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AI War 2 News

5.503 Multiplayer Bug Smiting

New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Post_Completion#5.503_Multiplayer_Bug_Smiting

This one fixes the most notorious of the multiplayer bugs that players have been facing -- big thanks to Badger for rooting out several that I just could not see, and had looked right past before. Wormhole changes were completely not working when sent to clients unless you disconnected and reconnected, due to a really subtle bug that I'd been unable to find for months. Badger found and nailed it. Then there was also a bug with occasional corruption of data with any faction that used fireteams, which was also incredibly subtle in its expression. Badger found and fixed that, too, along with the hacks getting out of sync on the client.

Previously, when the fireteams sync got messed up, it was pretty much just completely scrambled on the client from then on until disconnect and reconnect, so a number of other bugs should be gone now thanks to that one fix. In a similar vein, the bug with units being in random wrong spots on the client, but only sometimes, is hopefully now fixed -- that one is very hard to test in such a way that we can be sure it is gone, but fingers crossed. The fix for that was another subtle one, but seems logical that it would resolve it.

There are also new MP sync options. There's a button in the debug menu under the escape menu that you can press to force an immediate sync to all of the clients, from the host or clients, so that if things don't look right on the clients, they will be straightened out right away versus anyone needing to disconnect and reconnect. Secondarily, there's a new setting (under Networking) called "Host Only: Force Sync Interval". On this interval (in minutes), the game will automatically sync all data to clients. So if you set this value to 20, every 20 minutes the game will resync to clients.

What about beyond multiplayer? Well, CRCGamer has made a number of balance improvements to DLC units, and also to his More System Defenders mod. Badger has also made some balance improvements to his Dyson Sidekick.

Classic Fusion by Puffin and a variety of mods by Dismiss have also gotten a variety of updates, but those haven't had their notes updated in the wiki; that's up the the mod authors themselves, and I think they may have some notes inside the mods themselves. It looks like there's a whole new mod from Dismiss as well, which is exciting!

More to come soon.
Enjoy!

5.502 No More Overlord Doubling

A variety of bugfixes and balance tweaks in this one, along with updates to Outguard Party, Classic Fusion, and other mods: https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Post_Completion#5.502_No_More_Overlord_Doubling

One of the larger bugs this one fixes is "wow two AI Overlord Phase 2s appeared instead of one." That was a bug that was introduced over a really long period of time, in a really indirect fashion; it seems to have actually become extant in early July, but the groundwork to make it work was laid much longer ago. The most interesting question on that one is "why wasn't this extant prior to July?" which, even with code history, is actually hard to answer in this case.

More to come soon.
Enjoy!

5.501 Fixes

New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Post_Completion#5.501_Fixes

This one is smaller, mainly some fixes. Some of those for mods, some for the main game. More fixes and similar are coming; it's been a really busy period, and those of us internally have been spread unusually thin.

More to come soon.
Enjoy!

5.500 Classic Fusion, And A Megaton Otherwise

New build, and it's truly a whopper: https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Post_Completion#5.500_Classic_Fusion.2C_And_A_Megaton_Otherwise

The first thing of note is that Puffin's massive total conversion "Classic Fusion" mod is now released in this build. This has been a two-year project for him, and it essentially hybridizes the first and second AI War games, using the engine of the second game but mostly ship stats and designs and such from the first game. This is a very exciting thing, because Puffin and I wound up having some disagreements on just where to be similar to the first game versus where to be divergent, and I'm really glad to see his version of that vision now as something that others can also enjoy. Hopefully it brings a lot of fans of the first game joy!

But wait! I said there was a megaton otherwise. By that I mean this is absolutely a packed build, partly because it's about 3 weeks of work; I was traveling out of the country to visit family, and folks were busy while I was away and couldn't push builds.

Badger has also added a new mod, this one the Dyson Sidekick. "This is a new player-controllable faction. Play as a coalition of Zenith, Neinzul, Templar and Spire trying to build a Dyson Sphere, while fighting the AI and the Reapers, the forces of an evil Necromancer."

Good grief! That's quite cool, and also huge!

And another big mod: The Reclaimers by Dismiss are a human faction dedicated to human recovery and advancement in the galaxy, though not through direct combat.

And SirLimbo has re-released his AMU mod: "Right now AMU is only at about 20% of the code it had before, but a lot of AMU has been integrated into the main game, so the actual progress is probably between 30-40%."

Outguard Party by Dismiss has been updated to v3! DpsHud by Dismiss has been updated to v2!

Tom Prince fixed a ton more bugs, and made a number of more things run more smoothly. CRCGamer has been working on balance like a madman. These are each really long sets of release notes all on their own, and exciting even for folks who aren't interested in all these new mods and such.

More to come soon.
Enjoy!

5.018 Easier Reconnection

New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Post_Completion#5.018_Easier_Reconnection

Quick heads up: this is the last one for maybe half a month, probably, because I'm going to be traveling. Normal updates will resume in early July.

This build includes a number of tweaks and fixes from the usual suspects, including Tom Prince, CRCGamer, and SirLimbo. Lots of good refinement in here, including some balance fixes to unexpected cheese sources. There was a very unusual way of farming metal that folks discovered just recently, which is kind of cool to have pop up after 6 years of development, really.

In multiplayer, when clients disconnect, they can now reconnect much more smoothly without the host having to disconnect and rehost first. In my experience it worked if you just tried it twice anyway, but that was not apparent to everyone, and probably not universal anyway.

I also fixed some issues with improper long range thread planning happening after you reloaded the xml for the game by switching out mods or dlcs that are enabled (without restarting the game). This prevents a number of "thread stalled" issues, which so far as I can tell were all related to this one use case.

More to come in early July.
Enjoy!