Major Revision, AI System, New Options

First of all, I am sorry that the update has been a long time coming. But we did a major revision and, for example, completely renewed the AI system. And extensive activities are not so easy for a private hobby project with a full-time job and family in mind. However, we have tried to respond to community wishes as much as possible, provided that they did not conflict with our own opinion (for example, we already implemented game options for making the initial money and the per-round earnings configurable per player, but then took that out again because we felt it would negatively affect armory development during a match). This is what we've been doing for the past few months:

Feature updates

• The AI system has been completely renewed. Not only can the basic skill level be set for each AI player as before, but now also different character traits. We hope that this will address some community requests for the "old" AI features, but also that the AI behavior has become more meaningful in principle: for example, AI players would now upgrade their tanks and buy and use more strategic weapons (i.e., Airstrike) and items (i.e., Defense System).

• AddedA new game option has been added"out-of-control deaths". This is to address a community request, and we ourselves think the new feature is absolutely awesome: if a tank receives enough "pressure", it not just smokes and explodes, but it might go "furious" and, as an unwanted last act in life, release a whole bunch of dangerous bomb shells to the environment.
• AddedA new game option has been added"wall type unknown until evident". This goes hand in hand with the fulfillment of a community wish that the wall type should be recognizable: additional information has been added to the statistics window (Tab key), including the wall type (depending on the wall settings and the new option being set or not).

• We got rid of the somehow annoying "cash money" sound (this was also a community request) and replaced the sound for earning EP. Actually, the EP sound is more of a tank-died sound now, as the new sound doesn't play when EP is earned but when a tank dies. Some other sounds have been slightly revised.

• The Defense System has been tuned a bit and a fabulous sound has been added for it.

• The in-game chat has been slightly improved (networked multiplayer mode).

Bugfixes

• A bug in the XML component has been fixed where double and single quotes might have bothered each other in savegames.

• Some bugs in the AI logic have been fixed. But the entire AI system has been redesigned, so whatever.

• The networked multiplayer mode has been slightly improved in general. However, in wild situations it can still be a bit choppy. The game shouldn't be a network game at first, so it's a bit tricky to integrate this functionality in retrospect. But it works, kind of.

• Some "minor" bugs have been fixed that caused null-pointer exceptions or invalid memory accesses in certain situations. We recently let 8 AI players play against each other for several hours and we didn't find any more errors, and they also eagerly bought and used weapons and upgraded their tanks etc.

It is not yet certain what we will do next. We still look forward to feedback and suggestions for improvement of any kind. And if you find bugs, please let us know so that we can track them down and fix them. Perhaps we will expand the networked multiplayer mode in accordance with Corona so that Internet games are also possible. This is not a promise, just a possible direction we could take. It remains exciting.