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AI War 2 News

Beta 3.786 A Very Intense Patch

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!

Beta 3.785 Just Bugfixes

New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:The_Great_Refactor#Beta_3.785_Just_Bugfixes

This one just has some bugfixes, none of them TOO serious. That's kind of the idea for the period leading up out of beta. Hopefully if things are looking good, then Monday might be the day. I guess maybe Tuesday if the winter storm coming up knocks out my power, or if there are enough bugs that we need one more day of testing at that time.

More to come soon!

Beta 3.784 Tractor Recursion

New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:The_Great_Refactor#Beta_3.784_Tractor_Recursion

Lots and lots of bugfixes, a few DLC3 additions, and some quality of life tweaks. I typed up most of a longer post, had to step away for a bit to take care of something, and discord ate it when I got back. Nice. So I'll be super brief, instead.

We need to keep an eye on this for a bit longer before we let it out of beta, clearly, but I'm quite encouraged in the main. Thanks to everyone for all your bug reports.

More to come soon!

Beta 3.783 The Return Of Multiplayer!

New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:The_Great_Refactor#Beta_3.783_The_Return_Of_Multiplayer.21

Multiplayer is BACK, folks. There were a lot of beta-branch-specific bugs since the great refactor started, because I needed to get singleplayer working first, and then get multiplayer going.

I am very very happy to report that this should be the most stable and most performant version of multiplayer yet, beating out the stable branch most likely, knock on wood. There are still some things that I'm sure will come up in testing, but the ghosts issue seems to finally be fully resolved, which means the "my stuff explodes for no reason" issue, in other words.

There are some other small bugfixes here, but mainly this is MP stuff. There are also a number of notable balance adjustments to DLC3 content, mostly thanks to Zeus.

This feels really good, although it did take me a day longer than I originally expected. I've been able to play 10-20 minutes of multiplayer gametime at once without issues now, though (and I just didn't test further than that).

More to come soon.
Enjoy!

Beta 3.782 Smooth Reloading

New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:The_Great_Refactor#Beta_3.782_Smooth_Reloading

Hopefully we are in the last few days before this comes back out of beta. I have some known issues I need to fix in multiplayer, but once again we've cleaned up the full (I think?) list of known bugs of any seriousness that are afflicting multiplayer.

This build also makes it so that when you reload the xml for the game by changing enabled mods or dlc, it now does so in a smooth way with actual interface feedback about what is happening. This is how it was prior to the beta period, but since the beta period it's been jerky and slow and seems like the program is frozen at times. All fixed now!

This build sees tractor beams able to drag ships around again properly, tachyon beams no longer over-negating cloak, invulnerable ships truly being invulnerable again, necromancy working again, stacks splitting less aggressively, ships no longer losing orders when going through wormholes, no "infinite threat spawn" situations anymore, and so on.

Improvements-wise, this includes a feature where ship lines transferred between fleets now take on the orders of the fleet they are being transferred to. And some work on vassals in DLC3, though that doesn't have its control interface yet. Necromancers also got a number of balance improvements and tweaks.

More to come soon.
Enjoy!