v1.0.0

Global Changes

PRO RULES

• A fixed list of units, upgrades and tricks is now out of every LAN and online match. The button is grey and it stays grey
  • There is no warning and no penalty after the fact. Skirmish, the campaign and the Generals Challenge keep the whole arsenal
• One check box on the network lobby settings page, ticked unless the host clears it
  • The host's choice goes to everyone in the room and into the replay, and the lobby remembers it for next time. A host on an older build has no box to send, so that game plays without the list
• No Particle Cannon and no SCUD Storm
  • The USA Superweapon General keeps one Particle Cannon. He paid for his superweapons with a weaker army, and a general who may not build any is playing half a faction
• The Nuclear Missile silo still goes up. The missile inside it never launches, and nobody's screen counts down to it
  • The silo is where China buys Nuclear Tanks and Uranium Shells
• The superweapon dropdown now decides one thing under Pro Rules: how many Nuclear Missile silos a player may have standing
• No Aurora Bomber, the Air Force General's Alpha Aurora included
• No Tactical Nuke upgrade for the Nuke General's MiGs
• No suicide bomb upgrade for the Demolition General, no Neutron Shells and no Stealth Comanche
• No demo bike. A terrorist can no longer climb onto a Combat Cycle
  • A rebel, a worker, a hijacker or Jarmen Kell still can
• Carpet Bomb now stays grey until its owner reaches three stars
  • The Air Force General could buy his at one
• A Microwave Tank can no longer freeze a building that is still going up
  • Parking one beside a half-built base kept it half built
• No foundation can go down within 300 of an enemy building. The placement ghost says why it is red
  • 300 is a margin past the 225 a Patriot battery or a Stinger Site reaches on the ground. It ends walling somebody's base in with scaffolds nobody means to finish, and building a tower in their yard
• Two towers per oil derrick. Your Patriot batteries, Gattling Cannons and Stinger Sites near a derrick count against it, and the third tower's ghost goes red and says why
  • Derricks standing together share one allowance, so the pair 250 apart on Tournament Plains counts as one derrick. An ally's towers do not use up your two, and tunnels are not limited
• The computer opponent is held to the same list
  • It asks the same question your build buttons ask before it spends a dollar

UNIT LIMIT

• A Unit Limit box on the lobby settings page caps the match at 840 units, shared out evenly
  • Two players get 420 each, four get 210, eight get 105
• Units standing and units waiting in a queue count against your share. Buildings do not
• A transport that rolls out full is now charged for its riders while it is still in the queue
  • A Troop Crawler costs nine and cannot slip eight Red Guards past the limit. A pair of Red Guards costs two
• Build buttons grey out at your share. A Shift or Ctrl batch near it queues as many as still fit and stops
• Your count and your share sit in the top right corner next to the frame rate
• The host ticks it and everybody else sees it ticked

SUPERWEAPONS

• Superweapons is a dropdown: Allow Superweapons, Limit Superweapons, No Superweapons
  • Limit leaves each player one Particle Cannon, one Nuclear Missile or one Scud Storm at a time
• The USA Superweapon General keeps four of each of his under Limit and one of each under No
  • Three superweapons of his own are what he pays for weaker tanks and a worse air force with. Against a lobby that bans them he plays the army he paid for, not an empty base

PEACE TIME

• LAN and online lobbies offer 3, 5, 10 or 15 minutes of truce at the start of the match, or none
• Nobody can attack anybody while it runs. A shell fired at empty ground in the hope of splash counts as an attack
• A unit standing near an enemy command center burns, and keeps burning until it leaves or dies
  • The truce buys time to build. It does not buy a free walk to somebody's front door
• The countdown runs red at the top middle of the screen. The last ten seconds are counted out one large number at a time
• A computer player in the room switches the truce off, whatever the host picked
  • A computer opponent does not honour a truce. Against one, peace time is only a handicap on the human

DIFFICULTY LEVELS

• The top level is called Hard again
  • It read Brutal on the seat list for a while. Hard is the name the box always printed, and it still plays what the top of the removed six-rung ladder played

LOBBY

• The skirmish and LAN rooms are now laid out on one grid
  • Column headings sat up to 18 pixels to the right of their columns. The seats and the settings page now start and stop at the same two edges. Play Game waits at the bottom right and the button that leaves the room is at the bottom left
• The open tab is now lettered green
  • The grey it used measured about 2 to 1 against the panel, and read as a button that was switched off
• "USA Super Weapon General" now fits in its box with all eight seats taken
• The game speed slider now stops at 60
  • Its last notch read "--" and started the match at 1,000 game frames a second, which every machine tried to play. A speed saved on that notch comes back as 60
• The online room keeps its old layout

