AI War 2 News

New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:The_Great_Refactor#Beta_3.797_Eldritch_Art

This one is a bit different! It has a pretty huge amount of new art for the game, including some revisions to things in the base game and DLC1, and new art for DLC2 and 3. The release notes have videos of a couple of particularly cool items. There's more to come on this front, but it's not going to mean a full halt to work on code or anything like that.

Speaking of code, there's a number of new goodies in this version! Your ships no longer target hostile units you are in the process of hacking (like ion cannons), which is pretty slick -- thanks to Badger for that.

Additionally, a lot of updates have happened for the Necromancer and the Elderlings in DLC3.

More to come soon, including more bugfixes.
Enjoy!

New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:The_Great_Refactor#Beta_3.796_Greatly_Thinning_The_Turncoats

This one still has an occasional turncoat unit (grrr), but they are REALLY hard for us to hit, now. Versus after yesterday's build, threads were no longer insane, but turncoats were still frustratingly frequent. There was also a performance regression in the build of yesterday or the day before, and that's fixed now. Occasional turncoat aside, this is running really well right now! Pretty much all of the other recent bugs of notable severity have also been fixed.

If you get an exception in this build, please do give us your log, as it has some direct info and then some info following the exception. A screenshot of the exception doesn't show the whole story.

Necromancer also continues to evolve thanks to Zeus and Badger, and there are now tips of the day and regular tips about the "wait for stragglers" mode.

More to come soon.
Enjoy!

New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:The_Great_Refactor#Beta_3.795_Deduplicating

This one hopefully is going to fix a LOT of the strangeness that we've been seeing. Essentially, this was a confluence of a couple of bugs that combined in some nasty ways, but generally speaking did so only a few times an hour per machine. The frequency has gone up a lot more recently because of how much more multithreaded the game is than before, but the root bug goes back to November 17th.

At the moment, we shouldn't see any more units switching sides, or any of the other random background thread exceptions that were suddenly extra-prevalent in the last week. So for now I'm going to close all those tickets, and if we see new things, then we'll address those fresh.

A whole lot of the codebase has also been further improved when it comes to the threading model, and so the error count really should be a lot lower coming up. Fingers crossed, but testing on my own machine so far is good.

Dire CPAs continue to get refinement from Badger, and the necromancer got a LOT of improvements, in particular in balance and in clarity and ease of use.

More to come soon.
Enjoy!

New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:The_Great_Refactor#Beta_3.794_Synchronicity

This one has some (hopefully) major improvements to some of the odd threading issues we've been seeing on the beta branch. The release notes have the details, but essentially I had switched a couple of our pools that are used in a cross-thread fashion to use the (relatively) new Concurrent collections from Microsoft, and near as I can tell those have some accuracy issues. I've switched back to traditional locks, and the performance is still great, and hopefully things will be back to the former level of accuracy.

The whole turncoat unit issue is a deeper rabbit hole than before, so I've increased the debug output details for those, but it's possible that my pool thread lock changes will already resolve it. We'll see.

This build has a few other bugfixes, although there's still more I need to get to on mantis.

Also included in this version are some more Expert Mode improvements from Badger, and some DLC3 improvements from him as well.

And lastly, I've added proper official art for two of the largest DLC2 Dark Zenith units. More to come on that front, and for DLC3 and some base game revisions, too.

Enjoy!

New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:The_Great_Refactor#Beta_3.793_The_Turncoat_Question

There was limited time today, but this one includes the new Dire CPAs feature thanks to Badger for DLC3 testers to experiment with (it will be public to everyone on the beta branch soon).

This one also includes more instrumentation to try to figure out why ships are switching sides, since they are still doing that sometimes. I'll be very curious to hear what the reason is when someone runs into it again in the new version. Thankfully, a number of other bugs were able to actually be fixed, versus just better-instrumented.

More to come soon.
Enjoy!