AI War 2 News

New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:The_Great_Refactor#Beta_3.780_Nomadic_Ark_Empires_And_The_Hull_System

The last couple of builds had some notable bugs, apologies for that. Those are all solved, and performance has been boosted yet again (compared to the distant past, not just the recent past), and there are some quality of life improvements.

Beyond that, there's a very cool hulls system that -NR-SirLimbo has added to the game, mainly for mods. This is something that lets you create more AI War 1 style hull types and ammo types and vulnerabilities and strengths. It's not something the main game uses much, but it is used in order to provide Heroic Ship traits (really big ships that are immune to most "bs attacks," so to speak). Beyond that, it's a really interesting platform for mods to do cool things.

The More System Defenders mod has returned, and there was at least one other mod depending on it that is now working again, too.

The Ark Empire in DLC1 has been very close to completed! Thanks to Badger on the most recent batch of items there. I still have a very few last bits to add in, but in general you start with an Ark that is nomadic in the middle of enemy territory. In other words, you don't automatically have your first planet, you have to fight for it... or you can opt NOT to take that planet at all, and instead to take one of the neighbors as your first planet. And your actual king is an ark that is mobile and that you can move around as you wish, so your empire is permanently fluid.

It's a very interesting way to play, and gets back to the original kickstarter goals and designs. I don't think it's going to be the way that most people prefer... but then again I could be wrong. It also includes build-your-own-starting-fleet mechanics, which are super exciting. The normal empire that we have now is something that we built because the Ark Empires just "didn't feel like AI War" when it was the only way to play. But now the Ark Empires are much more advanced, and optional, so I'll be curious to see what people find is more fun in the end.

Badger also made a number of major improvements to the Intel menu, making it way more readable. Necromancer got some tweaks from Badger, and expert mode got some tweaks from Tom.

Puffin is also still steadily working away on his massive Classic Fusion total conversion mod.

Lots of cool things afoot! More to come soon.
Enjoy!

New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:The_Great_Refactor#Beta_3.777_Last_Refinements_For_The_Year

This is quite a big one! Dozens of bugfixes to the game and to various mods, and things should be running better than ever. Plus a whole lot of other things:

Doomsday mode (a new DLC1 feature) got some refinements from Badger.

Expert mode got some more refinements from Tom.

The message log has been upgraded a ton so items in it are clickable, and same for the right-side temporary messages that pop up. They have tooltips explaining what will happen when you click each line, and the message log has a new icon in the bottom left so it's clearer that it's not just for MP chat.

Speaking of icons, the tabs on the left sidebar have gone iconic rather than text-based. We have more room now, they're more attractive, and people have not been a fan of the sideways text that used to be there.

Puffin has been busy on his Classic Fusion mod, which is not yet released, but which is seeing a lot of internal updates frequently. Three new mechanics have been added by him to the game in general to support some of what he wants to do there, and that's the devourer, weapon points, and infestation ship mechanics. Goodness!

The list of bugfixes is pretty intense, and StarKelp has made both improvements and fixes to his Civilian Industries mod.

And lastly, a last-day-of-the-year surprise from ArnaudB, he's created a new "From Spire Frigate to Dreadnought" mod, which lets you hack the lone spire frigates to turn them into massive spire battleships or dreadnoughts.

Wow! Well, more is going to be coming very soon, but not before the end of the year (which is in about five hours where I am).
Happy New Year!

New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:The_Great_Refactor#Beta_3.774_Metal_Flows

Whew, okay, lots of cleanup in this one, largely from the work yesterday. The way that metal outflows were working is much faster as of yesterday, but there were a variety of problems I needed to fix up today. It's even faster now, and also actually fully correct as well.

Another thing that has been really-wrong for a long while (during the beta) was the way that tech previews were showing ship counts. That's now vastly more efficient, as well as actually -- again -- being correct. This also applies to the strengths/weaknesses R view, all of which I had to pretty majorly re-code.

The other bug that has been biting a lot of people lately is one where a bunch of ships would complain about the "squad in central registry was actually" errors flooding through the game. The root issue is there in the stable build (though silent), and has been there for years (it's the root of the ghosts in multiplayer, also), but it's gotten much worse in the beta since we now do so vastly much more multithreading (and now has errors that pop up when there's a problem). That should now be fixed, and we should not be seeing that error anymore, knock on wood. There are a few specific cases where we might see an error about the central registry if the timing is just wrong and I need to update some code, but that should be rare.

