Ares 0.6, a Service Release
Written for Ares by AlexB on 2014-04-03
The final Ares 0.6 is now publicly available, following an informal Release Candidate phase of two weeks in which no new issues turned up.
Ares 0.6 is more a service release than a feature release, as it focuses mostly on updating code that was there already. Some changes are optimisations, some made the code simpler, and some are preparations required for later changes.
The biggest feature is the expansion of the CellSpread logic, which can now limited to not affecting the same object more than a predefined amount of times. More importantly, the maximum value for CellSpread has been relaxed, and 11 is no longer the upper limit. Sight uses a different but similar system, which has been expanded as well to support values beyond 10.
Units like Aircraft Carriers and Destroyers got a minor update: not only can they now cloak without crashing their spawned units all the time, they can optionally also gain experience from their spawns' kills now. On top of this, literally, flying Aircraft Carriers are now supported: spawns don't appear on the ground any more, and they can dock with the carrier in air.
The minor additions include a way to only drain the affected power plant and not the player's entire power, to make helicopters play their rotor animation even if hovering or landing -- which is something the original game would not do -- and to restrict build options to factories built by players of certain countries, just as in the previous games in the Command & Conquer series.
There are a few more features, like Tech Structures being given back to the neutral country instead of blowing up in case a player exits a game or is defeated, a nice and useful feature known from Generals. This is, of course, optional and can be customized for each building type.
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