MAP

Minimap

• Supply piles, oil derricks, hospitals and repair pads are now marked on the minimap from the first second, on ground you have scouted and ground you have not
  • Derricks, hospitals and repair pads never showed at all, and supply piles disappeared under the fog with the rest of the map. The marks are the dollar and the star from the lobby map preview
• One mark per place rather than one per pile. A pile that runs dry drops off

MOVEMENT AND ORDERS

Mouse

• Left now selects, and only selects. Right now gives orders, and nothing it does moves the camera
• The middle button now moves the camera. The spot you pressed stays put, and the further you pull away from it, the faster the map runs
  • Ctrl with the same drag turns the view. The wheel zooms toward the cursor, and the screen edges still scroll
• The classic scheme, where left selected and commanded and right scrolled, is gone rather than switched off. Its two checkboxes left the options screen
• A box drawn with Ctrl held now takes those units out of your selection
• A box drawn with Alt held now keeps only what can shoot
  • Drag across your base and you get the tanks, not the dozers and supply trucks standing among them. Both work on a drag only, and a single click means what it always did
• The right button now drops the building on your cursor even when the click moved a few pixels
  • Sending a dozer off in the middle of a Shift-held row left the ghost riding the cursor. The cancel only counted a press that had not moved at all

Formation lines

• A right drag now draws a line, and the selection spreads evenly along it in the order the units already stand
  • A column arrives as a firing line. The line keeps its curves to the end, where a long sweep used to finish as one straight run to the cursor
  • Letting go over the sidebar finishes the order instead of leaving the line stuck to the cursor
• With F armed, a left drag draws an attack-move line. Artillery spreads across a front, each gun firing on what walks into its own station
• With G armed, a left drag posts one unit per station along the line
• FormationDrag = no in Options.ini turns the line off

Order keys

• A is now attack. The next left click fires on whatever it points at, the ground and your own tank included
  • The mode drops the moment the order goes out, so nothing stays armed behind your back. Ctrl no longer forces fire, and A is the one way to shoot the ground
• F is now attack-move, aimed with the left button
• G is now guard. The group holds the spot you click, shoots what walks into range and does not chase it off the post
  • The cursor turns into the targeting cross while G is armed. A right click puts any armed key down without giving an order
• Hold position moved from G to H
• A and F now turn each other off
• An attack click no longer drops the group it was meant for
  • A click that was not a drag ran the same deselect a plain left click runs. The order arrived a moment after its units had been dropped

Target circle

• With A armed, a circle drawn with the left button now turns everything hostile you can see inside it into a target list, nearest first. The group works down it without another click
  • When a target dies the next order goes out on the same frame. A target none of them can reach or hurt is passed over instead of holding up the whole list for the rest of the match
• Shift held while drawing now puts the circle's targets on the end of the list. Without Shift the circle replaces it
• The ground inside the circle is washed red while you drag, painted on the terrain so it runs up the hills and your tanks stand on top of it
• Any order you give by hand now ends the list. Losing a unit no longer does
  • For a while one tank dying threw away every target still owed
• A target with enough of your fire already in the air to kill it now counts as done
• Shells and missiles crossing the circle no longer go on the list
  • Each one cost the group a two-second stall on something about to stop existing
• A target that drives into the shroud keeps its place in the list and no longer draws its thread
  • The thread could be used to follow it through the fog

Order threads

• Selected units now draw a thread to the ground each one will stand on, with the order's own cursor as the marker
  • Green for move, pink for attack-move, red for anything that shoots, blue for guard. The thread is asked of the unit every frame, so it lasts until the unit arrives, changes its m...

v0.1.1-alpha

NETWORK PLAY

The crowd model shipped in v0.1.0-alpha behind -crowd, off by default, and the notes for that release explained how to record a clip with it. What they did not say is what happens if one player in a lobby has it on.

The answer is a desync, and an unusually cruel one. A player's file set is checked at the door: turn up with an INI the host does not have and the join is refused with a mismatch, which is at least a message. A command-line switch passes no such check. The lobby is happy, the match starts, everyone watches the loading bar, and then the first order given to a group of units is decided one way on one machine and another way on the next. Nothing names the cause. The game just stops agreeing with itself.

