AI War 2 News

New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Finalizing_Multiplayer#Beta_3.502_Input_Salve

Still in the beta branch for right now.

This one fixes a ton of bugs, including almost all the ones that I mentioned in the last release (not the mis-centering in the galaxy map, which is a minor cosmetic thing really).

1. It also has come to my attention that the game hangs sometimes on start for some people, across OSes, on the latest betas. A lot of investigation went into that today (you can see it on discord if you want in chris-talks-code-gameplay), and the end result is that unity is definitely having a bug where sometimes it will just take its ball and go home during loading from asset bundles. It's some sort of cross-threading thing, and I've done a bunch to mitigate that, but there's still some other things I can do. I haven't seen any mention of this on unity's issue tracker in recent builds, so this is either a regression on their part or it is resources.load() conflicting with asset bundle loading. Either way, I'd rather not wait for them to fix it, and reproducing it is spotty at best. Anyhow, so that's improved, but may not be gone entirely.

2. Input handling, on the other hand, is VASTLY improved compared to the last half month. I made a number of changes in July that were attempting to help with some unusual control schemes that one user wanted to do, and it wound up fouling up things for everyone. Today I've revised that code further and it now works better than ever (knock on wood, so far as I can tell), although the one use case that individual wanted isn't possible anymore. But the code is a lot more brief and clear and functional than it was prior to the foulup, so that's nice. And our new double-click handling improvements are still all here.

3. Fixed an exception popup in the last build if you didn't have DLC3 installed, and that was preventing random factions from working. Those now work!

4. Tooltips now work flawlessly again, versus being strange like they have been for the last half month or so in the beta branches.

5. Some more metal and energy consumption fixes, this time provided by NR SirLimbo.

6. Mod updates by SirLimbo, and also cml added support for random factions to his mod.

7. Plus just more random exception fixes relating to recent changes on the beta branch.

More to come soon.
Enjoy!

New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Finalizing_Multiplayer#3.501_Shot_Compression_And_Bugsmashing

This one has a major new feature in it that NR SirLimbo has been wanting to put in for a while, and he was waiting for the next big beta period (that's now!) to do it. It's called "shot compression," and it's basically like stacking for shots. In a lot of respects, it lets stacks of ships with multi-shot abilities work a lot more like they do when they are not stacked, replacing a number of more ad-hoc types of approximation that I had put in over the years instead. I like this solution a lot, but SirLimbo notes that it definitely does need more testing by folks.

This build also adds the major feature of RANDOM FACTIONS to the base game! That was a cool feature that Badger cooked up, and it was going to be in DLC3 for a while, but instead it's free to everybody. We'll properly announce that as a marquee new feature when we come out of the beta branch, but for now folks willing to deal with this beta period can go nuts. :)

In other news, since the release of that last build there were certainly a number of bugs that folks have reported, and some of those are fixed while others are still a work in progress. It's coming fairly quickly so far, knock on wood, and hopefully a release tomorrow will affect the last really large things.

1. Fixed a whole mess of exceptions and errors that could happen, many of which predated the beta period, at least for multiplayer.

2. The ability to use HDR displays apparently was causing certain displays to be very dark. At least I hope that's what it was. There's no good reason for this game to use HDR displays, to be honest, so I just turned that back off.

3. Fixed some super longstanding Astro Train bugs, so now they work properly.

4. Fixed some even MORE longstanding bugs relating to energy and metal displays per planet, and things like that. There were a number of them that were showing correctly in one spot (and calculating correctly for the actual bonuses), but then showing incorrectly on a variety of screens. That's all consolidated now and shows correctly everywhere now.

5. Notifications at the top of the screen don't flicker anymore (that was a regression in the last version).

6. Galaxy map icons now react visibly to being hover-over, like icons in the planet view do. This makes things feel so much more responsive! Also, the underlays behind planets react like their planet itself, which is also really helpful when you're using the search tool in particular.

Major bugs still known:

- Hovering over units and planets on the galaxy map DOES always highlight them (so the hovering is working perfectly), but the actual tooltip does NOT always show up. There are some other places in which the tooltip also does not always show up correctly.

- Double-clicking and a few other mouse items are acting a bit funky. I need to read those reports in more detail.

- Going into the lobby the first time is still mis-centered.

- Some various other exceptions that folks have run into and reported.

I'm hoping to have those things wrapped up tomorrow, and then we'll see what new things folks run into as it gets more and more stable here. It is annoying to have a bunch of code regressions, but that's part of the territory when making such large changes. These should hopefully pass quickly, and in general things just feel so much more smooth!

More to come soon.
Enjoy!