Right! There's still other bugs that people have noted, and I plan on trying to plow through a ton of those tomorrow, as well as actually getting to my correspondence. I wanted to go ahead and get these major fixes in today, though, so I focused there first.

This build also includes a planet cap of 120 by default now (though you can unlock it with a personal setting in the performance section), because anything above that is kind of death by a thousand paper cuts for performance on even very modern machines. 120 planets was the original limit in the first AI War, and things should perform quite nicely up to there on machines in this game now. The only places where I'm still seeing performance lag (though I'll need more data) is currently on 180 planet maps with tons of factions and deep into the midgame, and even there I'm still averaging 60 fps now, with full sim speed, so that's a lot of wiggle-room and should see normal map sizes really play very nicely.

And lastly, now the expatriate tech can upgrade human resistance fighters and ALL outguard (not just some of them), which makes the HRF in particular way more useful as an ally than they ever have been in the past.

More to come soon.
Enjoy!

New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:The_Great_Refactor#Beta_3.773_The_Turbo

This one is a bit unexpected in its content. There's a few bugfixes and QoL improvements, but then mostly I focused in majorly on both sim performance and framerate for the game, and got some pretty magical results.

Overall there were some places where in a giant galaxy from user deadzone with a ton of ships and factions, I had like 60% sim speed at best. I now have 100% sim speed on that, with some very occasional dips that I haven't yet located.

That particular save also was extremely choppy, and was giving me a framerate that was maybe in the 40s, but extremely jerky because the frame times were so uneven. I've done a ton of work on that, and I'm now seeing closer to 60-70 fps, with some dips still on that as well, but with it largely being smooth instead of jerky.

I get so used to playing midsize games, or the early game, or just whatever saves people are sending in, that I don't usually see these performance hotspots unless someone happens to give me a save that has it. If you've got such a savegame, then please feel free to either pop it on our bugtracker or send it to me on discord.

The changes to make this work so much better were nontrivial, so there are likely going to be some cross-threading bugs resulting from this. That will keep us on the beta branch slightly longer, but honestly it just depends on testing results.

I have a big backlog of correspondence as well as bugtracker tickets to look at since being out for the holiday, and I promise I'm not ignoring any of that -- I just wanted to really focus on this thing today, since it's the sort of thing that both is really important as well as leads to potential new bugs. Having this in sooner than later, and then dealing with the existing reports, should let me double up on dealing with those reports plus new ones.

So how is performance now? I'm getting pretty diminishing returns on the one savegame that was a big problem for me so far. All the other saves I have were already fine. Do you have any saves that still are problematic in the new version? If so, send them on over!

More to come soon.
Enjoy!

New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:The_Great_Refactor#Beta_3.772_Refinements_And_Polish

Okay, I really need to stop predicting what my next day is going to be like. I was planning on finishing up the bugfixes for multiplayer today, but instead I had to spend a bunch of time on the phone with Intuit (uggggh), and then there were a rash of other issues that affect both single player and multiplayer, so I worked on those, instead. We really are getting close on the beta being back to the stable branch, but there's still just a bit too many things going on for me to be ready to pull the trigger yet.

There's an interesting poorly-performing mid-game save that deadone77 provided, and before we come out of beta I want to see if I can't get that running smoothly. I suspect it already runs better than the stable branch would have with that scenario, but now with all the beta improvements I can actually see which parts are slower and I think I can deal with that. I suspect that if I can get that solved, then that will be a major performance boon for games in general in that sort of state, which will be great for all of the more active factions.

Anyway, so there's still some random bugs, there's that performance thing I want to get dealt with, and there's the MP bugs that I still need to work with. As far as getting out of beta goes, that's the full list of what I'm aware of. Tomorrow is Christmas Eve, so I'm going to be signing off for a few days to spend time with my family. I hope that you and yours are having a great holiday season if you celebrate anything around this time, and if the next holiday for you is New Years, I'll be seeing you well before then.

That's the other big reason I don't want to go out of beta right now: doing that right before a holiday where I'm not around and a number of new people are likely to show up seems unwise. I'll be back on the 27th or so.

Thanks so much to everyone who has been working so hard on testing, and discussing, and tweaking and fixing things!
Enjoy!