Going through what GameLogic reads found six more with the same hole. -noflowpath, -nolanes and -nomomentum each put one piece of the movement stack back the way it shipped in 2003, which is the whole point of them: they are the retail baseline a change is measured against. -aislice changes how many frames pass between one unit's decisions. -groupdrill fakes a group order every so many seconds, which is how the crowd model was measured at all. -peacetime sets the truce clock, and that one had a comment in the code claiming no player could reach it in a network game because the host's options string is read instead. The comment was wrong. The line that read the switch ran after the line that read the host, and overwrote it.

All seven are now reset at the start of a LAN or online game, in one block, before anything reads them. A replay is left alone, because a replay recorded with a flag needs that flag to reproduce the match it recorded. The block carries a note saying that anything new reaching the logic from the command line belongs in it on the day it is written, which is the actual fix; the seven switches are just the backlog.

VERIFICATION

Three matches at fixed seeds 0, 1 and 2, each played for 12000 logic frames, recorded, and then played back from their own replays. Same world CRC at frame 12000 both ways in all three: 0x892B0234, 0xB4F5A110 and 0x3AE86783. Seeds 0 and 1 produced those same two values before the change as well, which is what a fix that only fires in a network game should look like from a skirmish.

21 test suites, all green.

v0.1.0-alpha

Global Changes

DIFFICULTY LEVELS

• Three levels: Easy, Medium, Brutal
  • There were six for a while. One rung either side of Medium, one above Brutal. All three are gone, and nothing that sat above Brutal went with them: Brutal now plays what the top of that ladder played
  • A player picks a level once and wants to know what it means. Six names each turning a single switch was a worse answer than three names each describing an opponent. The machinery underneath is untouched and the levels are still tunable from the data files
  • Easy answers far too late
  • Medium reacts on time, saves its damaged units, and expands to a second supply pile
  • Brutal hides nothing: no reaction delay, it builds against what it sees, it masses its army before it commits, and it pulls a beaten team off the field
• Measured: Brutal beats Easy 15-0 over 32 headless matches with the seats swapped both ways, on twice the army and twice the spending
• The ladder is now the same ladder wherever a seat's name is written
  • Half of it read in EA's old words ("Easy Army", "Medium Army"), half in ours, all in the same dropdown. Four separate lists answered "what is this seat called" and no two agreed. The lobby, the seat itself, the score screen and the online list now say Easy AI, Medium AI, Brutal AI
• All three are in the LAN and online lobbies. Every machine at the table plays the level the host picked
  • A seat now keeps its name, its colour and its start position when the list refreshes

PEACE TIME

• A new lobby setting next to the starting cash: 3, 5, 10 or 15 minutes of truce at the start of the match, or none
  • LAN and online carry it, only the host can change it, and everyone in the room sees the choice before the game starts
• Nobody can attack anybody while it runs. No raid, no single shot in passing, no round into empty ground in the hope of splash
• The ground around an enemy command center is not a place to wait it out. A unit standing there burns, and keeps burning until it leaves or dies
  • The truce buys you time to build, not a free walk to somebody's front door
• The countdown runs red at the top middle of the screen, the word PEACE over the time left
  • It sits where you are already looking. It announces itself at the start, at one minute, thirty seconds and ten seconds, and again when it ends
• The last ten seconds are counted out one number at a time under the word PEACE, each one landing large and fading as the second runs out
  • The word stays where it is, the plate under it goes, and the time is replaced by a number you cannot miss. All of it at the top of the screen, off the ground you are about to fight over
• The truce switches itself off if there is a computer player in the room, whatever the host picked
  • A computer opponent does not honour a truce. It waits five minutes and then plays the game it was going to play anyway. The only thing the truce delivers is a handicap on the human. The box greys out and reads off while a bot holds a seat, and the host's choice comes back when the bot leaves. That is also why the skirmish lobby has no such box