New build! Wow it's been a while, so this is huge. https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Finalizing_Multiplayer#Beta_3.500_Data_Integrity_And_Game_Tech_Upgrades

This one is on the beta branch! In Steam, you will need to select current_beta to see it. On GOG Galaxy, you'll need to select Beta. In the game you should then see 3.500 as the version.

On Steam, there is a most_recent_stable_beta if you have problems with this one and need to fall back to 3.313 as the previous beta.

So what's going on with this release? Well... a lot!

1. We've upgraded the version of the unity engine that we're using by a lot of versions, and so now we have native M1/Silicon support for macs, as well as better support for OSX and Linux in general. Also also, it's probable that the bug with Radeon cards on OSX in Metal is fixed.

2. I made a ton of improvements visually and performance-wise to the main menu yet again, so that runs better than ever even on very low-end machines.

3. There have been a number of UI performance improvements in general. Visually nothing is different much.

4. Random bugfixes, but really only a handful of them in the main.

5. A HUGE architecture rework when it comes to how data is loaded and pooled. It turns out that we were having a ton of memory leaking out in various ways, and I've now pretty much entirely put a stop to that. Thanks to Daniexpert for bringing this to my attention. This particular thing is so overwhelmingly large in how much of the game that it touches that there may be some lingering bugs that are unknown, and there are a handful of fairly minor known issues listed in the release notes, too.

6. There are now anti-memory-leak tools for modders and faction developers to be able to monitor their own stuff, too. So far just by watching at the OS level, it doesn't look like much is leaking there at the moment, if anything, but it's nice to have.

7. The memory leak work, which was extensive, also doubles as a helper for multiplayer client integrity checking. I haven't gotten into that yet, but it's going to be very useful for getting the last of the MP oddities out of the way.

Known issues? Sure:
- Centering is off when going into the lobby usually the first time.
- Notifications at the top of the screen flicker at the moment.
- Mods: Chrysalis Devourer and Kaizer's Marauders are probably re-broken despite SirLimbo just fixing them a bit ago.
- Mods: The Reprocessors mod is likely broken until it gets a code update.
- All other other mods should be working fine from what we can tell.

- Unknown factor: not sure if we are clearing playeraccounts the proper amount, in multiplayer in particular. Will need testing by me.
- Unknown factor: who knows what else is wrong. This has been a tectonic shift for the game. But those are the known issues, at least.
- Unknown factor: It is probably going to be important to check that things like the Zenith Miner Mining, and any other units with particle effects (Zenith Miner Probe, etc) all are properly working and not getting stale, too.
- Unknown factor: Same deal with some of the special effects, like lightning blasts and such. Those haven't been tested yet, and are at a minor risk of having the same problem, although the code review looks good so far.

This has been an absolute slog and a ton of work, but I'm really pleased with how much more responsive the game is, and all the new power and capabilities. This is one of those items that wasn't on my radar at all, but I'm glad I was able to put in the time and get it improved. Now let's just have fingers crossed that we don't run into too many regression bugs over the next days and weeks.

More to come soon.
Enjoy!

New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Finalizing_Multiplayer#Beta_3.313_Input.2C_Selection.2C_And_Flagships

This one is on the beta branch! In Steam, you will need to select current_beta to see it. On GOG Galaxy, you'll need to select Beta. In the game you should then see 3.313 as the version.

For now, we're going to leave 3.309 as the main non-beta version for everyone. These new builds are killer, and bring a lot to the table, but are buggy in the short term because I had to change so much, and I can't remotely find every edge case when making such large changes.

This one changes the input system around a lot in a low level way, so it should feel a lot better.

This one also makes HUGE changes where you can suddenly select anything and everything -- enemy units, neutral things, etc. You can pause neutral units before you would even be capturing them. It also hides cloaked enemy units even from your sidebar.

Stationary flagship mode is a really useful (but harder to get used to from the start) mode, and it has a "punch through" key of Z that lets you issue orders to a flagship in that mode. Now you can hold Z to give ignored-by-the-flagship orders to fleets NOT in stationary flagship mode. So you can use it either way, which is handy.

A laundry list of bugfixes in here, although there are still some issues with engineers that I'm aware of, and drones don't build, and a few other things. It should be plenty playable in the main, but there's some stuff that will need attention for sure.

More to come soon, as this shakes out and we find all the bugs and grind those into paste.
Enjoy!

New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Finalizing_Multiplayer#3.312_Hotfix

This one is just a hotfix for a boneheaded compile chain error that slipped in at the last moment before I did the release last night. Sorry about that! This also has a few other random fixes and improvements in there from Badger and Zweihand, since they were already ready to go when I made the hotfix.

More to come soon!