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The 1.3 patch has been in development since September/October 2001, headed by two programmers who had worked on the original Bat […]
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The 1.3 patch has been in development since September/October 2001, headed by two programmers who had worked on the original Battlezone II team: Ken Miller & Nathan Mates. (In January 2009, Ken Miller moved to Armature Studios, but Nathan Mates has remained employed by Pandemic Studios, which was acquired by Electronic Arts in early 2008. We're working on other titles as our day jobs; Battlezone II patches are done in our spare time.)

The major improvements of 1.3 public beta 5.1, compared to the previous release are:

* Performance optimizations to DirectX 9 graphics, most noticeably in the terrain rendering. Satellite view should be far faster, especially on slower machines
* EMBM bumpmaps work once again. High res shadows are re-enabled, but still just as buggy as it's always been (since Battlezone II v1.0)
* Local fog should look better
* Various crash bugs fixed
* Max vertex count for models has been upped to 20,000 verts/model; old limit was 2730 verts/model. No stock assets have higher poly counts, but mods may take advantage of that.

A number of tweaks and enhancements of the 1.3 series are: 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. DXT Textures are supported to more efficiently use graphics card memory.
* 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.)
* Much greater MOD (game modification) support, allowing up to 26 total races to be active at once. Many MODders have been among 1.3 beta testers, and have been working to take advantage of the new features. [Their participation or nonparticipation is their own business; no support for 1.3 is implied or MODs promised by us.]
* Developed/Tested on Windows 2000/XP/Vista, for much better compatibility out of the box. Should work on Vista without requiring Administrator access. Limited WINE testing has been done as well. For Vista/Win7, should fully support being installed to paths with unicode, has high-resolution icon for Windows Explorer
* Redone audio system that supports far more channels (up to 64) and DirectSound3D for a far more immersive experience. Note: not all sound cards on the market support that many channels; if the driver on your system notes a limit under 64, BZ2 will use that instead.
* Support for Ogg Vorbis compressed sounds - similar to mp3 files, but with higher quality.
* Various lagout bugs in network games should be drastically reduced. Resyncs should be reduced in general, units (human & AI) should warp less online
* Many crashes/freezes fixed.
* Enhancements to many parts of the game, including AI, craft handling, etc.
* Many more pregame options for IA, DM, Strat & MPI games (feature available to MODs to define custom options pages on a per-map basis)
* Bots in DM, and some additional DM gameplay modes.
* Strategy-CTF game mode -- capture a goal, tug it back to your recycler to win, on 6 classic maps. Finally a good use for tugs in MP!
* Over 50 additional Instant Action & Multiplayer maps by several mapmakers within the BZ2 community, and tweaks to some existing maps to reduce bugs. As of 1.3TechAlpha5, there are 20 classic & additional IA maps, and over 100 classic & additional MP maps installed.
* Several additional security measures to make cheating in multiplayer much more difficult; deliberate remote crashing of games should be fixed.
* New BZ2 editor screen layout files contributed by testers to expose more functionality that was already there.
* Ability to rotate buildings (on 90-degree increments) for even more base-building fun
* Updates to the manual (located in the Extras folder where BZ2 is installed to) to give updated and more accurate information
* Includes over 1.1MB of text files listing changes made since 1.2. This changelog contains our (minimalist) notes as to what changed for each version, and isn't guaranteed to be easily understood. But, it may be useful reading.
* More features, including weapon linking, thumpers, and variable gravity DM maps
* Many more modder features, such as 60-char ODF names, inheritance, tons of new tuning values, etc
* Easier to host games w/ automatic UPNP, Windows Firewall support(*)