AI War 2 News

It's been sixty-six days since the last major release writeup, with THIRTY-FIVE releases in all, and notes starting here and ending here.

We are now in a mix of multiplayer alpha and beta! (Depends on how you play, some methods are feature-complete and others are not.) If you want the full info on multiplayer's current status, the place to look at that is here.
[h3]Badger's Retirement[/h3]

Okay, this would be a really really long digression, but I hope you take a moment to click over and read about the legacy of Badger and Puffin. Both have retired from working on the game fully (although both still hang out and occasionally poke things in), and so I'm now the sole remaining active developer on the game.

With that being said, this is "news" as of a month and a half ago (for Badger -- for Puffin, it was much earlier this year), and we've had 28 releases since Badger retired, so I do okay on my own. This isn't a cause for concern, but rather a moment to take stock of their achievements and celebrate them.

It's also worth noting that Badger is still doing some remaining work here and there on DLC2, and he's already decided to return and is working on content for DLC3.
[h3]New Main Menu[/h3]

You might have noticed the new main menu if you've logged into the game in the last month:



If your computer fans turn on and your FPS is only like 30, please don't freak out. This is actually the (by a really large margin) most intensive scene in the entire game. I get 90fps on it and in the game on my main dev machine, and a measly 30fps on my under-min-sys-requirements mac computer, but it's usable on both. Even my below-specs mac is getting like 60-90 fps in-game with ship models turned off.

The main menu might seem like a strange thing to revise, but it's the first thing that you see when you load up the game. We wanted something that felt more epic and exciting, and that had a darker and more appropriate thematic feel for the game. Personally, I also wanted a view from inside a spaceship looking out, since usually we only ever see spaceships from the outside during actual gameplay.

I also majorly updated the ending scenes (both win and loss), so those are more epic now.
[h3]UI Overhaul, And Usability Galore[/h3]



Okay, so for one thing I did a complete visual overhaul of what buttons look like, and backgrounds on all the UI bits, and things like that. This no longer feels vaguely website-ish. It feels like... well, like a hardcore strategy game with a lot of space themes.

But that's not all we did. There are new functions for doing searches for units or planets by name on the galaxy map. There are a ton of new galaxy map filters that show more information of various sorts. You can easily see where threat is, or the hunter or warden, etc. You can edit planet names, set priorities per planet like the first game (but with more options), add narrative notes to planets, and more.

You can also ping planets or locations on planets, and you can ping with multiple colors to help communicate meaning while you're discussing on voice chat. The notices up at the top of the screen now have backgrounds that indicate their severity/importance, and are automatically sorted by that.

There's also a new fleet status window that Badger added despite being retired (he actually did a ton of QoL stuff in the last month, since he was actually starting to play both on his own as well as with his family and friends and thus noticing more things). The fleet status window is particularly helpful for keeping an eye on what is going on in your empire, or in all the empires of players in multiplayer.

...but it's been 66 days. Come on, we're just getting started.



[h3]AI Improvements[/h3]

• The AI Hunter has gotten more intelligent multiple times over, and fireteams in general have gotten smarter. You have pre-retirement Badger to thank for these.
  
• Deepstriking (the AI Reserves) got a number of AI updates from Badger right before he retired.
  
• The way that AI Sentinels handle their reinforcement budget was completely overhauled by me, making them much more threatening and interesting.
  
• The way that AIs use turrets has also been redone, so that they really don't use remotely so many as before. They really should be putting their resources into things that can strike you offensively, so the planets with a bunch of turrets are now far more rare.
  
• Turrets have actually been rebalanced fairly substantially, largely thanks to post-retirement Puffin, who was still collecting ideas from the community and implementing them along with his own thoughts.
  
• We made a number of changes to how strength values are calculated, to more accurately represent how dangerous ships actually are. This makes it easier for you to make good decisions, but also plays directly into the intelligence of the AI and other NPC factions.
  
• There were a number of cases where the AI Sentinels would hold onto threatfleet ships (which are not very smart) for too long rather than giving them over to the Hunters. We looked at that and I decided to just brute force them into giving their ships to the Hunters if they can't get whatever they think they are doing done in 3 minutes.
  
• Thanks yet again to post-retirement Badger, various factions including the nanocaust and marauders are able to invade your galaxy in a delayed fashion, which is pretty cool. Rather than having them there from moment one, they show up a while into the game.
  

[h3]More Mods![/h3]

• Another new included-by-default mod is now in place: Civilian Industries, by StarKelp. This is turning out to be a really popular mod, which involves a lot of defensive and economic buddies hanging around. Strategic Sage has been doing a video series with the Civilian Industries helping him against the Scourge from DLC1.
  
• NR SirLimbo has been adding a prolific number of mods, as well as several frameworks for modding. His Extended Ship Variants (for the base game and for DLC1) have become really standard fare for a lot of players, and his Kaizer's Marauders are a vastly more complex and dangerous interpretation of the base game Marauders. At the moment he is working on a new and evolutionary style of Devourer, but that is currently still in earlier testing and not yet included for everyone in the main game.
  
• I did an enormous overhaul of our XML Parsing capabilities, upgrading it so that the data is parsed faster, and also more correctly. This fixed up a number of blocking issues that were preventing certain mods from being possible, and consequently we saw a huge uptick in new mods right after that.
  
