AI War 2 News

New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Finalizing_Multiplayer#3.311_Engineer_Multitasking

(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 continues the improvements from the beta build I put out yesterday, which is rewriting a huge amount of how engineers make their decisions and how they go about their work in general. For one thing, did you know that engineers can do a bunch of things at once? Specifically, they can repair something, build something, and boost a factory all at the same time if they are in range of them all. This is not new, but it only ever drew one assistance line.

Now you can properly see all that sort of thing, and the lines themselves are more attractive and informative about the state of metal flows going to each thing. There are also slightly different line colors and styles for things like assisting construction of a structure versus boosting a factory versus doing a repair (before these were all identical).

The line visuals are more efficient on the GPU/CPU AND prettier now in general, which also includes tractor beams and a few other unrelated lasers and such.

Also, in terms of multiplayer, or assisting NPC factions, the math is finally settling down into something that is very close to correct. There's more things that I need to fix up with this, but it's demonstrably better than two releases ago, so I'm taking this back out of beta. Tomorrow I hope to finalize all the rest of this, but it will partly depend on feedback and what folks notice that might still be a bit off.

More to come soon.
Enjoy!

New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Finalizing_Multiplayer#Beta_3.310_Engineering_Intelligence_Injection

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 3.310 as the version.

If you have a chance, please do try this new beta version, and pay careful attention to your economy and your engineers and repair, etc. There are still some known issues with engineers (getting indecisive at times, choosing not-the-optimal-order-I-say-in-the-release-notes to do things in), but I think that they're still actually more functional than the prior version. And I'm not aware of any other bugs right now that are new.

However, as with any version that changes so many things (this serious changed a LOT, and I still have more to do next build to get those last known things fixed), there is the chance for something to be dramatically wrong with it. Hence a beta that is possibly just going to last a day or so. If your economy is correct and not getting eaten by things improperly, then I'll be happy; that's honestly my main worry, because I changed so much there.

So what's up with this build in general?

1. Network privacy settings if you play by IP and are streaming and want to hide that from your screen.

2. Fix a bug that was causing slowdown by spamming the error log in the prior build.

3. Completely re-code most of the engineering logic, and a lot of how assistance from engineers is applied to things they are building or boosting, etc.
- Previously in MP, the person receiving help from your engineer paid for it instead of you. Some help you were! ;) Now you pay for it properly, as expected.
- Way more options on being able to help out allies in MP and even SP.
- Ability to boost factories in general in MP, or build things for allies.
- Fix to engineers running off to strange corners of the gravity well (and possibly same fix for melee units).
- New injection of intelligence in engineer priorities for what to build first, etc. (This doesn't work fully yet, but all the other new features do.)
- Engineers no longer move in small jumps to get to their target. They go there much more quickly and smoothly.

4. Bit of data savings, and several minor performance improvements.

5. Fix to the bug from the last few months where a lot of ship-to-ship lines were not drawn, AND a fix to them sometimes hanging around TOO long.

Feedback is really welcome, and I hope to get the rest of the remaining issues with these tomorrow, along with some other bugs and improvements. If you're curious how some of these longstanding engineers could last so long... well, check out my last playthrough, where I show myself playing the first two hours (gametime) of the game. Notice my use of engineers? Essentially, whatever was auto-created I let happen, and I ignored them beyond that. It's part of my general playstyle that I rarely have the extra metal to spare, and I play on accelerated time, so engineers just put me in the Drain economy state more often than not. It's a very strange thing not to play with engineers much, but I don't, and so I was completely blind to how prevalent this stuff was. Sorry about that!

More to come soon.
Enjoy!

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!