LOBBY

• Every lobby now has two tabs over the bottom panel, Info and Lobby Settings. The one you are looking at is the one greyed out
  • Skirmish keeps starting cash and the game speed slider on the settings page. LAN and online keep starting cash next to peace time and the superweapon rule. The map details in skirmish and the chat log in a network game come back the moment you tab away
  • Before this they were scattered around whatever space each of the three lobby screens had left over
• Superweapons changed from a tick box to a dropdown: Allow Superweapons, Limit Superweapons, No Superweapons
  • Allow is the game as it plays without a rule. Limit leaves each player one Particle Cannon, one Nuclear Missile or one Scud Storm at a time. No bars them
  • The tick box was one number for everybody, which is why it could only ever say yes or no. A ticked box in a settings file from an older build reads back as No Superweapons
• The USA Superweapon General keeps four of each of his under Limit Superweapons, and one of each under No Superweapons
  • The rule that reads as a handicap to everyone else reads as a deletion to him. Three superweapons of his own are what he pays for weaker tanks, weaker infantry and a worse air force with. Play him against a lobby that has banned superweapons and you are playing the army you paid for, not an empty base

ECONOMY

• Supply piles now refill themselves, slowly. The more base has grown around them, the faster
  • A pile was a fixed heap of money. It ran out and there was nothing left on the map worth fighting over. Whoever ate the middle first took the match, and the second half was played on an income neither side could win with any more
  • One box every 40s on its own, every 20s with a Supply Center nearby, every 13s with two. Never past what it started with
• MoneyPerMinute in GameData.ini now pays every living player the same amount every minute
  • Default is zero and nothing changes in a stock install. Measured: four Brutal computer players on one seed were given 7,777 a minute, three of the four spent between 3,400 and 6,200 more in the first three minutes and put the difference on the map
• Taking over a beaten ally's base no longer restarts their research from zero
  • A player upgrade is bought once for the whole player. The buildings you inherited were charging you for a second copy of something you already had

WINDOW

• Fullscreen, borderless and windowed are now one saved setting. WindowMode in Options.ini, 0, 1 and 2 in that order
  • The command-line switch still wins for that run. The choice applies when you press Accept, not when you restart the game: the window loses or gains its frame and the display device is rebuilt in place
• -borderless now runs at the desktop resolution, without a frame and without changing display mode
  • Alt-tab returns instantly, nothing on the desktop shuffles behind it, and a second monitor stays usable. Edge scrolling works the way it does in fullscreen
• Antialiasing is a saved setting too: MSAA, 0 for off, 4 for sixteen samples
  • A level your card cannot give is stepped down rather than refused. Asking for six samples gets four instead of nothing
• A windowed game now has a minimize button
  • It never had one, and the system menu's Minimize entry did nothing. Alt-tab was the only way out
• Alt+F4 and the window's close button now quit the game
  • Both always sent the "quit now" message and nobody was listening. The handler was disabled in 2003 and never turned back on. A match in progress closes its replay first

MOVEMENT AND ORDERS

Routes

• Wide vehicles now swing out when there is room, and squeeze through tight ground only when there is no other way

  • A route was chosen by looking at the ground under it and nothing else. A tank was handed the shortest line, not a line it could drive. The shortest line clips every corner; a tank that clips a corner stops, backs up, tries again, and everyone behind it waits. Ground that passes close to terrain now climbs sharply in cost over the last few cells

• A turn now costs what the vehicle spends turning it

  • Every turn was the same price. The one that pivots on the spot and the one that swings its hull round over a second and a half. The first turn of a route was free on top of that, which is why a column sent forward sometimes set off by driving backwards
  • Measured over twelve matches: waiting decreased 38%, time genuinely stuck decreased from 11.3 frames to 0.3 frames per match, and pathfinding itself got 20% cheaper. A drivable route is a route nobody comes back and asks for again

• Cells where units actually stopped now stay expensive for about a second

  • A unit that jammed in a queue and asked for a new route no longer gets the same queue handed back. A slightly longer way round wins

• Routes now carry a clock. Every unit says where it will be every half second, and a route pays for a cell somebody else wants at the same moment

  • Two columns going the same way are in the same cells at different moments and pay nothing. Two columns crossing pay, and one of them goes round. The distinction is the whole thing: without the clock, a shared road looks as bad as a crossing

• A group now plans its corridor from whichever member is closest to where you clicked

  • Planning from the middle forced everyone in front of it to reverse to join, and drove the route through the group

• Measured: twenty matches, seven minutes each, four players, the same twenty maps. Units waiting on each other decreased 31%. Over six 4v4 matches it decreased 38%, units genuinely stuck halved, and the worst frame decreased from 30.6ms to 9.9ms

  • Waiting is counted like this: one unit waiting for one frame is one. Every number below is that