• Oh man, the mods from NR SirLimbo kept coming! There's a micro mods collection in there now, too. He's been absolutely prolifically busy on several fronts. It's hard to understate just how involved his Kaizer's Marauders are, in particular. And his AMU tool is there to support any modders who want to use it, making it easier to make complex mods like his.
  

[h3]Multiplayer Bits[/h3]

• Multiplayer itself has seen a ton of improvements at a technical level and otherwise, it probably goes without saying. But this has been the major focus of mine during this period, despite the detour into quality of life improvements.
  
• Multiplayer went through a number of changes at a technical level as I experimented with how to get the smoothest experience in terms of sync, while at the same time keeping things moving. The end result was not what I had planned on, but is instead something that relies on data I collected in real world use cases. It works ridiculously well.
  
• The ability to swap ship lines between players was added by NR SirLimbo, which was really kind of him and saved me having to do it. He also made that interface a bit less overwhelming in general even in single player.
  
• I added in the ability to finally share control of a single faction, and that's the mode that is just now going into beta (aka feature-completeness). The multi-faction mode will hopefully join it in beta status in the next week or two at most.
  

[h3]Other Visual And QoL Improvements[/h3]

• I redid all of the visuals for area of effect attacks, most notably tesla attacks. It looks SO much cooler now. The old version was okay, but not nearly as varied. And when I upgraded the lighting pipeline during the runup to DLC1 late last year, the AOE visual effects actually wound up taking a step down in visual quality.
  
• I added a new Stationary Flagship Mode, which I had expected to be popular but actually was almost universally hated. But it is still something that you can enable if it solves a gameplay problem you have. A few people were enjoying it, so that's a win in my book. But it's no longer on by default for everyone.
  
• The way that galaxy map links are drawn has been updated to be a gradient of the two colors of the owners between those planets, which was a cool addition of post-retirement Badger.
  
• For a long while, we've had some trouble with trying to use one button for toggling on or off modes like pursuit and attack move and so on, and so I split those into two functions where you can clearly tell it if you are turning them on or off. This solves a lot of intermittent frustrations people were having.
  
• Post-retirement Badger added a whole host of other quality of life improvements.
  
• Post-retirement Puffin added about thirty-six new space backgrounds of various sorts, for use in-game and on the galaxy maps. These were mostly created using the shader tool I set up a few years ago, but the results are the result of a lot of artistic work and experimentation on his part. They really spruce up the variety in the game, and in particular make the galaxy maps look nicer.
  
• I also spent a goodly while making it so that we are now able to include arbitrary sprites in text. This involved further customizing our version of TextMeshPro, which now has a number of unique features for us. This paired well with our overhaul of the icons for various resources, and in the future we'll do things like embedding ship icons in tooltips.
  
• The visuals for shots themselves are now a lot more appropriately-scaled for various zoom levels, so battles look nicer.
  
• There are also now battle indicators on the galaxy map, making it more obvious where there are fights happening in your territory without it becoming a circus.
  

[h3]What's Else Is New?[/h3]

• Astro Trains got a buff to make them more interesting.
  
• Post-retirement Badger also added a variety of roguelike options for not revealing things about what the galaxy you are entering entails, which is a cool feature.
  
• A bunch of performance improvements in text generation, and UI updates in general, have been made. SirLimbo and I wound up going down a giant rabbit hole on the text generation in particular, but it makes it so that really length text narratives and dynamically-generated lists of ship tooltips no longer suck the performance out of your game.
  
• Error handling is also vastly more robust in the game, and when errors happen you now get much more information about what is happening and especially if there are a bunch of silent errors hammering your log.
  
• Ever thought that "snipers and drones are useless, because they just aggro entire enemy planets and get me killed?" Well, they now have a new aggro invisibility ability, which solves that problem and lets them remain useful without being unfair or annoying.
  
• For our linux players, we've added a variety of tools to get around the unity bug with mousewheel scroll being backwards, so that is one annoyance off the list.
  
• The number of bugfixes and general balance tweaks are too staggering to recount, but it's a lot.
  

More to come soon!



[h3]Multiplayer Schedule?[/h3]

There are two ways of playing: a shared faction, which is now in beta and thus basically complete aside from bugfixing; and multiple faction, which still has some known issues and missing features and thus remains in alpha.

I expect to sort out the remaining known issues, while fielding ongoing bug reports, over the next 1-2 weeks at the most. At that point, multiplayer is effectively finished aside from just giving it time to collect any more bug reports people come up with.

One thing I should point out is that this is an insanely complicated game from a technical standpoint, and so the more testers the better. The game might be working perfectly for most people in most situations, and then you come along with your friends and run into something catastrophic and wonder how anyone could possibly play this.

Send me your bug reports, and I can generally have that stuff knocked out in a couple of days. But without your bug reports, if other people aren't running into it, I'll never know it's there.



[h3]DLC2: Zenith Onslaught[/h3]

Our first non-kickstarter-related expansion comes out in early 2021. Maybe January, or potentially February. You can read all about it, at least in a limited preview format. We've had a number of testers banging on this for months now, and the detailed unit design and art to go with it are the last pieces we'll be putting together.

