AI War 2 News

New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Finalizing_Multiplayer#2.806_Correctness_By_Attrition

The title of this one is a bit amusing, because again this refers to two different thing. On the one hand, attrition effects are now more correct in the game when they are interacting with stacks of smaller units, doing commensurate larger damage to them. On the other hand, network results are getting more correct, gradually, as I wear down the bloody errors in a lengthy process of attrition.

Speaking of multiplayer, this build is kind of a big deal for it, because I finally found and fixed a number of rather core issues that were cascading into other areas of the game. The number one thing that I fixed was that sometimes there were "ghost" units that the client thought were still alive, but the host knew was dead. These were sometimes missing the sync process, and persisting on the client indefinitely -- potentially for hours. This was causing a lot of wrong behavior and constant sim divergence and fixing, as you might imagine, for the ships that were reacting to the ghosts.

Similarly, the client could have a wrong idea of which AI subfaction owned certain units, and so the local simulation would give the wrong AI decision-making a go, causing a constant pop over and pop back. Most "rubber band" issues were something like that, where the client and host just couldn't figure each other out.

Lastly, for certain kinds of data sync, I had a sudden idea and put in some extra (configurable) delays into the existing time slicing that these have. With the default settings, this is a network traffic reduction of over 75% (actually closer to 84%, but hey it will vary by machine). The really critical stuff syncs as fast as ever, and so it's very likely that you'd never notice a difference other than things being snappier.

This is quite exciting. Enjoy!

New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Finalizing_Multiplayer#2.805_Relentless_On_Several_Levels

This fixes an absolute metric ton of multiplayer bugs. It also makes the "relentless" AI waves way smarter, and able to pursue more complicated and unexpected objectives.

This version also introduces per-difficulty variants of the AI Overlord (the final boss), so that the challenge is appropriate at each level. We had based it around difficulty 8 during the paradigm shift, and donblas was quick to let us know how much of a difficulty spike that created at the end of a difficulty 6 game. The overlord should now be nicely tuned for each difficulty level, with 9 and 10 being even harder than before. Speaking of difficulty 10, there are two different versions that you can run into; the x-4000 and the PFFN. They are definitely terminators in relentless pursuit of your tasty home station.

A lot of other bugfixes and balance tweaks in this one, and still working on DLC2 art as well. One key balance change is to make the dyson sphere substantially LESS relentless in turning its neighborhood into a parking lots for its giant (now unopposed) armada. They were a wee bit overtuned.

Enjoy!

New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Finalizing_Multiplayer#2.803_Multiplayer_Option_Overload

Second one in a day usually isn't a good sign, but this isn't too awful. There are a few minor bugfixes and lore tweaks that just happened to be ready, but the main reason for this release is to give you a truly absurd number of Steam networking options. We are having trouble getting any one method to reliably work for everyone. Some methods are better than others, but they don't all work for everyone. And some work better or worse depending on what part of the world you live in.

So we have options, at least temporarily, that look like this:



Hopefully over time we get to pare that back down, with a small number of options that work for everyone.

Enjoy!

New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Finalizing_Multiplayer#2.802_Multiplayer_Steams_Onward

We briefly had a v2.801, but had to revert that because it had a couple of critical bugs. The changes from that have been included in this new build, which runs great.

Overall this is just a laundry list of bugfixes and tweaks that people reported, but most of them are centered around multiplayer -- specifically on Steam.

Our dalliance with the Steam P2P networking framework is likely coming to an end, because that was incredibly unreliable and a lot of people actually had commented that other games had problems with it, too. That leaves us with Steam Sockets, which is Valve's newer networking model, but it doesn't support multi-channel data, which causes a lot of slowdown for this specific game.

Thankfully, Steam Sockets does support multiple ports, so I've adapted it to use four ports as if they were four channels, and the performance is through the roof from that. Additionally, we now support using Steam Sockets either in a relayed fashion (goes through Valve's network, which they say is faster than the general Internet backbone, but varies a lot based on where you and your friends actually live), or via a direct fashion (just connects you and friends directly, even across a LAN if need be). The direct fashion is WAY faster in my experience, but it's slightly more of a pain to set up (host tells others their IP).

Badger also slew his own dragon, which was a way for the AI threat against the dyson sphere to turn against you unexpectedly. It was actually a general memory leak that has been around since October 2019, as well, so this was really a great one to find and fix. Not sure how much this may have been negatively impacting performance in some games.

The load game menu also now performs better when you have a really huge number of savegames or campaigns. Previously it had an annoying delay when first opening.

Enjoy!