AI War 2 News

New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Finalizing_Multiplayer#3.309_Hangar_Staff

(Reminder that if you have trouble with the build, you can always go into betas and choose most_recent_stable to go one build back. This is how I sleep at night after making some major changes.)

Wow, it's been over a week since the last release! I've really been pretty absorbed with some of the art updates, including all of the wormholes, and the title menu for the game (as shown below). I'm really pleased with how much more detailed it turned out, AND how much more efficient. The overall visual quality of the hangar scene in the main menu is much much higher, but it also probably runs much faster on every spectrum of machine.

We also finally have some human characters hanging around in the dock -- having a chat, waiting impatiently for doors that never open, and taking a break by themselves, respectively. This helps give a sense of what the scale of the doors and ships and objects are. And, per discussions on discord and unlike the Death Star, we did build in a safety railing.

Meanwhile, Badger made some notable improvements to hacking estimates. A lot of hacks didn't really give an indication of the strength of the response you are likely to see, but now do. He also improved the battle notification trigger code, making it easier to notice where battles that actually require your attention are located.

A couple of minor tweaks and fixes, and lots of updates to many mods by several authors.

More to come soon.
Enjoy!

New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Finalizing_Multiplayer#3.307_Art_Overload_And_The_Devourer_Chrysalis

(Reminder that if you have trouble with the build, you can always go into betas and choose most_recent_stable to go one build back. This is how I sleep at night after making some major changes.)

There are so many projects going on right now for AI War 2! Personally, I'm taking a pause from Expert (and the other related) modes, and working on some art upgrades and general artwork. There's something north of a dozen new or updated unit graphics in this particular build. I have on my todo list another... 140ish.



One of the cool things changed in this one is the AI Command Stations, which you see ALL OVER THE PLACE. They were some of my much older art, where I was trying to get a sense of large scale without having repeating elements or using greebling (which is how Star Wars makes things feel large). Normally in not-outer-space, you use horizon lines, distance fog, and other things to give a sense of scale. None of that really exists in space, although in the last few years I have discovered that using a smaller camera FOV actually does give some of the benefits of horizon lines (making things seem larger than life), while also avoiding lens distortion of spherical objects (aka all the planets don't turn into ovals near the edge of the screen). At any rate, there was a great discussion about those sorts of techniques, and things that I've learned that work well or poorly, in our discord. Links to the relevant parts are in the release notes. The new command station started out being something I was iffy on after my initial paint work -- I came back after lunch and noted that now I hated it -- but after working with it in my more modern shaders, the result is actually really killer. Here it is:



Other command stations, and also fortresses of various types, and various capturables in the base game, are all on the schedule for major upgrades like this. There's also a lot of Zenith Onslaught art coming.

A major new mod also is now out as of this release: the Chrysalis Devourer. This is something that NR SirLimbo has been working on for what seems like most of 2021 so far. It's a really ambitious faction that asks the question: what if the Devourer Golem actually evolved over the course of the game? And somewhere along the lines, additional questions like "what if it behaved more like a real animal?" and "what if you could defeat it temporarily, but it held a grudge?" The result is something that preview testers in the discord modding channel have been enjoying a lot.

Behind the scenes, there's also a lot of work going on for the next expansion, which will now come out in October. Our "DLC3" is being split into two parts, because once again the scope has grown and we have a lot of people working on things with it. So the first part will be October, part 2 will be Q1 2022. More information on that will be available in the coming months, and we'll have updated the store page with the new info, too. There's a lot of features that have not been announced yet at all, some features that were announced but which will now just be given free to everyone who has the base game, and then some features that are going in either one part or the other.



Multiplayer isn't perfect yet, but is getting there. A lot of bugs have been slain recently in general, so taking a detour into art after being so bug-oriented for a bit seemed like a good idea. There's a lot more bugslaying in the near future, though. And there's still various other free features coming this summer, like Interplanetary Weapons, among others.

More to come soon.
Enjoy!

New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Finalizing_Multiplayer#3.306_Tweaks

(Reminder that if you have trouble with the build, you can always go into betas and choose most_recent_stable to go one build back. This is how I sleep at night after making some major changes.)

These are just a few tweaks, including some new visuals for the base game and ZO, a bugfix in the AMU mod, etc. The spire hammer AI type also got some new units in ZO, which is nice.

There's more in the works, but I've spent most of the last couple of days (and a lot of the weekend) working on getting my physical and digital workspace working better. My desk for the last year and a half has been all kinds of lacking in ergonomics, and I've been feeling it quite a bit. But I hadn't put it together until it was pointed out to me a couple of weeks back. Ergonomics matter! So much easier to get more done when it isn't uncomfortable or outright painful. So depending on what your own desk situation is, I hope you don't have a blind spot like I did.