This expansion represents a large opportunity for us, since it will coincide with the game fully launching its multiplayer mode. A lot of news outlets didn't fully cover the original launch of AI War 2 because we released it in a crowded season and it came out with too little advance notice. So we're trying to turn that around with this expansion and hopefully get some more traction with a wider audience for the base game itself.
[h3]DLC3: The Neinzul Abyss[/h3]

Our second piece of DLC for 2021 will hopefully come out more around the middle of the year, and you can read about that here. It's something that came into existence largely because Badger kept adding too many things to DLC2. DLC2 was either going to be massively expensive, or any other DLC we ever did was going to look paltry and small by comparison.

We made the sensible decision to split these out into two products that we can thus offer at better prices -- and also take extra time to do cool extra things for DLC3. I'm looking forward to getting to fully design my first faction, versus just collaborating on factions with others or doing the art and technical support for them.



[h3]Remaining Kickstarter Stuff?[/h3]

There's a diminishing number of things. I covered a lot of it back in update #65. Interplanetary Weapons are something still coming for free to the base game (they were a stretch goal), and I'll be working on those while I work on DLC3. The backer planet naming will happen around the same time, as well as the ability to send some taunts back from the player at the AI.

We'll probably do another batch of AI taunts as well, and the Cyber Cipher reward for mysterious messages will be something that we tackle during that DLC3 period. Design and Name an AI is something that will be around the same time as the third DLC3, same as the Text-Based or Design-based Mercenary Stuff. There are two lingering art-related backer rewards I still need to follow up on, but then that's it.
[h3]What Happens After That?[/h3]

That really depends.

The release of this game started out going well, and I think that the reviews that folks have been leaving for the game were a big help for folks passing by at the start. 2020 has been a rough year, though, when we really look at the data. The company's income has fallen to less than half of what it was in 2019, and that was already one of our lower years in terms of income.

We do have those two new DLC planned for 2021, along with the giant multiplayer updates and so on that are free, so hopefully that trend will turn around. If you've been playing the game and enjoying it, we'd greatly appreciate it if you'd drop by and leave your own thoughts, too.

If the trend doesn't turn around? I don't know, exactly. The structure of modern online stores may ultimately wind up forcing our hand. I'd probably have to either choose between working on an entirely new project unrelated to AI War 2, or start working on a sequel instead of more expansion. Both prospects have a lot of downsides, but they also have some substantial upsides.

Right now I don't feel super inclined to leave the AI War franchise after all this work and developing this giant engine, so I'm more inclined to stick to something closer to home than try to reinvent the wheel. If you look at the evolution of AI War 2 since launch, the current build you're able to play is already practically AI War 3. It looks better, plays better, has better AI, has more content, and is much more technically advanced.

Right now the frustration is that more or less we're doing most of that work for free (personally I have still lost about $240k in making AI War 2, versus earning any actual money, if you look at my spent money versus earned), and it's hard to get press attention for a "year old game." Since we started this project, more than half a console generation has come and gone, sheesh! I have no shortage of ideas, but I don't want to work for someone else and right now the open market is feeling fairly indifferent.

I have a lot of hope for 2021, though. :)



[h3]Please Do Report Any Issues![/h3]

If you run into any bugs, we'd definitely like to hear about those.

Thank you!
[h3]Problem With The Latest Build?[/h3]

If you right-click the game in Steam and choose properties, then go to the Betas tab of the window that pops up, you'll see a variety of options. You can always choose most_recent_stable from that build to get what is essentially one-build-back. Or two builds back if the last build had a known problem, etc. Essentially it's a way to keep yourself off the very bleeding edge of updates, if you so desire.

[h3]The Usual Reminders[/h3]

Quick reminder of our new Steam Developer Page. If you follow us there, you'll be notified about any game releases we do.

Also: Would you mind leaving a Steam review for some/any of our games? It doesn't have to super detailed, but if you like a game we made and want more people to find it, that's how you make it happen. Reviews make a material difference, and like most indies, we could really use the support.

Enjoy!

Chris

It's been six days since the last major release writeup, with four releases in all, and notes starting here and ending here.

We are in multiplayer alpha! If you want the full info on multiplayer's current status, the place to look at that from now on is here. We've had the first victory over the AI in multiplayer happen, and we're knocking down MP bugs steadily.
[h3]AI Improvements And Additions[/h3]

Okay, this is a really big release, actually. Far more than we had intended to do, but so it goes.

First off, the star of the show is definitely the new "Tsunami CPA" option in the galaxy options screen. You can turn it on for existing savegames or new campaigns, but temporarily it is off by default. It turns Cross Planet Attacks into the sort of... scary tidal wave of doom or glory that the pre-3.0 days of AI War Classic used to enjoy.

We'll always keep the option to have boring-style CPAs in this game, where basically the CPA just releases a bunch of threat that join the Hunter fleet. That's... fine. But as a number of people have noticed, that's a very anticlimatic result after a scary countdown timer.