• This cost search time, and that cost was accepted

  • Adding a cost the distance estimate cannot see is the same mistake the pathfinder was rescued from two years ago. The search stops walking at the goal and opens a fan. The first measurement scanned 225,419 cells a match against 57,596 before. Raising the estimate to match the added cost brought it to 90,058 and took units genuinely stuck from 43 a match to 8. The total: 56% more search for 31% less waiting

Width

• A route is now a width, not a line
  • Every unit drove at the exact centre of the ground it was given. That is why twenty tanks crossing open ground arrived in single file, all aimed at the same one metre
  • A unit now holds its own place inside whatever width the ground beside it allows. That place is not fixed when the order is given, it is measured where the unit is standing. Open ground means a wide front; a bridge puts the same units back in line without anyone deciding to queue
• Lane count is now...

v0.0.1-alpha

Global Changes

DIFFICULTY LEVELS

• Six levels: Easy, Steady, Medium, Hard, Brutal, Merciless
  • Medium to Brutal was a cliff. The steps in between land where a player actually needs them
• No level cheats
  • Extra money, cheaper units, faster building, longer vision, tougher units: none of it, in either direction. What changes is what the computer is allowed to decide. How often it looks at the map, how long it takes to react, whether it counters what you field, whether it masses before attacking, whether it pulls damaged units out
• Each step up switches on exactly one new behaviour
  • Easy is slow and brave. Steady saves its damaged units. Medium expands on its own. Hard counters your build. Brutal masses and commits. Merciless is the ceiling
• Measured: Merciless beats Easy 15-0 over 32 headless matches with the seats swapped both ways, on twice the army and twice the spending
• All six levels are now in the LAN and online lobbies
  • Those two lobbies offered three. A seat set above Medium was sent to the other machines as Brutal, so a game meant to be played against Steady was played against Brutal by everyone at the table, host included
  • The new levels showed up in the lobby as Closed and lost their start position every time the list refreshed. The seat list was still sized for five entries, so the last levels fell off the end of it
• The computer now picks a personality each match and keeps it. One plays for the attack, the other for the base

THE GAME'S CLOCK

• The picture now runs uncapped, and the rules keep their own steady clock
  • A slow moment costs you a dropped frame, not a slow game
• Animations now run on a clock instead of counting frames
  • Briefing and cutscene subtitles hold long enough to read again. The radar's under-attack pulse throbs instead of strobing, and no longer ends early. The main menu surf rolls at its own pace rather than ten times too fast
• On-screen countdowns now read real seconds and answer the game speed

MOVEMENT AND ORDERS

Attack-move

• Artillery, rocket infantry and Scud Launchers now search as far as they shoot
• Attack-moving through a base now shoots the base
  • Buildings were filtered out of the target list
• A unit now picks the worst thing in range. Anything armed before anything that is not, then the more dangerous of the two, and worth fades with distance
  • A group ordered through a base no longer stops for the first dozer it passes while the artillery beside it keeps firing
• A unit now turns onto whatever is actually shooting it, then resumes the advance
• Ctrl on the click now advances the group at the slowest unit's pace; a plain click lets each unit run at its own speed
• Ctrl on the attack-move click no longer shells the ground
• A large selection now arrives as a crowd, heading for the spot you clicked and taking the nearest free ground to it
  • The group tried to hold its shape all the way in. Two hundred units told to attack-move spread along a line, and three hundred told to move mostly stood still
• Nothing walks off the map chasing a target that keeps retreating

Targeting

• Damage now counts the moment a shot leaves the barrel, not when it lands
  • Once an enemy is accounted for, the rest of the group retargets
• Your own right-click orders now always win, however much fire is already inbound
• A reservation now lapses within half a second if the shot never arrives
• Ctrl+Q now takes infantry only, not every armed thing you own

Aircraft and guarding

• Two jets on one Airfield no longer deadlock waiting for each other
• Losing the Airfield no longer leaves its aircraft circling rubble forever
• A repaired aircraft now flies to the rally point instead of hovering over the pad
• Infantry leaving a captured building now follow that building's rally point
• A guarding unit no longer fights itself between returning to post and shooting back
• A helicopter no longer boards a transport from the air

Troop Crawler

• Now waits up to 10s for its squad to climb back in
  • One man who cannot get back aboard no longer parks the Crawler for the rest of the order
• Its squad now stays out until the area is clear instead of piling back in after every kill
  • Clear now means as far as the men can shoot, so they finish the enemies in front of them
• Every man aboard now gets out to fight
• A Crawler that has lost its whole squad now carries on with your order

