AI War 2 News

New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:The_Great_Refactor#Beta_3.790_Defense_Against_Rogues

This one has some improvements from Badger to the tech window, and also includes several bugfixes from him (including some cross-threading fixes that are high-priority and were bothering folks over the weekend).

Beyond that, StarKelp has a number of fixes and improvements to his Lost Humans mod, including adding new Rogues for you to meet.

More to come soon.
Enjoy!

New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:The_Great_Refactor#Beta_3.789_Network_Consolidation

This one has a whole lot of cool new things for the necromancer, if you're a DLC3 tester at the moment.

For everyone, there's a lot of networking improvements in here. Accuracy, speed, and a lower number of options when it comes to steam networking. I also found that the steam networking in particular was causing some hitching and freezing on the client and host, and moved that code onto a background thread where it no longer causes that.

I'm not sure if I got all the canaries or not, but it seems like I got a number of them, anyhow. There are some new tools that allow you to send metadata headers along with the data, and if you run into a canary, then you can go into personal settings, network, and enable that to get a more precise hit as to where the problem is. If you're the client and getting the error (most likely case), then the host actually is the one who has to enable the metadata send, because they're the one generating the data.

Oh yeah! I almost forgot, but there are literally dozens of bugfixes for nullrefs in here. It touches pretty much every faction in the game in at least a couple of places. All that carnage from a couple of builds back with the new rash of nullrefs should be solved now. Also, tachyon beams work again, unlike the last build or two where I had messed those up with a boolean inversion.

More to come soon, but hopefully this does well for folks in multiplayer over the weekend. I still have some known bugs to iron out, but in terms of random performance drops and error popups, fingers crossed those are largely a thing of the past.

Enjoy!

New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:The_Great_Refactor#Beta_3.788_Canary_Search

This one fixes a bunch of more stuff with multiplayer, and a few single player bugs like tachyon beams not working. This also gives some great new quality of life improvements when dealing with cloaked enemy ships on a planet.

As far as multiplayer goes, I think it's pretty much more solid now than it ever has been before, but there are a couple of places where I know the code is being sent incorrectly (we get "canary warnings" from that). At the moment, I haven't been able to find those yet, so I've put in more canaries, and that should give us proper info on it as people hit the new canaries.

More to come soon.
Enjoy!

New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:The_Great_Refactor#Beta_3.787_Yet_More_Performance

I had hoped to be out of beta a week or so ago, but we're not quite there yet. On the plus side, we're continuing to make some astronomical strides in general stability, performance, and so forth. This applies to singleplayer and multiplayer. We have a couple of dramatically-overpopulated huge savegames that would have ground to a halt in the past, and they now actually run at about half sim speed and 30fps; by simply adjusting the game speed up to 2x, you can run those in realtime, in other words.

I prefer that the game run at 60+ fps, of course, and at full sim speed; but in this particular situation, we're talking about 9.5 hours into a game with 13 intensity-10 factions, 3 difficulty 9 AIs, and three other factions in addition. In total, under the hood, 49 factions in place, and about 550k ships in 40k groups. That is... really really extreme, and the fact that it's quite playable now is something I'm really pleased by. Even better, the game now uses far more of your processor cores as of this version for these extreme sort of scenarios. It won't use excessive CPU in a normal situation, but it does scale up as-need, even on 16+ cores.

There are some safety mechanisms in here that are new for various NPC factions, which allow them to force stacking when they start getting too many units spawned. This is useful even for modders, so that if they wind up with runaway unit counts on high intensities of their factions, they can have the game automatically adapt and get better performance out of it. In the event that the automated logic doesn't get the job done, it now shows what is going over budget in a warning fashion, which should encourage people to submit savegame bug reports where more direct tuning can be done by the faction author. Overall I like giving people the tools to succeed and not shoot themselves in the foot, so this is a big step forward in that regard. These mechanisms only apply to NPC factions, not to player ones, incidentally.

Lots of bugfixes in this build, many of which are related to the recent "don't reference a wrong unit" code that was put in. But also, this fixes a couple of notable multiplayer bugs, and so hopefully the multiplayer experience is smoother than ever, as well. I still expect some remaining small issues for a bit, but so far I'm really heartened by just how well it's running on my test setup.

Civilian industries got some updates as well, and runs again (it was busted at the last moment in the prior build).

More to come soon.
Enjoy!

New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:The_Great_Refactor#Beta_3.786_A_Very_Intense_Patch

Whew, this one is absolutely giant. It's mainly focused on polish and bugfixes, but it has a number of DLC3 features in there as well. I was hoping to get out of beta last week, but there were too many things that have needed attention. I'm happy with the progress that is happening now, though.

This new build includes some performance improvements for extreme faction situations, which allows factions to detect poor performance and then throttle themselves. We had a save with a ton of intensity 10 factions in it that were getting over a million units in the game, and the performance was really suffering. Now it scales up way less rapidly in there, and the performance is much better. If we are alerted to other poor-performing faction saves, we now have tools where we can fix those up when the saves are provided. This is also something that modders can make use of.

DLC3 changes abound, such as the Elderlings having some new hacks you can do against them, and lots of Wild Hives updates, and Necromancer updates... the list is long.

Bugfixes are really voluminous here in general, too. A lot of multiplayer fixes are included, but there are also many single-player ones. There were also some really nasty bugs relating to pooling of units in really high-load games, and those are now fixed. A couple of these things were pretty giant amounts of code surgery, and some of those will give a few errors in the short term rather than silently doing something wrong. As we find those, we'll fix them and then they also won't have errors. At the moment we've fixed a few hundred cases of those, but there are likely more lurking (none have shown up in testing at the moment, but that's not an ironclad thing by any stretch).

A lot of this had to do with making things more resilient when the game is under extreme load. Making it work more correctly in those cases, as well as making it not run as slowly in those cases.

Mod-wise, Civilian Industries has seen a bunch of updates from StarKelp, and they now perform a lot better and send less data in multiplayer, too. Existing civilian industries games are broken, but all other saves are fine.

StarKelp also added a new Lost Humans mod, which is a cool new thing that allows for Travelers and Lost Colonies to spawn out in the world. This is a unique mod in that it uses a non-faction-based mechanism to have these work, which is a first among mods. Very cool feature that is also very low-load.

More to come soon.
Enjoy!