AI War 2 News

New beta build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Multiplayer_Alpha_And_Beta#Beta_2.775_Prepare_For_Beta_Exit

You need to use the current_beta branch on Steam or GOG to play this one. If you have trouble with it, there is a most_recent_stable_beta, now, too.

This is just some polish and balance tweaks, focused on trying not to rock the boat while cleaning up last things before we exit beta. We've been on a beta branch for almost three months now, which is an INSANELY long period of time, but a lot of great things happened during it, and it's time for this to head back to stable soon. Unless something dire happens, that will happen on Wednesday the 14th.

Most of my personal time right now is going into work on art for DLC2, which you can watch and comment on the process of here: https://discordapp.com/channels/240637654717300736/825178033500848149/831306561489993791 Rather than doing a stream (which I did last week, and will do again at some point), I've been focusing on just writing up what I'm doing and posting frequent images in progress. Makes it easy to give feedback, and gives you just the bullet points of the process.

Things are looking pretty smooth right now, so fingers crossed. This does NOT mean multiplayer will be out of beta -- that needs another month or so in the cooker, but please do test in the meantime. All in all, I'm quite pleased with how things are coming along, and really excited for folks who have been on the stable branch to see the many gargantuan new beta updates.

Enjoy!

New beta build with a hotfix is out: https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Multiplayer_Alpha_And_Beta#Beta_2.773_Civvies_Hotfix

This one makes Civilian Industries (mod) work again.

New beta build with hotfix is out: https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Multiplayer_Alpha_And_Beta#Beta_2.772_Wormhole_Hotfix

You can now use wormholes again!

New beta build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Multiplayer_Alpha_And_Beta#Beta_2.771_Critical_Performance_Mass

You need to use the current_beta branch on Steam or GOG to play this one. If you have trouble with it, there is a most_recent_stable_beta, now, too.

Ugh, that last version had all sorts of performance problems and was quite a hash. It turns out that most of it was relating to the ConcurrentPool<> that I added, and remarked at the time might be problematic. It turns out it was... VERY problematic. A lot more problems than I was originally attributing to it were actually just related to that (such as having 70,000 stale shots in one person's save).

In the process of investigating a couple of huge saves that were running slowly, I wound up actually making some more performance improvements above baseline that we had had, and some saves that were only running at 80% speed because of some useless background chatter now run at full speed.

This version also includes a couple more multiplayer fixes, including (hopefully) getting LiteNetLib to work again, and also preventing some MP client errors from several mod factions.

Hopefully this is nice and stable so I can focus on art tomorrow.

Enjoy!

New beta build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Multiplayer_Alpha_And_Beta#Beta_2.770_Multiplayer_Metal

You need to use the current_beta branch on Steam or GOG to play this one. If you have trouble with it, there is a most_recent_stable_beta, now, too.

This one has a ton of bugfixes to multiplayer, and also a huge number of fixes to Metal on OSX, and Vulkan for Linux. I haven't tested the latter lately, but it should be doing much better (though there's always OpenGL). On OSX, Metal is vastly more performant when it comes to how textures are used in RAM and consequently VRAM, so getting that in tip-top shape was a priority.

I also managed to shave off another 600 MB of RAM usage in general between the base game ships and the DLC1 ships and a few last bits of the main game body. This makes the game load faster, and also will make a lot of scenes higher-performance if you have a GPU with low amounts of VRAM in particular. This also makes more room for the influx of new content in DLC2, but not at the sake of quality; things are just more optimized now.

But wait! So much more! Marauders got a ton of buffs and tweaks from CRCGamer. Lots of corvettes got balance refinements from him also. Coilbeams should no longer deal 100x too much damage to secondary targets thanks to ArnaudB. Forcefields have gotten a bit of a nerf at baseline, but actually get more powerful at very high levels so that they are still useful when the Fallen Spire and similar are around. Command Station balance and energy usage has been tuned quite a bit as well, with these changes to cmd and ffs being an ArnaudB project aimed to making more viable playstyles with them.

Badger fixed the bug with multi-AI games having too few Praetorian Guards (that an oops by me), and ships with ff harmonics can now use wormholes under ffs. Oh, and there was a memory leak in shots that SirLimbo found, and I got that fixed up today. It was a major performance drain.

More soon!