I'm starting with some stuff that will be featured in the next playtest/release, because in my opinion, it marks a major milestone in OpenRA history.

After ages of putting off modders and players alike, most show-stopper performance and AI issues will finally be gone.

- Performance of harvester resource search has been improved by a factor of over 10, eliminating one of the biggest performance issues affecting both human and AI players.

- AI now properly checks if a structure would put it on low power and in that case build a power plant instead.
- AI will no longer try to build naval structures when there isn't enough water available.
- AI will no longer endlessly try to build and place a structure if it has run out of build space.
- AI will now distribute orders to units over several 'ticks', instead of giving them out all at once causing one massive lag spike.


In summary, for the first time playing with multiple AIs (or lots of harvesters) will no longer result in painful slideshows.
There is no ETA on the next release yet, but at this point "some time in August" still seems realistic (fingers crossed).

I'm really happy to know that somebody took care of these AI issues. It should definitely mark a major milestone in terms of macromanagement. I I just hope somebody makes AI become a bit smarter ion terms of macromanagement when patrolling a path and choosing the correct targets to fight against.

Honestly RA2/YR AI coding is a mess and I'd rather see it more module (i.e. not separate teams for each difficulty, but 1 team with separate difficulty subtrees), still keeping the same capabilities of course. Cleaner code would be much nicer to add the new type of AI types to (see C&C3 and on {TS's [AIGenerals]}).

...

Another thing I've wanted to point out for quite some time (because OpenRA has had these features for quite a while):

You can have nearly unlimited weapons and unlimited turrets on any actor, and give some of these weapons their own pool of limited ammo.
You could make a battleship with two cannon turrets, a missile launcher, a half dozen smaller gun turrets at the sides, a depth charge launcher and a tesla coil, and assign multiple weapons to each turret, and let the main cannons run out of ammo after ~100 shots requiring the player to manually resupply them at a ship yard.
And yes, you can give each turret its own art, too. Turrets are upgradable as well, as are armaments, so you can turn a medium tank into a fully-fledged heavy tank via upgrades / veterancy, for example.

While we won't make it for the upcoming release, for the release after that we plan to have all actor body, turret and barrel render traits upgradable, so you'll be able to do some crazy stuff, if you want to (a TD T-Rex turning into a voxel mammoth tank after eating enough infantry while retaining veterancy? Will be possible).

It is rectangular and round bar shaped hitboxes that you see in a developer overlay there. It also displays damage taken in the small numbers. What looks like a red lighting effect around the explosion is actually a visualisation of the damage fallout. Should assist in balancing the weaponry.

Additionally, you can now define custom targetable positions freely via offsets (relative to actor center). On top of that, we're about to fix our code so that these will not only be used for certain targeting and range calculations, but actually really for everything, so frontal attackers, turrets and weapons will really aim and shoot at the closest targetable position, instead of the target's center.

And while it might not be used by our TS mod, those customizable offsets work on the Z-axis as well, meaning you'll be able to make weapons shoot at the body of mechs, rather than their feet, make aircraft fire at the top of buildings, and so on.

Not in the current shape, no. Probably possible at a later point

at the moment, this is unfinished and breaks the balanced-cellspread model (which was called as a hack but... bleh). Note that this requires that every building must have a manually set up hitbox.

But for the sake of modder-friendlyness, I'll see if I can fix the 'ApplyToAllTargetablePositions' instead of removing it, although that probably means I'll change it to 'ApplyToAllOccupiedCells', to untie it from targetable offsets.

I like! Can it (stances) be set on factories types, so all newly built unit could have a appropriate default stance?

No..

Nice you see you again Gangster.

Can it (stances) be set on factories types, so all newly built unit could have a appropriate default stance?

Okay, and can I set Hold Fire on base defenses?