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Bittah Commander

The Dawn of the Tiberium Age 1.1117

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It's been a while since DTA 1.11 has been released since then our website has moved from cncxs to PPM after some server issues that couldn't be resolved and 6 updates have been released, including today's (version 1.1117). Here's a global overview of the most important changes that have been made since DTA 1.11:

  • Most importantly, two options to improve the performance have been added, of which the most notable one must be AlexB's hack which disables VideoBackBuffer. Without this hack, graphics that are normally allocated in the video RAM first have to be copied to the system RAM before the game is able to use them and this process can slow down the game a little or a lot, depending on your system (for some systems it's even so much that the game becomes unplayable). Of the people who have tested this, the majority was able to notice a significant boost in performance and for a few people the game's performance even went from being so slow it was entirely unplayable, to perfectly playable. There were just a few people who reported that disabling VideoBackBuffer itself made the game unplayable for them however, so for this reason an option to enable VideoBackBuffer again has been added to the launcher (but as mentioned, leaving it disabled is faster for most systems).
  • The other option to enhance the performance which was added before that, is a setting to disable the darkening effect on sidebar icons which you see whenever you build a structure. For all systems this slows the game down at least a little bit (for many systems it's barely noticeable however) and for some systems it this was bad enough to almost make the game unplayable. With videoBackBuffer disabled, the slowdown caused by the darkening effect should have become entirely unnoticeable on most systems however, which makes the option to disable the darkening effect unnecessary for most systems, but it's still there for the few very slow systems where lag is still noticeable when building structures and the few systems where disabling VideoBackBuffer caused problems.

Other improvements include that the launcher the now displays how many DTA players are online at CnCNet and will also display this in the bottom right corner of the screen via a text balloon in the bottom right corner of the screen; this way you you'll be able to minimize the game while waiting for other players to come online, while at the same time making other people aware that there's someone waiting to play in the lobby.

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The launcher will now also check whether all of the mod's files are present and unmodified (to ensure there won't be any issues when playing online), it'll show the total progress instead of progress per file whenever you install an update (or install DTA from scratch) and it will also tell you the size of the update up front.

 

The maps that are included with the mod are now located inside of folders instead of in MIX files and although that might seem meaningless to the people to the people who just play the mod, it means that future updates will be much smaller considering only the specific maps that have been added or changed will have to be downloaded then, rather than the whole 20+ MB MIX files that contain the maps. Mind that any custom/downloaded maps still have to be placed in the mod's main folder rather than inside of the Maps folder however.

The map editor now also has an option to disable sounds (although I replaced the map editor's original sounds with something less disturbing, some people were apparently still bothered by them) and there's also 2 new tool scripts; one for disabling building bibs (this is done on some maps where they look bad because of the custom lighting) and one for enabling naval yards for maps.

 

 

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Moving onto actual ingame additions,

  • all buildings with chimneys (power plants, the war factory and the research facility) now have smoke/steam animations in the enhanced mode (which can be disabled by lowering the detail level)
  • there now are hunter-seeker crates (they don't inflict as much damage as the ones in TS, but they can help with finding/destroying that last pesky hidden unit when Short Game is disabled)
  • laser fence posts no longer look like tiny wooden poles and have more hitpoints (about 3 times as many as a brick wall piece), although they can no longer be turned off
  • you can now build MIGs and Tesla tanks after capturing the tech center of an opposite faction
  • and GDI can now build the M.A.D. Tank.

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Several new maps have been added:

And finally, DTA 1.1117 also added Scavenger maps. Scavenger is a new game mode where players have to aquire credits, units and powerups by collecting crates, while only being able to build a barracks, a war factory, a repair facility and some defenses. The war factory can only build a few basic units, while more advanced units can only be acquired via crates.

You can also choose to disable bases, which basically makes the game mode similar to the Survivor game mode which older versions of DTA used to have.

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Have a look at the change log to see all other changes since DTA 1.11.

Edited by Bittah Commander

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