The hunter is its own thing, and is intelligent and scary in its own way, but it's also cautious and coordinated. That's the very opposite of what a Cross Planet Attack used to represent, 8 years or so ago, in the first AI War. A Cross Planet Attack is meant to be a flood of ships from all over the galaxy, only lightly coordinated at best, that wash up on the shores of your defenses and either dissipate or carry the wreckage inland.

So that's what happens now, if you turn on the Tsunami CPA option. It's basically a thousand screaming idiots running at you from every direction, only sort of avoiding danger. And they go for the throat, too, if they can get past your external defenses. It's thrilling and quite unlike anything the AI War multiverse has seen since maybe 2012. How I've missed this.

However, here's the thing that makes this extra cool and also quite new-feeling: the hunter may be cautious, but it also is quick to capitalize on openings. And it operates alongside the Tsunami CPAs. So while those are washing up on your defenses, and you think you're going to be okay... sometimes the hunter shows up at just the wrong time and tips the balance. It turns out that a meticulous and ruthless planner, given a thousand screaming idiots for cover, is even more effective.

Moving on from the keystone feature:

In a whole bunch of other areas for the AI, there are things that look on the surface like nerfs to the ship budgets for the AI, but actually are not quite what they seem.

The changes are complicated enough that it's really easy to misunderstand the implications of them even if you read really carefully.

But to summarize the most important one, essentially the AI is... less reactive in how it applies its budgets when it feels like its king is under pressure. It now trusts that it has been building a good and solid defense for a long time, and keeps pressing its own attacks on you.

Previously you could run into REALLY protracted final battles with the AI homeworlds, where the AI was being super defensive and making it really hard for you to win... but also really hard for you to lose. Now the AI final fights won't be quite so hard to win... but at the same time there is a dramatically higher chance of you outright losing during them.

Aside from this, there are what amount to some legitimate nerfs to the AI in the warden and praetorian guard sub-factions, if those are at their full cap for whatever reason. Rather than donating excess income to general defenses (which made some AI types turn out to have generalized defenses that were way inflated in an inappropriate way), they just lose that budget. This is more in keeping with the first AI War as well, and should not affect most games. A few specific AI types may wind up needing a buff, but let us know how those feel (Special Forces Master and Praetor, mainly).

Oh, also speaking of the AI's intelligence, the highest-level AIs (difficulty 8 and up) will now underestimate their strength a bit when deciding to engage you. This will make them tend to engage you with overwhelming force more often, again like the first game.

And in general, turrets were being undervalued in terms of strength, which was hurting the decision-making of all factions. So the strength values of those have been tweaked upwards (how the strength is reported, not what the damage of the actual turrets is), and that should lead to all factions making more sensible decisions on heavily turreted player planets.

Oh, and it's harder to bait the hunter into your meat grinders on difficulty 8 and up. You're welcome. ;)
[h3]What's Else Is New?[/h3]

• There's a bunch of new little lore bits that now appear in the game when you are getting started! This includes backstory on the Spire and Zenith if relevant when you find them, and backstory on the AI. Some of these bits of lore are brand new information, and other are things that were easy to miss.
  
• The Civilian Industries mod not only now works again, but also has been getting a number of substantial updates by its author, StarKelp.
  
• Lots and lots of bugfixes.
  
• One bugfix in particular fixes an issue where all of the fireteam-based faction ships were being lobotomized upon loading a savegame since September 3rd. So that made the hunter, the nanocaust, scourge, etc, all really stupid for at least 30 seconds after loading a savegame. That was a one-line typo on my part, but is now fixed.
  
• The Nanocaust has seen a bunch of buffs in general, since they were starting to seem lackluster compared to the newer factions that are more powerful. The devourer golem is coming up soon in terms of getting some new power levels (in its case those will be lobby options instead of a straight buff).
  
• In the arena of multiplayer, we found an interesting bug a while back that was causing any ships in transports to get duplicated endlessly on clients, which led to all manner of bugs and eventually crashes. The bugs we've been fixing since then have not been nearly so serious, and it's really great to see how a variety of people are playing a variety of multiplayer scenarios with success now. There are still plenty of missing MP-specific features and MP-specific bugs, but it's coming a long way fast thanks to testers.
  

More to come soon!

Looking for more information about multiplayer and DLC2? A recent post on September 25th has a lot of details.
[h3]Please Do Report Any Issues![/h3]

If you run into any bugs, we'd definitely like to hear about those.

The release of this game has been going well so far, and I think that the reviews that folks have been leaving for the game have been a big help for anyone passing by who's on the fence. For a good while we were sitting at Overwhelmingly Positive on the Recent Reviews breakdown, but there have been a lot fewer reviews lately and so that has definitely had a material negative effect. Go figure. Having a running selection of recent reviews definitely is helpful, but at least we have a pretty healthy set of long-term reviews. If you've been playing the game and enjoying it, we'd greatly appreciate it if you'd drop by and leave your own thoughts, too.

More to come soon. Enjoy!
[h3]Problem With The Latest Build?[/h3]

If you right-click the game in Steam and choose properties, then go to the Betas tab of the window that pops up, you'll see a variety of options. You can always choose most_recent_stable from that build to get what is essentially one-build-back. Or two builds back if the last build had a known problem, etc. Essentially it's a way to keep yourself off the very bleeding edge of updates, if you so desire.
[h3]The Usual Reminders[/h3]

Quick reminder of our new Steam Developer Page. If you follow us there, you'll be notified about any game releases we do.

