AI War 2 News

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!

New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:The_Great_Refactor#Beta_3.771_Expert_Mode_And_Civilian_Industries

Thanks to Tom, this one has a version of expert mode that is very close to feature-complete. Balance feedback is still needed from more folks on it, and I have some more ui work to do on the top resource bar, and there are some more optional features planned for expert mode, but the really core stuff is all there from Strategic Sage's point of view, which is super exciting! He and I had been plotting these features since May, so that was quite the wait, and I thank him for his patience and ongoing advice on it. Tom has really made expert mode happen way faster than I would have been able to, which is a huge boon, I'm really grateful.

In other news, I've reviewed all the mods since we're nearing the end of this beta period, and marked the ones that are not ready yet as being disabled, and let the various authors know for those who did no already know. On that note....

Civilian Industries has been something that took a ton of work to convert over, but StarKelp came in and smashed the last of the issues with that, and it's now back in working order for the first time since entering the beta period! That's quite exciting since this is one of the most popular mods, particular for newer players.

I've been working primarily on multiplayer, getting the bugs in that ironed out so that the beta branch will be as-good-or-better than the current stable branch for multiplayer. I'm not quite to that point yet, and I would not call the multiplayer playable on the beta branch just yet, but I think perhaps tomorrow it will be. There's a few other last-minute bugs that I see have been reported for single player as well, so I'll knock those out before we get off the beta branch in general.

More to come soon.
Enjoy!

New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:The_Great_Refactor#Beta_3.770_Bug_Roasting

Not quite off the beta branch yet, but I'm hoping that either tomorrow or the next day will see that. There were some severe regressions and some other major issues that just got missed in the last build, but those are all cleared up now and I'm currently not aware of any major bugs in the single player game for the base game and the first two DLCs.

If there's more I'm missing, please continue to let me know!

Multiplayer remains offline in the beta branch, but I aim to get that sorted out tomorrow. I had been hoping to get that all done today, but the vast majority of my day got taken up by the other bugs on the roster. For multiplayer, the main thing that I have to get working again is the initial handshake and the way that deserialization buffers work; during the refactor, I changed that back in July, and I recall thinking "oh yeah, I'll have to check and make sure that all does right when I get to testing multiplayer." At the time, I thought that was going to be August!

Still, as extra-long as this giant beta period has been, the game is exceptionally polished from it. The extra throughput that we have made a severe memory leak I introduced a couple of days ago something that almost flew under the radar. That's maybe a strange flex, but in the past, or indeed in most programs, a memory like that would have been paired with far more substantial general program slowdown. (I've thoroughly checked this for other leaks, and beyond that one boneheaded one from the 17th, we're good).

I've done a couple of major system refactors in my past work, twice on really large business systems spanning a bunch of servers, and a few times on games for Arcen (including the original migration from my hand-coded engine over to have Keith and I piggyback Unity back in 2010), and this has by far been the largest. The entire AI War 2 project has in general been a time of pushing technical boundaries in order to open up new gameplay and modding and performance abilities, and that has been a challenge to balance along with the regular schedule for the game, but I'm really glad to where the technology has (very nearly) arrived at now.

When we first set out to work on AI War 2, neither Keith nor I had ambitions for nearly such complex factions, AI that would process so much data, or support for mods of such complexity. But that's how the game and its community have evolved, and the modern version of the game really handles all of it very well.

More to come soon.
Enjoy!

New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:The_Great_Refactor#Beta_3.769_Neinzul_Custodians_And_Total_Conversions

Let's start with a question: aside from multiplayer, if you're in the beta branch, are you seeing anything that would prevent us from merging back with the main branch? Because I've finished all the todo items off my list for single-player. I have another day or day and a half of multiplayer work and fixes to do, plus whatever bug reports people make in that timeframe, but other than that we're head back for the stable branch for the first time since mid-July, good grief!

But seriously, if I'm missing something please let me know!

This version has a lot of bugfixes, and yet more total conversion support. The first total conversion mod for AI War 2, called "Classic Fusion," seems to be nearing a releasable state. It's essentially recreating most of the original AI War (AI War Classic) in the AI War 2 engine, with the AI War 2 factions, and with other specific tweaks to kind of merge the two games and meet in the middle. I got my first taste of booting it up today, and just going into the build menu -- which looks like AI War 2, of course -- made me immediately have this intense wave of nostalgia as I saw all the AIWC ships and structures, reborn in a new fashion. This is something Puffin has been working on for years now, and it's quite a feat.

Tom has also added more refinements for fuel in expert mode, which seems quite welcome! That mechanic has seen a lot of discussion on discord, and I'm glad that it's getting balance and attention. In the short run I've been focusing my efforts on getting us out of beta, but even after that there's a long list of other items I plan to work on for expert mode, DLC3, DLC1 late additions, and some other general base game additions.

Speaking of DLC3, StarKelp has been working hard on the Neinzul Custodians, which is basically the Roaming Enclaves. The Neinzul Wild Hives, another DLC3 faction, also got some updates and some new planet-wide ship mechanics to go with them. This game went from being "oh, poor Neinzul, they get no representation and it's all spire and zenith" to "wow, we have five substantial Neinzul factions in the third DLC." I am pleased with this development, and the further expansion of the lore and civilization of this race. Out of the three main alien species in the AI War universe, they've always been the least-explored. Nice to be reversing that!

More to come soon.
Enjoy!