The major improvements of 1.3ta5, compared to pb4a are:

- Updated graphics engine that uses (and requires) DirectX 9.0c for the best balance of compatibility and speed. Hardware transform & lighting is now supported, allowing a lot of work to be offloaded from your CPU and onto your graphics card. New DirectX features like fullscreen antialiasing (or multisample antialiasing) are supported to improve visual quality.
- Various lagout bugs in network games should be drastically reduced
- Further support for Windows Vista/7 -- should fully support being installed to paths with unicode, has high-resolution icon for Windows Explorer
- Music from the BZ2 CD is now distributed with this patch, in ogg vorbis format, allowing for better performance. You can also set up a random playlist of music to be played ingame, if you copy in .ogg files to the right place and the right name. (Note: other music needs to be user-supplied.)

Note: system requirements have changed; see more in the link above. The short summary of things is that ta5 requires Win2000 or later. It requires a CPU with Streaming SIMD Extensions (SSE) support, as did pb4a before it. Also, a graphics card that supports DirectX 9.0c with hardware Transform & Lighting (T&L) is required.

Note: There are a number of mods updated for ta5 or developed specifically for ta5. I've asked those modders to hold off on releasing them for 1 week so that people can enjoy all of the new items that pb4 has to offer. There's a ton of new options, recycler variants and new maps available out of the box.

Thanks to Ken Miller for his continued attention to BZ2, the loving support of my wife and daughter, all of the beta testers, and the BZ2 community for their continued interest in this game.

Why is this patch labeled 'Tech Alpha'?

Previous 1.3 releases were labeled 'public beta'. This is a 'tech alpha' because of the nature of the changes to BZ2. In short, because the graphics engine was rewritten to use the DirectX 9.0c fixed function pipeline, extensive work was done. From my professional work, as well as from reading about the PC Games Industry, ensuring compatibility with all of the myriad graphics cards and thousands of possible drivers is a really tough problem. Beta testers for this release have ensured that the game runs on their systems. However, we can't be sure that their systems cover the spectrum of hardware and drivers out there. If you've got a system like one of theirs, things will probably work as well for you as it does for them. If you've got a more unique set of hardware or drivers, results are not guaranteed. Until a larger community has run 1.3techalpha5 for a while, we would rather be safe and call this 'alpha.' If it works for you, great. If not, please drop by http://www.bzuniverse.com/forum and help us improve it.


-- GSH

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