DTA Lives - 1.12 Progress Update news

It's been a long time since the last update. My latest news post was 16 months ago, and that's way too long of silence in my opinion. During the time we've mostly posted new maps, and we've also had some breaks where we haven't posted anything for multiple months; maybe some of you have even thought of DTA being dead. Well, that's far from true.

In the meanwhile, we've actually made quite a few discoveries about the engine in addition to adding more maps into the game. Implementing these discoveries has taken a bit of time - but we believe they're certainly worth it. You'll see some of those below.

Graphically, one of the more important changes is what you see in the pictures above. That's right, we've converted TD's water animations for the TS engine. That includes not only the basic water animation, but also all other water-related things like water cliffs, shores and rivers.

For gameplay, there's a lot of improvements as well. Units with overlapping roles have been tweaked, the AI isn't that insanely difficult on Medium (AKA AI Level 1) anymore offering a much more balanced experience for most players, while the Level 2 AI has again been made stronger providing a very nice challenge for the most experienced players (especially on Comp Stomp -- getting slaughtered together with your friends is much more fun than getting slaughtered alone!). Talking about the AI, I might as well add that the AI is now also able to use ships (click on the image to view it in its usual size):

The teleporter system in Comp Stomp maps has also been replaced with a completely new system, leaving no dependence on the player manually entering their MCV into the teleporter. Instead, there are no teleporters; right in the start of a Comp Stomp game your MCV will automatically fly into your real starting location (engine wise, this is done with some scripting on friendly invisible carryalls). We have also added text triggers for convenience to people who haven't played DTA or Tiberian Sun before and as such don't know the hotkeys. See the image below for a demonstration.

There's also a very large surprise incoming with 1.12 which we won't reveal yet. It has actually taken most of the development time for 1.12, and with the long development time, you can expect it to be something fairly big. I can only say that 1.12 will really extend the game - in an awesome way ;)

The release isn't far away anymore. We won't discuss strict release dates, but expect 1.12 to be here soon. In the meanwhile, we will continue posting updates like maps and other content changes until we are ready for unleashing the next major version of DTA. Before that, you can still enjoy the very polished 1.11 which offers plenty of fun and which has been downloaded about 20,000 times as an estimate during its almost two-year long lifetime.