AI War 2 News

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!

New beta build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:The_Great_Refactor#Beta_3.709_Upgrades_And_Serialization_Fix

This one upgrades to a newer version of unity, fixing a number of bugs of relevance, including likely fixing the freeze on startup that was sometimes happening.

Additionally, this release should fix the bug where sometimes units would just turn feral on you when loading a savegame, and all bumrush you for no reason. Apparently testing with the golemite AI faction really makes for a show. If you see this again, please do let us know.

A number of performance improvements have been made in this build, although there's more I wanted to do. I'll continue pushing on with that over time. I also made some adjustments to have a death registry, which has some single player uses (it's related to those performance and correctness bits above), and then also will be the final solution to the ghosts problem in multiplayer once I finish wiring that up.

Final solution? How can that be? Well, the client will be told of things that have died, and the client can ask the host about dead things, as well. That way, the worst thing we can have is not a ghost, or an accidental death -- both two outcomes possible before -- but instead just a "stale data for some reason" issue. That is far less severe, and should be easier to debug if it happens, but even that happening should be way less likely.

SirLimbo continues to be on a roll adding things to the main game and for DLC, working on some changes that affect how mines show their remaining "number of times they can go off," and then also adding a bunch more stuff for the Brutal Guardians in the Dire Guardian Lair for DLC3.

I was hoping to redo some of how transported ships work, or how drones work, while we're in here doing this much surgery anyway. That's been on my wishlist for a long time. Unfortunately... wow. It's just really complicated to try to change it, and it would lead to worse performance if I did. Given I'm trying to make performance go the other direction, I don't feel great about that. It was worth a shot, but I'm going to give it a pass.

I still have some other during-beta things to refactor, to speed up, and to make easier to use in general, but the list is growing shorter. Then it's just a matter of getting the last of the bugs out, making sure multiplayer is going well, and then it's the new-feature train for a while.

More to come soon.
Enjoy!

Another new beta build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:The_Great_Refactor#Beta_3.708_Bugfixes_And_Death_Spawn

This one is smaller, but hits a number of bugs that were bothering people. It also adds some more new features that SirLimbo is working on for some of his new guardians and such.

There is still a serialization bug at the moment (probably), and at any rate I still have more to break in serialization in general. I didn't quite get through my entire list of things I wanted to, but I wound up finding some interesting nests of programming errors and sorting those out. Whether there is a wider issue on that front at the moment or not I am not yet sure, but I have a couple of targets set for review tomorrow.

In the meantime, hopefully things work out well savegame-wise, but please let us know if not. Badger would love some feedback on those new wormhole invasion styles, by the way! Those are in the base game, and are on by default, unlike what I reported last time.

If you're a tester for DLC3, then more feedback and testing with the necromancer and the sappers are also greatly desired at the moment. Lots of changes have happened with them since the last time we got much meaningful feedback.

More to come soon.
Enjoy!

New beta build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:The_Great_Refactor#Beta_3.706_Expanded_Wormhole_Invasions_And_Raid_Engines

(Please note: this one again breaks savegames, and there's a known save corruption glitch from the prior version.)

Well! It's been a busy six days since the last release. This new build mainly has cool new things from Badger and SirLimbo, however, so let's talk about those things first. I tried to fix one bug that could cause a freeze on startup, but other than that I didn't contribute anything here.

First of all, Badger has added options for Wormhole Invasions in the lobby that make it so that you can have something more interesting than the old style of them. Specifically, you can have them just send waves (well, that's a bit different), OR you can have them... you know... drill through the fabric of reality, forge a link between one of your undefended planets and somewhere in deep enemy territory, and spawn several waves at your soft underbelly.

That last option might sound crazy, but it's not meant to be purely punitive. The cool thing about it is that it also changes the nature of the map so that you can now ALSO directly go attack the AI deep in its own territory. Yeah, sure, your underbelly just got exposed, but you also now have a direct link directly into potentially useful territory. If it suits you, you can just reinforce your empire on that side, and use it as a new launching-off point against the AI. Or if it doesn't suit you, you can protect your empire by destroying the projector to shave off that unwanted link.

Remember that you have to turn this option on in the lobby to give it a try. Right now, by default things still work how they did before. If this is popular, maybe this will become a default for some game mode, or maybe it will just stay a niche cool new option; it's hard to say, and we'd love feedback.

SirLimbo, meanwhile, has been expanding the concept of "raid engines" in general by adding a lot of new features that allow for the creation of Dire Guardian Lairs, which was a concept we had in the original game. This new implementation takes it to new levels, though, and the new units that will be involved will be part of DLC3, so I won't say too much about them yet.

For my part, I had two days where I was out of town, and then I've spent all weekend and the first two days of this week completely reworking Arcen's website. That thing was old and creaky, not mobile-friendly much at all, and really not... good at showing the important information. We also had two blogs, which I had started neglecting to update because of how much of a pain it was. I'm still not done with the makeover, but there's a lot of good stuff there, and hopefully it really enhances people's ability to find out what they want to know about Arcen as a company.

I also wrote a couple of blog posts as a response to some questions that some students sent me:

1: https://arcengames.com/what-are-the-different-phases-in-a-development-cycle-when-creating-an-indie-game/
2: https://arcengames.com/what-tools-do-developers-use-to-make-an-indie-game/
3: https://arcengames.com/have-you-noticed-a-change-in-the-way-a-game-is-developed-throughout-the-years/

I'll post a bit more about this tomorrow when I hopefully finish the last of my changes, and then I'll be back to my normal coding. For now, feel free to poke around the revamped site (the game pages have yet to be reworked; if anything seems temp-y or unfinished, it probably is).

More to come soon.
Enjoy!