AI War 2 News

New build, and there's some surprises in here! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:The_Great_Refactor#Beta_3.742_.22Classic_Map.22_For_DLC1

1. First off, there's a new map type for DLC1 (hey, wasn't that complete in early 2020?) based loosely on some of the favorite maps from AI War Classic. In general, we're going to be beefing up DLC1 and adding more to it over the next few months, then renaming it and slightly raising the price. Folks just don't seem sold on this DLC to the same degree that DLC2 is exciting them, and so we'd like to fix that so that it's truly a must-have. If you already have the DLC (or buy it now while it's still slightly cheaper), you're just getting this bonus stuff for free.

2. Lots of bugfixes, including many for the Fallen Spire. Huge thanks to Tom for most of these. The Fallen Spire is apparently pretty much fully playable again on the beta branch, although there's still some bits I need to finish to fully bring it home.

3. Badger's done a lot with the Necromancer faction for those folks testing DLC3, and feedback would be awesome. Not only that, but there's a new Elderlings faction that is related to Necromancers, or that you can use independently of them, and which are kind of roaming monsters in the galaxy. I'm really excited about this addition. DLC3 is really just getting kind of mind-blowingly large, and I'm really excited about it. That's one of several reasons we really needed to up the game on DLC1 so that it feels comparable to these other two giants.

4. Consulting with Tom, there's a new strategy for how I'm quarantining ships that have recently died, so that there's a lot less chance of random errors in the codebase related to UI elements or otherwise still referencing something that is in the process of being disassembled. The changes here solve a whole host of known bugs as well as a bunch of likely unknown ones. Tom did further refinement to fix more of them, with a lot of debug assisting from Daniexpert.

5. Speaking of Daniexpert, they've been invaluable for helping me find and fix more memory leaks and odd-allocations of RAM over the last few days. There are several notable fixes that really eliminate the most notable memory leaks that we've been able to find so far, and the game also runs more smoothly than ever. Whether there are any more memory leaks remaining is not yet clear, so please do let us know what you find!

There are a number of known exceptions that I haven't had a chance to look at yet, both reported on Steam and on mantis, but I'll be getting to those mainly on Tuesday. I've got some other things going on on Sunday and Monday that will cut into my work time a lot, but I'll be back at things on Tuesday.

More to come soon.
Enjoy!

New build, not nearly as exciting as yesterday, but it's solid progress: https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:The_Great_Refactor#Beta_3.741_Clogging_Holes

1. On the subject of trying to hot-reload the xml files:

I've made some progress on that, but there's still more to do. There's some added functionality I need to add, apparently, before that's really going to work as well as I need it to. But it definitely got a lot closer today, and this took about the first half of the day to work on it. Right now if you try to hot reload xml, it will potentially lock up the game, but when you kill it and reload it, it will have what you want. I just need to fix the whole lock up part, but it's one step at a time.

2. On the subject of the memory leaks, which still exist:

Notice I'm not saying "the memory leak" anymore? I do suspect that there was mainly one big memory leak in the past, but at this point there are definitely multiple. Some of them are caused by the semantic changes I've made to how we use collections -- aka, in building the panopticon, I introduced new temporary memory leaks, but in exchange I gain the ability to find them and kill them, and also to improve performance in general in the future. I fixed at least six memory leaks today, none of which were the "big one" that is causing the most trouble.

Daniexpert was kind enough to provide a very useful core dump from that new feature, and by diffing that against an early-stage core dump of my own, this is how I'm not just finding the memory leaks, but also places where I can optimize capacity allocations. The side effect of the latter is that the game runs faster, and most notably that it's wicked fast to load savegames now. I mean, it's down from something like 1.5 seconds to 0.5 seconds; that hardly matters, but it does feel nice. And the overall ram usage being lowered, and the during-gameplay performance improvements that this also leads to, are the real win.

I'm currently going painstakingly through that one core dump, and just fixing things as I find them after careful analysis, rather than trying to find the big leak that I know is in there. Something has allocated 23 million objects when it really should be closer to three million based on another metric, and in that core dump is the answer to that question. When I find that, hopefully tomorrow or the next working day, that should be the end of the big memory leak (knock on wood). In the meantime, I don't want to leave any smaller memory leaks around just because I'm in a hurry, so I'm taking the time to do it right.

3. On the subject of the stalling background threads:

This is really intermittent and frustrating, and requires you to more or less restart the game to get it to work properly after it happens. It only seems to happen after having loaded multiple savegames in one run of the game. While chatting with Daniexpert about the data he was able to show me from it happening to him again today, I think I may have come up with a solution for it. I'll need to actually implement it and test it, but I'm hoping I can squeeze that in tomorrow, as well.

