This one is very exciting for me personally, because it addresses one of the hugest bugbears for me with the post-Unity-porting version of the game, which is RAM use. As long-time players will know, we’ve already gone through a huge number of gyrations to get the per-frame RAM usage down, with great success, but the problem was that we were still having too much baseline RAM — in other words, too much RAM in use right when the program was launched and when a savegame was loaded.
This version literally halves — or actually in some cases quarters — the baseline RAM usage. Here’s how we did it, if you’re curious. Be aware that this was some pretty major surgery to the innards of the game, so things may be wonky. I haven’t seen any issues whatsoever, but I can’t stress enough how many files this change touched, so there’s bound to be something. If you do find something, just let us know, and we’ll fix it as soon as we can.
If you want to revert to the 5.003 version of the game if you run into problems with 5.004, then you can download that directly from here. Just unzip that file directly over your existing AI War folder (unless you’re on a Mac — you’ll have to move the files individually there, because of how OSX handles file transfers. Bear in mind that saves made in 5.004 won’t be able to be opened in 5.003 or before, so overwrite with care.
Honestly I don’t think there’s really much cause for alarm here, but better safe than sorry when this sort of change comes down the pike. All things considered, anyway, this is a really exciting change that will really improve the experience for folks pushing the game to its limits. Enjoy!
This is a standard update that you can download through the
in-game updater itself, if you already have 4.000 or later. When you
launch the game, you’ll see the notice of the update having been found
if you’re connected to the Internet at the time. If you don’t have 4.000 or later, you can download that here.
