AI War 2 News

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!

New hotfix build: https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Finalizing_Multiplayer#3.303_Tutorial_Hotfix

This one fixes tutorials to not murder you either instantly (AIs on your starting planet) or if you take too long (waves for some reason).

This also adds back in the recently-removed-by-alterations version X map (as the default for X), but with fixes for the planet counts being offset too high. And of course the options to keep the more recent X style.

More to come soon.
Enjoy!

New build, mostly a hotfix: https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Finalizing_Multiplayer#3.302_Clarified_Invincibility

(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 fixes several bugs, and adds a few quality of life improvements. One of those is to really clearly tell you when you're trying to attack something that is not allowed. Oftentimes there's a unit that is invincible until you kill some other units first, or until it moves out of some location, or for another 30 seconds, or whatever. And having your ships just fail to attack it was bewildering. Now it really clears that up.

This also includes wider windows for things like C-clicking, so that you don't get accidental wrapping of things that shouldn't. This also let us spread back out the columns properly for ship tooltips, so those don't wind up with armor and mass on top of one another ever, etc.

Various windows now let you hit Esc to close them that previously (by oversight) did not. The tips windows show with much nicer and more informative headers.

That on-launch popup from the prior version of the game (which was harmless but annoying) is gone.

The AMU mod has more updates.

More to come soon.
Enjoy!

New build, with fixes to multiplayer as well as distributed economy mode: https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Finalizing_Multiplayer#3.301_I_Always_Wanted_To_Be_A_Ghostbuster...

(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.)

I spent at least three separate Halloweens as a Ghostbuster. One as an adult. As a kid in elementary school, I thought that sounded like just the best job. Now insert that clip of Frodo saying "but my own adventure turned out very different."

Mostly I laugh. This time, the problem with multiplayer was (at root) an endlessly-growing list of ships worried that they MIGHT be ghosts, and the client asking the host about that constantly and the host giving increasingly lengthy answers that slowed everything down.

It actually was more complicated than that, as these things always are, but "ghost suspects" were not properly having their "yes you were a ghost and died" or "no you're alive, what are you on about?" status updated in the central "ghost suspect" roll call. So the roll call just kept growing, infinitely, until the game couldn't take it anymore and your sim speed tanked to unplayable levels.

Now they do all this stuff properly, so far as I can tell, but this is hot off the presses so it needs more testing. What I can say is that multiplayer suddenly was by far the smoothest I've seen it as a client in quite a long time after these changes, and the numbers of ghost suspects and such all seem reasonable now, so fingers crossed.

It's possible that non-ghosts will start exploding on the client again because of this, because I put that sort of time-based code back in, but in reality I think that is just fixing particularly persistent ghosts. Knock on wood.

Distributed econ now gets science and hacking points properly, too, thanks to SirLimbo.

More to come soon.
Enjoy!