Version 1.039 is out, and boy is the graphics performance just through the roof on this one. This release really comprises a series of releases from the last week, a lot of which were minor internal things relating to the upcoming expansion for the game (which should hopefully launch into a public beta on Monday, incidentally).

How big of a graphics improvement are we talking? On high-end cards this can literally increase your framerate by several hundred fps if you have vsync off. On lower-end cards I’m not sure exactly what it will do (it will vary), but it may let you get close to 60fps where you previously would have bogged down to 10fps if the screen was filled with bullets.

1.034 came out almost a week ago with some bugfixes, although we didn’t post about it at the time aside from on the wiki. But it fixes an issue that was causing races to not ever build their Ultimate Buildings, as well as fixing a bug that made Core Coolers and Virtual Reality Centers not tell you what they do.

1.038 came out this morning, and adds new options where you can drop off captured pilots either as Expatriates or as Resistance Fighters. This makes for a really nice alternative to either giving them back to their host race, ransoming them to their host race, or selling them into slavery.

Ongoing Updates

The support of the community, and the growth of it, remain amazing to me. It’s been a dry spell for the last couple of months in terms of the speed of updates on the game, but we’re going to be continuing to expand the improve the game via bugfixes, balance updates, and new content, and plan to do so for the foreseeable future.

As you’ve already seen, it won’t always be on a consistent schedule, but if you’re familiar with our post-release support for AI War: Fleet Command over the past 5 years, that’s basically the arc that we are currently expecting here unless something unexpectedly changes. There are only two of us programmers, so when we have to divert our attention to something, there’s not a lot of granularity available to us, heh.

At present we are also working on an expansion TLF (TLF: Betrayed Hope). The expansion for TLF is expected to be available for preorder through our site on Monday, with access to the current beta of the expansion. The actual full release of the expansion is expected to be in mid November, on all the existing distributors that carry the base game.

More to come soon. Enjoy!

This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater, or if you have Steam it will automatically update it for you. To force Steam to download it faster, just restart Steam and it will do so.

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