Ares 0.D is finally here

Written for Ares by AlexB on 2017-06-10

Finally, after about a year, a new version of Ares is ready for download, and finally it is another feature release, not just a minor service release.

With Ares 0.D, mouse cursors can be customized for weapons to give special attacks an immediately recognizable appearance. But not only that: units and structures can have custom cursors for moving, entering, deploying, and more. This way, ejecting passengers or occupants can be distinguished from triggering an area attack, and entering a Grinder can have another cursor than bunkering a tank. For this to work, Ares now has a centralized section to define mouse cursors, which as a bonus also allows to edit the original cursors in the game.

Mechanics as known from The Aftermath and Ambulances like the ones in Generals are now possible. This means the limitation that infantry was only allowed to heal other infantry and vehicles were only allowed to repair other vehicles has been removed. No longer is the workaround with positive Damage and negative Verses needed, and targeting and putting repair units in guard mode just works as expected.

AI players can be made to build more than one building of a type, which previously was only possible for special buildings like refineries, or using building clones to emulate this. Ares adds new options to support this directly, for each difficulty level, and also with some element of randomness. Pimp your AI by letting it build more War Factories. Also, the buildup and sell time of structures can now be customized, thus making slowly deploying buildings possible.

Not only can starting units be defined for a country using one central option, it is also possible to have a country start with a deployed Construction Yard instead of an MCV. This allows for new game modes with fixed starting positions or no MCVs at all.

Ares implements Death Bombs for the Crazy Ivan, which were apparently cut from the original Red Alert 2. With this special mode, bombs will not detonate after a certain amout of time, but will keep the bomb active until either disarmed, destroyed, or manually detonated.

That's not everything, though. As always, there is a bunch of smaller features completing this release. A plethora of bugs has also been fixed, both in the original Yuri's Revenge and in Ares. Several of Ares' features have been reworked and inefficient code has been updated to decrease its footprint. That's it for today.

Download: https://launchpad.net/ares/+download
Documentation: http://ares-developers.github.io/Ares-docs/

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