Spring Info

While we had many releases in the last 3 weeks none of them felt large enough to make an image and a set of notes. Easter brings with it a bit of free time so here is a release and some notes on the last few weeks.

=== Engine ===

The greatest recent advance has been the permanent adoption of the latest engine version. Nothing is “official” but with week of successful use it does not look like we are going back.

Here is a list of some of the readily visible things that the engine does:
* Desyncs seem to be much rarer and if they do occur the engine devs will care.
* Gunships can crash when they die. Just like planes.
* Pathfinding updates much faster. Earlier units would take a while to notice that a ramp exists and use it in their pathfinding.
* Units don’t get stuck on terrain. In situations where they previously got stuck they now slide off.
* The line of sight view looks a lot nicer.
* Units can be prevented from occasionally firing sideways. It has been applied to Big Bertha, HLT, Grizzly, Penetrator, Annihilator and Starlight.
* Units can be told to ignore the terrain while firing. This is useful when they either have a massive spread or enough deformation to knock down any wall.
* Everything costs exactly how much it says it does. In 91.0 the costs were off by 16/15.
* Units are ‘forgotten’ by enemies much more rapidly when they cloak. In 91.0 a Scythe would be targeted by a Raven or Swift for so long that it looked like the plane was cheating. Now units forget after a few seconds.
* With bombers, queuing anything after an attack ground order does not destroy the attack ground order.
* Heatrays now do their correct distance-reduced damage against shields (previously they always did full damage).
* Transports no longer randomly de-exist their cargo if they die over blocking terrain.

There are many things behind the scenes in the update that make it easier to develop and could lead to more features. For example save games are now possible.

=== Balance ===

Not much has been happening in balance recently. The recent tournament went well in terms of unit diversity and the games looked very good. Vehicles were a bit dominant but Veh/Tank/Hover have a history of moving around a very fine balance point.

* Raven change from 10 days ago: Dives is slightly steeper but costs a lot of speed.
* Applied overkill prevention to Slasher.
* Doomsday Machine can now shoot at planes.
* Hacksaw missile turnrate increased slightly.

Defender buff:
* Damage 103.1 -> 104
The recent damage rounding changes resulted in Defender dealing slightly too little damage.

Brawler and Warrior gained 5.5% and 9% extra DPS that was taken from them in the transition between engines.

### Graphics
Now that most people can run the latest engine some possibly problematic features can be re-enabled. Explosion shockwave distortions are now back after a few month of absence. Also:
* Fixed many particle effects (shimmers, plane jets) being invisible for spectators and some players.
* Improved flaming units particle usage.
* Improved Catapult missile effects.

=== Interface ===

Here are some recent changes to the interface:
* The minimap has the option to fade on zoomout.
* Camera shake is configurable.
* Metal spots are displayed as white when unclaimed and have the option to show teamcolour.
* Better support for translations (the new engine supports utf8).
* Structure terraform can be activated by holding left mouse button and not moving the cursor for a second while placing a structure (the not moving time is configurable).
* Structures with absolutely no reason to have the Wait command no longer have the Wait command.

=== Fixes ===

* Fixed Reef drifting.
* Fixed Geothermal being difficult to target.
* Fixed Tidal Generator hitvolume. * Fixed set target stipple weirdness.

It’s time for a new version, and we’re using the 1.3.3.7 version number again because ZK is too l33t to use any other number.
In this update there are various improvements across all factories, many important bugfixes and some new features.

Shield Bots:
– Shield Bot Factory can now only be built by people with prior ban history to better reflect its criminal theme.
– Roach renamed to Rapist, for what it does to light units.

Spiders:
– Legs 6 -> 8.
– Vulnerability to newspaper +35%.

Aircraft:
– Raven replaced by Kestrel.
– Kestrel changed to a melee dive bomber.
– Kestrel renamed to Raven.

Buildings:
– Defender missiles 3 -> 5, for better defending.
– Newton is now unable to work by default. An apple needs to be dropped on it to enable it.
– Storage rebalance:
* turn rate +65%
* speed +80%
* DPS -15%
* range -40%
– Silencer nukes now cost no metal, for consistency with other weapons.

Miscellaneous:
– Dominatrix capture is now permanent. Obedience is the correct behaviour.
– Warrior weapon sound improved: replaced pew pew with WUB WUB.
– Penetrator renamed to Penis. There is no need for euphemisms.
– Zombies, CTF, KotH, and Lava are now all enabled by default.
– New Auto-Resign feature: detects *pluks and automatically resigns them.
– Updated translations for the Nahuatl and Icelandic languages.

Bug fixes:
– Fixed Screamer being unable to target ground.
– Fixed Flea decloaking when moving.
– Fixed Commanders being unable to morph to level 10.
– Fixed Scorcher not doing full damage at range.
– Fixed Ducks being unable to access their Rampage Special Ability Ninja Weapon Technique.
– Fixed slowdamage being unable to achieve 100%.

This patch also introduces the Featured Map Pool Rotation. You will only be able to play on featured maps from the rotation. Here’s the pool for this month:
– 1v1:
* TinySkirmish
* Chicken_Nuggets_v4
* Trololo_v2
* SpeedMetal_Duo_Extreme_NoMetal_fix_final_v3
* DarkSide Remake
– Teams:
* DeltaSiegeDry
* DeltaSiegeDry_Deluxe
* MiniDeltaSiegeDry
* DeltaSiegeX * DeltaSiegeDuo