Anyhow, I've also been on a continual quest for a few years to try and get the build processes to happen faster, and make it easier for me to make art updates in particular by having them not take so long. A full build of the art packages for the game would typically take 90 minutes, and I haven't been able to get much improvement on that despite how Unity has been improving their own systems. I finally am upgrading computers (in the near future), but my current machine is kind of falling apart (keyboard keys don't always work correctly, getting inexplicably slow in other areas, etc), so I figured I'd see what I could improve in the shorter term while I wait for the new one.

And... uh... well, my wife describes it as something that you might see on The Office, and I think that's apt. Heh. Five years ago I had put together my current machine, and it included one really fast NVME SSD for the OS, a second SSD that is less fast in 3.5" form factor, and , and a 7200 RPM SSD in 3." form factor. So naturally I had my OS and some programs on the NVME drive, and then all my working stuff on the second SSD...

Except I didn't. I've been running, all this time, with all my main work stuff on the HDD. No wonder things were so slow! It took 18 hours just to transfer 375 GB off that to the actual SSD; it was getting like 6MB/sec. Today, after that was completed, I can now actually upload things faster, compile a bit faster and build those 90 minute art packages in... 12 minutes. Good grief!

So this should make me a lot more efficient, with less waiting around. And once I have my new computer in a month or so, it should get even faster than that. I'm definitely excited, since it really reduces the barrier from me updating certain parts of the game.

More to come soon.
Enjoy!

New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Finalizing_Multiplayer#3.305_Fruits_Of_A_Snipe_Hunt

(Reminder that if you have trouble with the build, you can always go into betas and choose most_recent_stable to go one build back. This is how I sleep at night after making some major changes.)

A snipe hunt is a foolish errand (and apparently is also an actual bird, as well as an interesting etymological root for sniper, but none of those bits are relevant). Yesterday and the day before I had very long days, but seemed to accomplish next to nothing. I was trying to recode how the game loads and parses its xml files, to make them more efficient and get around a rare bug I had stumbled onto three days ago and then turned (accidentally) into a super common bug.

This morning I wound up just having to check in all that work, in case I need some of the results in the future, and then just revert it all and start over. During my 12+ hour snipe hunt, I discovered the general parameters for what makes the game load a bit faster, and what does not. So I came back and used much simpler principles to get some of those speed gains, and correct the loading bug in general, and that's that. Sorry it took so long, that was super frustrating.

Various other small bugfixes and performance improvements also resulted from that diversion, so those are now in this build also.

SirLimbo was also really busy during this time period, and he fixed the coilbeam math as well as unifying beam weapon math in general. He also continued to make improvements to the tooltips, and got the new icons in there for various status effects. Unfortunately the full-color versions that I did last week looked terrible when small, so those also had to get completely redone in single-color fashion. Those look much better, but I'll probably refine them some in the future.

Several other bugs were fixed, Zeus made a number of balance tweaks to some very high-end ships, and some other experimental changes went in for purposes of testing for later.

More to come soon.
Enjoy!

New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Finalizing_Multiplayer#3.304_Coilbeams_No_Longer_Tickle

(Reminder that if you have trouble with the build, you can always go into betas and choose most_recent_stable to go one build back. This is how I sleep at night after making some major changes.)

This one is filled with goodness:

- You can use Ctrl+1 or similar to assign the hotkeys to fleets. This has been requested for a while.

- There's a helper command that lets you rename campaigns if you want to split a campaign you're in.

- Officer fleets and spire fleets will now "Roam if Instructed" in new savegames, which is the more-expected behavior. You can still toggle it either way.

- Lots of tooltip updates! More awesomeness from NR SirLimbo, showing debuffs and buffs in a way that has never been available before.

- Fixed several threading bugs, and a bug where spire flagships could hack the ARS, and some bugs with marauders.

- Swapping fleet leaders is no longer possible, but you can swap all the ship lines in a fleet using the prior interface's location. Same general effect, but minus negative side effects.

- Fixed several bugs with beam weapon math, most notably a recent one that made spire coilbeams basically do "tickle level" amounts of damage (100x too low).

- The mod Kaizer's Marauders is now its own separate faction rather than overwriting the vanilla Marauders faction. This means you can have both on at once, or choose between them, or even see how the two of them compete with one another! This also fixed a few bugs with it. That said: This will break existing savegames that have Kaizer's Marauders in them. To finish those games, you can temporarily use the "v3.303 - Last version before the Kaizer's Marauders split" beta build in Steam. You may have to exit and restart Steam before this appears.

More to come soon.
Enjoy!