Also: Would you mind leaving a Steam review for some/any of our games? It doesn't have to super detailed, but if you like a game we made and want more people to find it, that's how you make it happen. Reviews make a material difference, and like most indies, we could really use the support.

Enjoy!

Chris

Can you hop into multiplayer and play now? Why... yes, you can! There will be bugs, at this point, but we're well into alpha now, and the first waves of testers have helped us fix a lot of things.

Since the last update post fifty-seven days ago (WHOAH), we've had thirty releases, starting with notes here and ending here.

If you want the full info on multiplayer's current status, the place to look at that from now on is here.
[h3]What's New Other Than Multiplayer Stuff?[/h3]

• Heck of a lot of bugfixes and balance tweaks, as you might imagine.
  
• You can have multiple Devourers and Zenith Traders if you like.
  
• The Imperial Spire (in DLC1) has a number of improvements.
  
• Ion Cannons are particularly more effective now.
  
• Melee units now do battle far more effectively, too.
  
• The way the galaxy map is drawn has had a lot of improvements, most notably in the lobby. This feels SO much better in singleplayer and multiplayer.
  
• Some features from the upcoming DLC2 (which is now pushed until January 2021) have been backported to the base game. Notably, you can now hack Dyson Spheres like an ARS.
  
• Dark Spire got a number of improvements, including more interactivity with other factions that hate them.
  
• Hit the R key to reset the camera rotation and orientation, at long last.
  
• Improvements and flavor updates to Human Resistance Fighters.
  
• Lots of changes to AI Eyes to actually make them formidable again.
  
• Lots of improvements to mod compatibility, which broke code-based mods temporarily, but ultimately make them work better in both singleplayer but especially multiplayer.
  
• Scourge (from DLC1) intelligence improvements.
  
• Civilian Industries By StarKelp has been added as our second off-by-default mod that we're distributing for the mod author. It may be broken at the moment because of some of the overhauls relating to multiplayer, but we'll have a working build again as soon as that is ready from the author. It's a very cool mod.
  
• More Starting Options By ArnaudB has been added as our third off-by-default mod. This one adds a lot of new options for starting fleets for you.
  
• There is a new "Find Planet" command (cmd:findp yourtexthere) that lets you find planets by name, which is super useful.
  
• Better Default Screen Resolutions! This has been bugging people for a while. It's now defaulting to your desktop resolution and fullscreen windowed mode when you start the game for the very first time.
  
• More voice lines related to the nanocaust and a few other factions.
  
• The AI difficulty descriptions have been completely rewritten and are way more clear as to what you can expect, without making you feel bad. Huge thanks to Tzarro on this!
  
• "Fireteam dynamic resizing" is a new feature that leads to massive performance gains in very late-game situations with a lot of enemy factions in play. Huge win by Badger.
  

More to come soon! Read on to hear about multiplayer and DLC2.
[h3]What's The State Of Multiplayer?[/h3]

If you want a truly exhaustive writeup about multiplayer, this has everything.

We have now been in multiplayer alpha for sixteen days, in a "soft launch" status. Basically, we only told people who were really paying a lot of attention in the Steam forums or on Discord. We had enough testers out of that smaller group to run into a whole slew of issues, and thanks to them you are now not going to be one of the folks to run into things that are that bad.

At first it was a situation where errors were immediate, and then it was a case of maybe being able to play 20 minutes at a time. As of a day or two ago, Suzera and Ipsum were able to play for about three and a half hours without major errors, until they hit a game-breaking dead-stop issue. However, the host was able to save their game, send it to me, and now on the new version they can keep playing as if nothing had happened; this may well be the first completed "real" multiplayer game of AI War 2 (assuming they win, heh).

At the moment you can definitely still expect some bugs, and things are not quite as smooth (visually) on the clients as we would prefer. But we've made a huge number of strides, and it should be playable from start to finish aside from whatever unknown bugs you run into. There's a list of many of the known issues, but most of them are not that serious at the moment.
[h3]What's The Difference Between Alpha And Beta?[/h3]

Beta means feature-complete. We're not there yet, on multiplayer. Things like sharing a faction between two players doesn't have an interface yet. Spectator mode has only been somewhat tested. Lots more testing is needed in general. Balance needs to be thought about by people who are actually playing it. There are some features like gifting between players that are an obvious need. Etc.

There's a list of questions for multiplayer alpha testers that can have a major material impact on what beta (and later fully released) multiplayer functions will be like, so if you have an opinion, please feel free to let us know!
[h3]What Makes Multiplayer Beta?[/h3]

When we have all of the major features missing from the alpha, then that's a relatively feature-complete multiplayer experience. When sync issues are not routinely a problem, and other bugs are not prevalent, then you can basically have an expectation of a "normal multiplayer experience." Connect, play, disconnect when done.

The purpose of the beta period is to have lots of people attempting that, so that we find the strange edge cases. Or other features that are needed that we are missing. Or balance problems that are specific to having multiple players.

At this point, the schedule is such that we'll be hitting beta status sometime in October. But we're in a more-robust-than-I-expected alpha status at the moment, so there is that.

