We mentioned that we wanted to get a patch out relatively early in February, but there were a few things which delayed that. The first was our website going down for several weeks. More importantly, there were only a few minor issues that would have been addressed, whereas the more major changes have required some other developments. As it is, there are five main things the patch will attempt to address when it comes out.
1. Many of you may be familiar with the unit selection bug in FoC; this is an issue which, when a certain amount has happened in a GC, causes the game to stop letting you select and control your units, making the game unplayable. As this was an issue with the base game, there's nothing mods can do to fix it directly. However, Pox has been working with Fregge on a new tool to rectify this issue by editing save files, which you can download by
clicking here. With respect to the patch, this opens up a few possibilities for us. One of the reasons we've had to disable the AI of different factions in several GCs was to mitigate this issue. Now that it's not an issue, we're exploring the options of re-enabling galactic AI for several minor factions.
2. In the Era-Progressive GC's, there's also an issue where if a faction is destroyed before an era change, the game will crash. We're experimenting with some things to address this issue as well. The tough part here is that there are so many possible combinations and it takes a few hours of playing to get to the point where you'd experience it, so this is something we'll be keeping track of after the patch to see if it is in fact resolved.
3. We're still experimenting with getting the New Republic into the Imperial Civil War GC as a playable faction. There are issues with making them use the proper story files in this GC for reasons we haven't been able to determine, so we're still working on that.
4. There is currently an issue with the multiplayer lobby because of an old entry in gamecontants which references a server message that Petro took down years ago. It's a simple issue to fix (replacing
http://www.petroglyphgames.com/eawmotd/ with
http://216.120.238.87/EAWMOTD in GameConstants.xml) however Gamespy is shutting down, so fixing this doesn't really solve anything. Several mods have started promoting the use of the tunngle Virtual LAN service as an alternative, so we're gonna jump on that as well, with details
here.
5. Finally, there are a few unit visual updates and optimizations we'd like to get into the mod for this patch, especially on the side of the New Republic. These include the Assault Frigate, CR90 Corvette, and Bothan Assault Cruiser. Possibly the Nebulon-B as well. I've also been playing with the idea of adding one of the new EotH units from Ascendancy into ICW, however since it's more of a utility ship it's harder to say whether it'd even be useful in ICW.
This should be coming soon. I'll get some screenshots of the last bit up as we go.
-Corey