Darwinia 1.2.2 can be downloaded here. It should increase performance significantly, reduce crashes and fix other small issues. The full changelog is below.

This patch is highly recommended for anyone playing Darwinia.

Changelist:

============
VERSION 1.22

- Fixed : Sending a Squad into a Radar Dish should be much more reliable.

============
VERSION 1.21

- Fixed : The Radar Dish on the mountain at the end of Generator could not be
aligned to the lower down dish on the final island...it was too low.

===========
VERSION 1.2

- New selection box system:
- Highlighting a unit by mouse-hovering over it will bring up a yellow
selection box over the unit.
- Selected programs that are offscreen will be tracked by an arrow at the
edge of the screen, pointing to the programs location.

- The Radar Dish code has been significantly improved. Radar Dishes should now
behave in a much more solid manner.
- Darwinians will no longer get trapped trying to enter a radar dish that
isn't connected.
- The mouse cursor and new selection box system should give you strong
hints about the effect of clicking on a radar dish at any time.
- When you are aiming a Radar Dish you will see a targetting crosshair not
unlike the one used for the Battle Cannon.
- Squads, Officers and Darwinians will no longer blunder into a radar dish
unless you specifically click on it.
- Squads should no longer get split up while entering a dish.
- Two way links should now work much better.
- Darwinians with orders to go into a Radar Dish will now correctly
remember their orders when the game is saved.
- Darwinians who are in transit in a Radar Dish during a level save will
no longer be left stranded out at sea upon reloading. They will now
appear at the base of the destination Radar Dish.

- Task Manager Changes:
- Engineer tasks will now display their current activity and spirit count
- Tasks that have yet to be placed will flash on and off
- The new selection arrows will appear immediately when a task is selected
through alt-tab, making it easier to tell which task is which
- If your Squad / Engineer / Armour dies while under your control, you will
see the 'Program Terminated' message

- Engineers will now reprogram a nearby Incubator rather than travelling to a
distant one, assuming you send them near the control tower. Previously
they would refuse to reprogram the incubator, even if you repeatedly
clicked on the relevent control tower.

- Added support for other language translations
- Language selector added to Other options screen
- Languages will be loaded from language.dat. We will distribute the
latest language packs freely on the Darwinia website.

- Mod system improvements
- Mod authors can now provide their own custom strings, or even override
existing strings from the game. Your strings file should be called:
darwinia/mods/mymodname/strings_default.txt
- If you wish to provide translations to your custom strings you can also
create the file strings_german.txt or strings_russian.txt etc, which
will be loaded instead of strings_default.txt if the user has that
language set in his options. Note you should always provide
strings_default.txt at least.
- stats.txt will now be correctly reloaded when a mod is selected in game
(rather than requiring a restart for new stats to take effect)

- Performance improvements
- Optimisations made to Darwinian combat code. Should help during big
battles involving lots of Darwinians.
- Spirit code heavily optimised. Was causing serious slowdown after large
battles due to large numbers of spirits floating around.
- Laser code optimised

- There are 3 possible rendering modes for Darwinia's landscape, which can be
set by the preferences variable 'RenderLandscapeMode':
- RenderLandscapeMode = 0 uses Vertex Arrays
- RenderLandscapeMode = 1 uses Display Lists (default in v1.0)
- RenderLandscapeMode = 2 uses Vertex Buffer Objects
The default has now be seen to 2 (Vertex Buffer Objects), which should be
faster in most cases than Display Lists. If VBO support isn't detected,
we fall back to display lists.

- New bootloader : Amiga
- Created new installer for the full game using Inno Setup (the install shield
installer used on the retail disks suffers from the common autoexec.nt
problem under some WindowsXP installations.)

- Altered Bitmap::ConvertPinkToTransparent to reduce halo around the edges of
textures that use transparency.
- Increased range of Battle Cannon when it is first given on Yard level
- Modified number of Darwinians required to complete Containment level,
from 200 down to 150
- The Construction Yard will now stop producing Armour if there is already five
or more Armour on the level. It will resume production when the number
falls below five.

- Fixed a very subtle bug that would cause errors to occur (including crashes)
if a Darwinian was running away from a grenade. Very rare occurance, more
likely during intense battles with lots of Darwinians and lots of grenades.

- Fixed : If you have a Squaddie/Engineer selected and you click select an
Officer, the squaddie/engineer task remains selected in the Task Manager.
This means if you press ctrl-c, both the newly selected Officer AND the
squaddie/engineer are terminated.

- Added a fix for people experiencing a crash during the end sequence
(caused by a corrupted saved Ant Hill). This crash would also cause the
levels 'Yard' and 'Receiver' to crash occasionally on re-entry.

- Fixed : Crash on startup reporting "failed to get CPU vendor"
- Fixed : Crash that could occur when Armour collided with Armour
- Fixed : After changing graphics options, Trees would sometimes be replaced
with a random shape scaled very large
- Fixed : Sepulveda incorrectly tells the user he can upgrade Engineers to
build bridges, which he can't.
- Fixed : Darwinians sometimes get stuck running away from a Battle Cannon.
- Fixed : Un-occupied Battle Cannons will no longer scare Darwinians.
- Fixed : Pressing CTRL-C on Armour that was low on health would terminate the
task, but the Armour would remain alive.

Took IV long enough...

But yeah, I recommend everyone get hold of this ASAP.

So far so good. I hope Ambrosia SW has learned some lessons on releasing programs before they're ready. And I hope that most fans of ASW can regain confidence in the company. I, for one, will now wait longer before registering software to see what sorts of problems arise. I will not stop looking forward to more great programs and ports from ASW. Everyone makes mistakes, and this is the first major one I've experienced from ASW.

I was under the impression that Ambrosia merely published Darwinia. Aren't the bugs etc.. the porting company's responsibitlity?

Introversion ported it themselves.

Anyway, the beta's been ready for about a month now, Ambrosia just never got round to releasing it. >.>

Agent_Vast, on Jul 14 2005, 12:47 PM, said:

Anyway, the beta's been ready for about a month now, Ambrosia just never got round to releasing it. >.>
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There was actually a bit more to it then that. There were a couple things holding things up at Introversion as well.

thanks