If you're wondering "when can I play with my friends and actually just have a good time doing it," my hope is that the answer is... maybe now? Depends on your tolerance for bugs.

If you're new to the game, or have a low tolerance for things that break, then my real answer to that question is "it should feel like finished and polished multiplayer in November," based on how things have been going so far.
[h3]What About DLC2?[/h3]

This is something we haven't really been talking about too much, mainly because it seemed in poor taste to be talking about it before multiplayer was ready. At any rate, Badger has really outdone himself on his part of it, and I'm very excited by what is there.

For my part of it, I have yet to even start it, and probably won't be able to until sometime in October at the earliest because of multiplayer work. So the end release for this expansion will probably be in January, which is when we'll likely also call multiplayer "fully gold" in order to maximize the chance of marketing. But realistically, hopefully multiplayer is there for you in every meaningful respect in November.

What can I tell you about this new expansion? Well, it's much larger than the first one. It's also not free to kickstarter backers, as an aside. It's called Zenith Onslaught, and it does live up to its name. I look forward to being able to share more about that with you in the future, but for now I need to keep my eye on the multiplayer ball.
[h3]Please Do Report Any Issues![/h3]

If you run into any bugs, we'd definitely like to hear about those.

The release of this game has been going well so far, and I think that the reviews that folks have been leaving for the game have been a big help for anyone passing by who's on the fence. For a good while we were sitting at Overwhelmingly Positive on the Recent Reviews breakdown, but there have been a lot fewer reviews lately and so that has definitely had a material negative effect. Go figure. Having a running selection of recent reviews definitely is helpful, but at least we have a pretty healthy set of long-term reviews. If you've been playing the game and enjoying it, we'd greatly appreciate it if you'd drop by and leave your own thoughts, too.

More to come soon. Enjoy!
[h3]Problem With The Latest Build?[/h3]

If you right-click the game in Steam and choose properties, then go to the Betas tab of the window that pops up, you'll see a variety of options. You can always choose most_recent_stable from that build to get what is essentially one-build-back. Or two builds back if the last build had a known problem, etc. Essentially it's a way to keep yourself off the very bleeding edge of updates, if you so desire.
[h3]The Usual Reminders[/h3]

Quick reminder of our new Steam Developer Page. If you follow us there, you'll be notified about any game releases we do.

Also: Would you mind leaving a Steam review for some/any of our games? It doesn't have to super detailed, but if you like a game we made and want more people to find it, that's how you make it happen. Reviews make a material difference, and like most indies, we could really use the support.

Enjoy!

Chris

Just an update on how things are progressing: https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Multiplayer_Alpha_And_Beta#Version_2.120_Improved_Lobby_Map_Experience

There's a lot still going on with the lobby that I have to sort out, plus then some immediate sync issues once we get past there. You can see a general list of the things that I'm aware of at the moment here: https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Multiplayer_Alpha_And_Beta#Multiplayer_Remaining_Todo_List

I'm keeping that broadly updated as I discover new things as I test things out. The UI issues for the lobby are dwindling in number, which is good, and all of the initial connection work is done for all platforms, which is also good.



1. Still need to be able to assign players to human factions in a nice fashion. This is a thing that is maybe one more day of work, knock on wood.

2. I think that for the galaxy map display itself, I have a slight bit more work to do on that given recent feedback. Hopefully half a day of work.

3. After starting the game from the lobby, there are some bits like starfield (but not planet) backgrounds that are out of sync, and I'm not sure why. In the lobby the starfield backgrounds are also out of sync. I need to fix that to make sure it's not a wider problem. Hopefully an hour or two of work.

4. Every ship that is created after the initial world setup is immediately desynced at the moment, as in their core IDs are different between the client and the host. Yes, I do plan on having robust desync repair, but goodness we need to also start by having fewer sync issues than THAT in the first place. This is something that I need to investigate what the ideal solution will be, and it's probably the single most complicated thing remaining for multiplayer. This could take weeks, but hopefully I can make it "good enough" in under a week of time and then refine it during the alpha.

5. There's some strange latency on the client end that I need to look into, which is probably some sort of complex timing-based issue with all of the threads. I am hoping that there won't be more than a few days of looking into that required before an alpha.

6. I do need to then actually code in the desync-repair loop, which again is a giant piece of work, but something I plan to handle in stages. My hope is to do a version that is less efficient but only takes me a couple of days to start out with.


At this point we'd have working multiplayer in an alpha state, minus some features and definitely minus some efficiency, but I can work on the features and efficiency during the alpha. Hopefully within a month or so of starting the alpha, things have stabilized out into a beta format where everything is working and we're just catching the odd item here and there.

Some technical things, like adjusting how GameCommands are structured from a code sense, will be absolutely massive and cause a lot of bugs for a little while, and I'm choosing to do those during the alpha rather than before it. My hope is that I can make it minimally invasive, but either way things will get solved faster by having more testers.


I'm going to be mostly unavailable for the next week for some last family stuff prior to my kids starting the new school year, so the earliest versions of the alpha won't be in August, quite. Sorry about that, it's hard to take time off especially when folks are so excited, but I also need to be a dad and husband.

