Available via Steam and Desura.
The game has moved on substantially since the Beta version, with many visual upgrades, and a new video-scaling system has been added to allow those with lower system specs (shame on you!) to play the game in blurry low-res. Windowed, or not. Eyefinity is initially supported at resolutions up to 3840x800.
The team have spent a huge amount of time polishing the Single Player experience, and it really shows, too! There's about 5-6 hours of full-on Single Player there.
The Game Editor is not being released concurrently, and we will have to wait a little bit for that. Likewise, the multiplayer game will get updates and improvements over the coming weeks.
The new "Updates" (replacing the word "Upgrades") for the Agent are legion: The number of possible combinations and permutations of weapons and ship capabilities will be close to the number of atoms in the solar system. The way the updates work online is that your selected updates are applied in the order you choose, after you make kills: the more kills you make, the more updates you get.
To whet your appetite, just some of the Agent Updates include: Faster scan pulse, wider scan pulse, +8% damage to scanned enemies, Damaging other players leeches their health and cycles, Hit-scan Dual Strike, Dual Thrash (Miniguns), Taking damage replenishes cycles, Increased gravity well power, Rapidfire Inject (Rifle), to name just a few. Adding different classes of updates increase your ship speed, speed of damage recovery etc
I know you will have a lot fun tinkering with your Agent, put it that way.
Your standard Agent now comes with a cycle-chewing cloaking device too.
Full 8-channel audio is working beautifully, and the sound track is kicka$$!
Cadenza have a couple of dedicated servers up and running, and I will continue hosting a big traditonal Deathmatch server here in NZ. The netcode has been polished, with the antilag code working very well indeed: you do not need to lead your shots to account for your ping. I have tested this to over 200ms, and the Rifle remains accurate at any ping. Don't ask how much math and data the server processes to achieve this.
The netcode has also been optimised, with an improved system which establishes Peer-to-Peer connections with all other players, and then finds the best routes for game data, and sends packets appropriately, accounting for ping and loss of all players. The server still mediates the game, however.
Just how much post-release work is performed for the game will entirely depend on how many sales are made. The game is entirely DRM free, and does not require you to launch Steam to play it. I know a Retrovirus Torrent will appear on TPB tomorrow, and I must tell you, I am a bit conflicted about it. On one hand, I want that torrent to do very well indeed, and on the other, I hope none of you will torrent it, or if you do, to make sure you pimp the game hard, and buy a copy when you can afford it.
Cadenza is a tiny team (Just look at the game credits!) and this is all they have worked on for over 30 months, paying themselves chump change in order to bring you the next-best-thing-to-Descent-4 and I would encourage every single one of you to contact old Descent players, friends and tell everyone you know about the game. If the game is successful we will see a lot of development work yet from Cadenza before they move on to their next project. I dearly hope they will be vindicated in their decision to do a Descent-like game, if only to prove the genre isn't 100% dead. If Retrovirus can turn a decent profit, we will undoubtedly see another Descent-like game, and it won't be 13 years until the next one.
I hope you will enjoy the game hugely. Please join the BB community over at The Retrovirus Forums: http://cadenzainteractive.com/forums/vi ... 8f1487df6e
. And those emotions stick with you. Or at least they stick with me. I'm bizzare.
. Multiplayer runs very smoothly -- though I haven't managed to actually fight anyone who wasn't a bot yet 
.