INTERFACE

Production strip

• One row above the command bar now carries everything your base is building anywhere
  • Ordered by time left, so it reads as the order things arrive
• Click a picture to jump the camera there; Ctrl-click cancels the order
• One picture is one order, cut to match the command bar's artwork
• The progress clock over a picture is now steady at any frame rate
• Click a unit with several factories selected and it now takes the shortest queue
• An upgrade bought for a group now starts in all of them, and shows its progress on whichever building is paying for it
• Watching a match, the strip is now every player's queue at once. One row each, bordered in that player's colour, the five that land soonest and a count of the rest
  • An observer used to see none of it. The bars over the buildings are everyone's too: what each factory is turning out, and how long the superweapons have left

Placing buildings

• An ordered building now stands as a see-through plan until a worker starts it
  • Click the plan, or press Stop, to cancel it and take the money back. It is silent, because nothing was built
• A plan now opens no fog of its own, and your opponent never sees it
• Your units now walk straight over a plan. Nothing solid is there until the builder starts work
  • It turns solid the instant the first work goes in, so no building goes up inside its own ghost
• The placement grid is now drawn on the ground, follows the slope, and reaches twice as far as it used to
  • Unbuildable ground is a soft red wash, crossed out square by square
• A building pointed at blocked ground now slides to the nearest spot it fits, and lands there
• Hold Ctrl and roll the wheel to turn a building before placing it
  • Turning a building no longer turns everything you build afterwards. A wheeled heading still carries from one wall to the next, but the next Supply Center comes out facing the way it was designed to
• A shift-held row of buildings no longer stops halfway, and now keeps going with no worker selected
• Running out of money no longer strands the ghost on the map
• The builder now starts work from where it reaches the site instead of shuffling into place first
• Dozers and workers now walk through anything still going up, so they never shut themselves in behind their own work

Money and production

• Supply piles and docks now say what is left in them, in cash, over the pile
  • No more guessing which expansion is worth taking from the art on the model
• Every build button now carries its price in the top right corner, opposite the build time already in the other one
  • The price was only ever in the tooltip, which means hovering one button at a time to compare two of them
• Factory queue increased from 9 to 100
  • The queue had nine buttons and that had become the limit
• Hackers now show how far off the next payout is. So do the Black Market and the Oil Derricks
• A worker fetching or handing over a box now shows a bar while it works
• Income per minute now sits next to your money, averaged over half a minute
• The nearest idle worker now takes a new job, without yanking a busy one off it
• A worker that is building something now still offers you the whole build list
• Workers now go back to collecting supplies when they finish

Health bars

• Health bars are now in the owner's colour
• A building's bar now sits above its roof rather than inside its art
• Every garrisonable building now shows how full it is, whoever holds it
• A vehicle's load now stays private
• Lamps, barrels, rocks and bushes no longer wear health bars

Camera and screen

• Widescreen resolutions are back in the options menu
• Zoom out further, with the whole map drawn instead of black corners
  • The ceiling is the same for everyone. No setting buys you a wider view
• Wheel travel over that range decreased from 38 notches to about 6
• Zoom toward the cursor now works. The spot under your pointer stays there
• The camera now turns in whole 45-degree steps, instantly, while you hold the key
• Edge scrolling now works windowed, and scroll speed no longer follows your frame rate
• A skirmish now opens zoomed all the way out. StartAtMaxZoom = No restores the old opening
• Taking over another base no longer squeezes the picture into the top four fifths of the screen

Keys and messages

• S now stops your units. The key was never bound
• Tilde now opens the general's promotions
• Escape now cancels what you were doing before it opens the menu
• Double-tapping 0 now jumps the camera to that group
• The two-key building shortcut now survives the command bar's redraw, and a click clears a half-typed one
• On-screen messages now hold for 2.5s and fade in 1s
• The clock and frame-rate readout is now drawn on top of everything, and the superweapon countdowns start below it
  • The readout separates game time from real time, and sim rate from fps. Pausing stops both clocks
• A game now opens with nothing selected, so your first click is not a rally point

VISUALS

Shadows

• Infantry shadows are now built from the pose: arms, head, weapon, moving with him
  • UseShadowVolumesForSkins = No puts the old flat blobs back
• All 128 tree types now cast, and so do the bushes and palms
  • The soft blob shadow for trees and scenery had never been drawn at all
• Fences, walls and props now cast a real shaped shadow, worked ...