If I had to guess, we'll hopefully have something that people can comfortably play with in the week of September 7th.

THAT said, technically multiplayer alpha is there now, it's just immediately divergent in the reality that you and your friend see. In some ways that is actually quite amusing, although I don't think it would be a fun way to play. For the host, everything is normal, but the client is on an increasingly bad acid trip. ;)

I may shift around the order of operations in how I approach certain pieces of work some, to brute-force solve desyncs, for instance, and then see how bad that makes performance feel. Working backwards in that sort of fashion might let people test sooner than later, but I remain antsy that the experience in that sort of scenario would be un-fun enough to turn away some testers.

Either way, past some certain point there will be a question mark of "when is this officially alpha," since alpha is technically feature incomplete and buggy by nature. Right now I think I draw the line as this being not officially alpha because I don't want feedback from anyone on it, since I know where the core problems are and I need to focus on those before we start looking for further bugs.


Anyhow, it's an exciting time and we're getting closer! I am really pleased and encouraged with how responsive I've been able to make the lobby after focusing down on it, and I think that we'll see the same thing with the rest of the game as I get enough time with the multiplayer components of each bit.

Cheers!
Chris

Multiplayer is not ready yet -- but this is a big milestone on that path. We expect to be into the alpha for multiplayer sometime next week.

Since the last update post sixteen days ago, we've had ten releases, starting with notes here and ending here.

I recently talked a lot about multiplayer and our plans for that in the short and middle term. I think all that is still accurate, but I'm going to talk about things again based on what I now know. Our release notes page also has a section with the current multiplayer todo list for your easy reference.
[h3]What's New Other Than Multiplayer Stuff?[/h3]

• Relating to DLC1, the Scourge have gotten a number of new tweaks and fixes.
  
• Various other UI tweaks and improvements, including a few to the lobby.
  
• A fix to a memory leak and a crash to the desktop that were possible for some people to hit in the last month. Those had to do with some newer ways of loading assets faster that didn't always agree with everyone's computer.
  
• We fixed a handful of cross-threading exceptions that were possible.
  
• The imperial spire now always give you vision properly.
  
• Several ship behavior improvements.
  
• The music selection/change window is now much improved.
  
• The Dyson sphere got a few buffs.
  
• A couple of speed improvements in parts of the codebase, and a couple of serialization fixes.
  
• A fix for the self-building ships owing extra metal above their actual cost.
  
• Several improvements to how stacks of ships behave, balance-wise. This most notably improves Vanguard Hydras.
  
• Campaigns in the load menu are now sorted by how recently something was saved in them, not alphabetically. Oh my goodness this feels so much better.
  
• Some minor nanocaust tweaks, and AI Exogalactic War unit tweaks in general.
  
• Some balance tweaks to the Fallen Spire ships.
  

More to come soon!
[h3]What's The State Of Multiplayer?[/h3]

This is a screen (edited to blur out some names) that makes me very happy:



For multiplayer, the intent is to have three general solutions for HOW data is transmitted across the Internet. Two our of three of those are complete. This doesn't mean that the game is ready to play, though, because WHAT data is transmitted across the Internet (or LAN) matters a whole lot more, and that still has a ways to go. But we'll talk about that in a minute.

First up, how do we connect to players and how does data get between them?

1. LiteNetLib. Originally FORGE Remastered, but that was not performing well in my tests, so I swapped it out. This is fully working. This is what you would use if you want absolutely no central services or servers, or you want to play on a LAN or a VPN with friends. It's extremely fast, and will try to do NAT traversal if you are playing across the Internet, but there's a very high possibility that you would need to use port forwarding with this. I built in a lot of things to make it easy to find your IP addresses with this, and it should support IPv4 or IPv6 with no troubles (though only IPv4 has been tested).
   
2. Steam. This is fully working. Basically, the host opens the lobby in multiplayer mode, or loads a savegame. The client clicks join game and sees a screen like the above with all of their Steam friends. Click connect next to the one who is hosting, and Steam brokers a route through any firewalls you have, sets up a very fast relay through their own servers, and connects you with your friend without ever revealing the IP addresses of either of you. It's not possible that you would have to worry about ports or port forwarding or any of that sort of thing, as it doesn't use any of that in a traditional sense.
   
3. GOG Galaxy. Not yet working. This solution will only work for Windows and OSX right now, and not also Linux like the other two solutions do. This one will work a whole lot like Steam, although with less in the way of relay servers. I'm still working with GOG to figure out a few technical bits at the moment.
   

At this point, this covers HOW data gets around. Other than GOG, which I'm waiting on information for, I'm completely done with this work (any future found bugs aside).

The work of this stuff is:

• Getting you and one or more friends connected.
  
• Then keeping you connected and data moving fast between you.
  
• And finally, making sure you know when someone disconnects.
  

These have no idea what is being said while you are connected, or really any concept of what the game is or what it is doing. Their job is immensely complicated, but it's all about the shipping and transfer of data, and not about what the data is.
[h3]What's The Barrier To Multiplayer Alpha?[/h3]

In order to play multiplayer at all, you first have to get connected and stay connected. That's done. The game also then has to have a system for talking between clients and the host, and keeping everything in sync. Someone clicks a button or gives orders to a unit, and everyone else sees the result. Etc.