4. Everything else?

These items are my top priority right now until they are fixed. After that, there's many other general bugs, and then a load of new features and things coming down the pipeline. I'm really excited about those things, but I want to finish this stuff out right and have this running really smoothly for everyone. I really have no idea how many more days of this pre-everything-else work is left, but I will be able to do daily releases like this one with updates, at least.

More to come soon.
Enjoy!

Whew, okay, this one is pretty huge: https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:The_Great_Refactor#Beta_3.740_Code_Panopticon

The idea of a "panopticon" is that it's a structure where there's absolutely no privacy, and there's perfect observation of everything that happens inside. Dystopian thought, right? Well, in this case, I've been working on constructing a panopticon... for memory leaks. The idea is for myself or modders (whoever has caused the memory leak) to be able to get a few core dumps (you can generate those by just hitting F7 now) and then have an idea of what is leaking, which then makes fixing it much easier.

A rather nasty memory leak bug has been lurking for a few weeks now, and I do think I solved it, to be honest... but before you get too excited, there's at least one new one. Or maybe it's a different flavor of the prior one, but the new one acts different, so I suspect it's new. As I've been constructing my panopticon for bugs, there's been a lot of adjustment required in many areas of the code. I clearly have a few blind spots remaining, so it's not a true panopticon yet, anyway.

That said, the game is playable enough for the beta branch, and there's great stuff going on in here, so with a few caveats please have at it! One of the caveats is that if you change around your selection of mods and/or dlcs that are enabled, right now that can cause a lockup or a bunch of errors or work perfectly, variably. It's on my list.

But what else is new? A number of other folks have been super productive, too:

Tom from discord has offered to help with a "bit" of bugsmashing, after examining the open source parts of the code and noting a few things he could fix. He's then been on a real tear throughout the codebase, just fixing tons of items and resolving lots of tickets. That's super helpful, and I'm incredibly grateful!

Among other things, the Fallen Spire are mostly playable again. They're still missing the ability to switch which fleet is being bolstered, and the modular ships aren't in there yet, but Tom has tested and fixed everything else except for the transciever, which is wicked cool and saves me a ton of time I can put into other things for you guys.

Badger decided the AI needs more mean things it can do to you, so he's working on a Svikari variant that can be friends with the AI instead of you. He also made the planet sidebar way more informative when you've got a crippled flagship, versus being misleadingly stuck at one health tick.

Zeus is back in the saddle with a number of balance changes, plus a number of not-listed-yet really cool things for DLC3. One of them involves a gravity well full of orbiting guard posts, which is... just plain awesome.

Daniexpert fixed up the Lost Spire Frigates to "Roam if Instructed" by default, which was a satisfying venture into code for yet another modder/volunteer.

For those with DLC3 early keys, Badger also majorly reworked the Necromancer, and they're ready for some serious testing. Right now it's just the Necromancer helper, so you need to add them as a secondary faction to your main empire and then hit F4 to swap to them. The solo-focused necromancer empire will be coming before too long, and Puffin had some great ideas on that which I'm excited to try out.

I still have a number of code things to fix up in the wake of this panopticon business, but I'm hoping that this will be the last truly large refactor of the game. I'm ready to just focus on bugfixes and more features and such, versus rearranging things in painful detail like this. But things are going to be in much better shape for modders for the long haul now, despite the short term bugs, so I'm definitely pleased about that.

Lots more is coming soon.
Enjoy!

Second beta build of the day: https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:The_Great_Refactor#Beta_3.711_More_Fixes

I still have to chase the memory leak that we've got going on, and a new rash of reports of various things arrived this evening thanks to Daniexpert (that really is helpful, so thank you!), but this build cleans up some of the issues, and also adds a bit more performance in a couple of areas.

This build also fixes the Civilian Industries mod to once again compile, and I am assuming it works but I have not tested it.

There's still a lot changing at the moment, and will be for another few weeks I imagine, but for now this is kind of "business as usual in the beta." I'm going to take this weekend off, after working the last two.

More to come soon.
Enjoy!

New beta build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:The_Great_Refactor#Beta_3.710_Hotfixes_Serialization_and_Performance

Possibly the first of two for today, we'll see.

This one fixes some latent bugs in the prior build, mostly about loading transports and saving the game. You know, not anything important.

This also makes the UI sidebars more responsive, and fixes a possible glitch in xml importing and two definite glitches in necromancer hacking.

The death registry work in general is also moving along towards prep for multiplayer.

Lots of things going on and improving these days, but since we're in this kind of chaotic beta period it's certainly leading to lots of bugs, too. I'll be glad to be out of this beta period when we can be, but at the same time it's still really gratifying how much we're able to improve the core of the game while we're in here. It just makes a terrible mess, as grover would say to elmo.

More to come soon.
Enjoy!