AVWW Beta 0.557 "Of Bitmap Fonts And Pipelines" Released!

This one is another really major release in a lot of ways, as it finally implements some major performance and render-capability improvements that I've been wanting to do since even before we started beta. 

I'd been avoiding these things since they tend to be a time sink, but we're now hitting the point where there were a number of bugs that I just couldn't solve any other way than addressing the more fundamental issues -- pretty much all of which are with Unity's vanilla GUI capabilities.  I've been adapting in the better third-party EZGUI code, with a lot of heavy customizations for even better performance and to fit into our render pipeline.

Anyway, I'm doing my best not to get sucked into a major time sink with these GUI changes, but the results that are already in place from what I've been doing rather speak for themselves -- the parts I've swapped out so far are really more attractive, and in some cases I'm seeing a 50% speed improvement, which is huge.  Not that the game was slow before, but we want to make sure it is able to run as close to 60fps on as many computers as possible.

This release also includes a couple of new music tracks which are both awesome, a couple of general bugfixes, and quite a few multiplayer bugfixes.  The multi-part enemy code is also working quite well now, and the Urban Predator enemy from the prior release is going to be seeing an update hopefully tomorrow to include some of that new functionality.  Another new enemy, the Urban Crawler, is nearing completion and should hopefully also be ready tomorrow.

More to come soon.  Enjoy!

This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have 0.500 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 0.500 or later, you can download that here.