A huge amount of that sort of data-sharing is already done:

• The initial sharing of the state of the galaxy, so that everyone is on the same starting point, is done. It nicely pauses things until everyone is caught up, so that if someone is popping in in the middle that's not a problem.
  
• The actual routing of all the GameCommands that the AI and players issue, and the central time clock ticking, and that sort of thing has been done since 2017, and something we've been continually working on keeping up to date. I'm sure there will be bugs, but I can verify that the vast bulk of this is working correctly already.
  
• With the lobby itself, there's a bunch of UI stuff that is particularly complicated, more than the rest of the game in some respects, and that is partially done. Right now there are a number of known bugs in there that I'm sorting through.
  
• We also have to know which players are controlling which factions, or who is choosing to just be a spectator, etc. That's on my list for early next week along with the lobby bugs.
  
• During gameplay, certain things will drift out of sync because of the multithreading that we do, and because of floating point inconsistencies between machines in a few places. We need to have the game roll through and self-analyze itself and fix those sync errors. A lot has been built out here in terms of design, but the basic version needs to be implemented before people can play for too long without sync errors being hilariously in the way.
  

And in terms of a multiplayer alpha, that's kind of all that we have left to do. The main time question mark is just how many bugs I run into. I also do want to convert the GameCommands into a new format that is more efficient, and that will probably introduce even more bugs, but that will ultimately be a speed boost for both single-player and multiplayer games.
[h3]What Will Multiplayer Alpha Be Like?[/h3]

Buggy, probably. And definitely not feature-complete. Hopefully you can play with a friend for at least 20-30 minutes before there are catastrophic pileups of sync errors, and then saving and reconnecting is fast (3-10 seconds, probably). But I would not expect to be able to play an entire game.

I also expect to see some funky things that we did not expect, such as trouble using certain interfaces or issuing certain commands. Those should be pretty quick to fix, on average.

There's also a bunch of features that are multiplayer-specific that will be missing. Want to trade ship lines with a friend? Too bad, at first. Text chat? Sure, that's there already. Science sharing? Yep, already there! Passing some metal over? Nope, not yet.

During the alpha, one of the things that we'll be soliciting feedback on is what features you want. We have a pretty good idea, based on all those years of co-op in AI War Classic, but it's still good to hear what feels lacking here, since there are a lot of concepts and features in this game that did not exist in the first.
[h3]What Makes Multiplayer Beta?[/h3]

When we have all of the major features missing from the alpha, then that's a relatively feature-complete multiplayer experience. When sync issues are not routinely a problem, and other bugs are not prevalent, then you can basically have an expectation of a "normal multiplayer experience." Connect, play, disconnect when done.

The purpose of the beta period is to have lots of people attempting that, so that we find the strange edge cases. Or other features that are needed that we are missing. Or balance problems that are specific to having multiple players.

I'm still hopeful that we'll reach the start of beta during August, and at the moment that seems like a reasonable goal. The one real wildcard remaining is how much of a bear the sync code winds up being, since everything else is either complicated-but-done, or some type of code I have done many times over the last 11 years.

The Steam networking integration, and even to some extent LiteNetLib, were the other two major wildcards, and it's really rewarding to have both of those behind me. I do need some extra assistance from the GOG SDK team in the short-term before I get that platform up and running, but if that isn't ready until sometime in the beta period that wouldn't be the end of the world. I would just prefer it to be done sooner.

We will probably have a multi-month beta period, just to let people have lots of time to run into any particular issues. This will also give me time to then step back and do my work on DLC2, and then we can officially launch both that and the free multiplayer update at the same time. October still seems reasonable for both.

If you're wondering "when can I play with my friends and actually just have a good time doing it," my hope is that the answer is "during beta, later this month." Fingers crossed!
[h3]Please Do Report Any Issues![/h3]

If you run into any bugs, we'd definitely like to hear about those.

The release of this game has been going well so far, and I think that the reviews that folks have been leaving for the game have been a big help for anyone passing by who's on the fence. For a good while we were sitting at Overwhelmingly Positive on the Recent Reviews breakdown, but there have been a lot fewer reviews lately and so that has definitely had a material negative effect. Go figure. Having a running selection of recent reviews definitely is helpful, but at least we have a pretty healthy set of long-term reviews. If you've been playing the game and enjoying it, we'd greatly appreciate it if you'd drop by and leave your own thoughts, too.

More to come soon. Enjoy!
[h3]Problem With The Latest Build?[/h3]

If you right-click the game in Steam and choose properties, then go to the Betas tab of the window that pops up, you'll see a variety of options. You can always choose most_recent_stable from that build to get what is essentially one-build-back. Or two builds back if the last build had a known problem, etc. Essentially it's a way to keep yourself off the very bleeding edge of updates, if you so desire.
[h3]The Usual Reminders[/h3]

Quick reminder of our new Steam Developer Page. If you follow us there, you'll be notified about any game releases we do.

Also: Would you mind leaving a Steam review for some/any of our games? It doesn't have to super detailed, but if you like a game we made and want more people to find it, that's how you make it happen. Reviews make a material difference, and like most indies, we could really use the support.

Enjoy!

Chris