AI War 2 News

New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:The_Great_Refactor#Beta_3.781_Tachyon_Healing_Reversal

This one... fixes all of the really major bugs that I'm aware of in single-player! So heap on some more, see what you can find! ;)

I still have some known multiplayer bugs that I need to fix before we're able to leave beta, but beyond that and whatever new is reported... that's where we are. So that's quite exciting!

Also exciting? Your own tachyon beams (you know, the ones for revealing clocked enemies?) will no longer accidentally heal enemy cloaking devices, making them perma-cloaked no matter how much the enemy shoots you. Yes... in the past build, I made an error and tachyon beams were your own worst enemy, creating invisible unhittable terrors of enemies who could shoot you with impunity. Seeing that was actually pretty menacing, and I understand it cut a swath through several player empires. Uh... my bad!

This new version has some performance improvements (again), and also a lot of improvements to how notification hovers work. If a notification talks about things on multiple planets, it now highlights all the planets of relevance.

The necromancer got a number of new powers in this build thanks to Badger, and also got a bit of a nerf to the very late game since they were getting absurd apparently. Finding the ideal power curve for that new player faction is a work in progress, but sounds like it's coming along. I particularly like that the Neinzul Elderlings have sanity that they lose, and are losing it faster now. That's fun.

The build yesterday also had some bugs in the new hull system from SirLimbo, which is understandable for something so huge. Those are fixed now, although it sounds like there are a few final gasps from other bugs in that bit of code.

Thanks to everyone who has been testing, and hopefully the next few builds are uncommonly clean for how things have been the last half year. We're finally nearing the exit of beta, and the end of the great refactor, which is a milestone I will really relish.

More to come soon.
Enjoy!

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!