AI War 2 News

New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:The_Great_Refactor#Beta_3.795_Deduplicating

This one hopefully is going to fix a LOT of the strangeness that we've been seeing. Essentially, this was a confluence of a couple of bugs that combined in some nasty ways, but generally speaking did so only a few times an hour per machine. The frequency has gone up a lot more recently because of how much more multithreaded the game is than before, but the root bug goes back to November 17th.

At the moment, we shouldn't see any more units switching sides, or any of the other random background thread exceptions that were suddenly extra-prevalent in the last week. So for now I'm going to close all those tickets, and if we see new things, then we'll address those fresh.

A whole lot of the codebase has also been further improved when it comes to the threading model, and so the error count really should be a lot lower coming up. Fingers crossed, but testing on my own machine so far is good.

Dire CPAs continue to get refinement from Badger, and the necromancer got a LOT of improvements, in particular in balance and in clarity and ease of use.

More to come soon.
Enjoy!

New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:The_Great_Refactor#Beta_3.794_Synchronicity

This one has some (hopefully) major improvements to some of the odd threading issues we've been seeing on the beta branch. The release notes have the details, but essentially I had switched a couple of our pools that are used in a cross-thread fashion to use the (relatively) new Concurrent collections from Microsoft, and near as I can tell those have some accuracy issues. I've switched back to traditional locks, and the performance is still great, and hopefully things will be back to the former level of accuracy.

The whole turncoat unit issue is a deeper rabbit hole than before, so I've increased the debug output details for those, but it's possible that my pool thread lock changes will already resolve it. We'll see.

This build has a few other bugfixes, although there's still more I need to get to on mantis.

Also included in this version are some more Expert Mode improvements from Badger, and some DLC3 improvements from him as well.

And lastly, I've added proper official art for two of the largest DLC2 Dark Zenith units. More to come on that front, and for DLC3 and some base game revisions, too.

Enjoy!

New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:The_Great_Refactor#Beta_3.793_The_Turncoat_Question

There was limited time today, but this one includes the new Dire CPAs feature thanks to Badger for DLC3 testers to experiment with (it will be public to everyone on the beta branch soon).

This one also includes more instrumentation to try to figure out why ships are switching sides, since they are still doing that sometimes. I'll be very curious to hear what the reason is when someone runs into it again in the new version. Thankfully, a number of other bugs were able to actually be fixed, versus just better-instrumented.

More to come soon.
Enjoy!

New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:The_Great_Refactor#Beta_3.792_Thread_And_Entity_Sanity

Wow, I keep thinking that we're getting close to being out of beta, and then more strange stuff pops up. Thank you so much to everyone testing on the beta branch, because this really helps us to make sure things are as clean as possible when we come back off this branch.

To that end, there are two major fixes in this build that should solve a lot of issues.

First of all, the way that entities (ships, etc) are centrally tracked has been reworked a fair bit. This should prevent some of the truly bizarre issues we were seeing lately such as your units suddenly belonging to the AI, or vice-versa. Worst case, it will actually give an error message and let us know what's up, rather than just silently robbing you or gifting you.

Secondly, there's a lot more thread protection in there to prevent threads from overrunning themselves. I suspect that this was the root cause of a ton of issues here. Badger had figured out a way to prevent that, and applied that to some of the short-term planning threads with success, and so now this is applied everywhere throughout the game. Knock on wood, that should solve crashes and a whole bunch of other random stuff that was fairly recent in appearance.

In multiplayer, the pings now have a notification, which is a pretty major quality of life improvement. There are some other improvements to how flagships show up if they have both a control group number and an overlay (previously it just showed the overlay). ARSes also give variable numbers of units (depending on the ARS), which is quite fun and interesting.

The Lost Humans mod continues to gain more updates from StarKelp, and includes some things like a Scourge Lab that can appear, Construction Convoys, and its own galaxy map filter.

Behind the scenes, I've been working on artwork for DLC3, the latent DLC2 art, and the new DLC1 art (for new features coming to DLC1), as well as some replacement art for the base game in places where I feel like the art just needs some improvement. All in all, I have... 325 unique pieces of art to do for that, turns out. So... yeah. That's going to be a few months, since I'm going to be needing to also work on actual bugs and features and so on. It took me a day and a half just to get the list and the prep work done. DLC3 is slated for late April at this point, largely because of this big list of things.

That said, as has been happening, there will be plenty of ongoing updates, including art drops and code and balance and so on. So there will be plenty happening between now and DLC3 releasing.

More to come soon.
Enjoy!

New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:The_Great_Refactor#Beta_3.791_Network_Defragmentation

There are a few new expert mode additions in here, making that even more difficult and interesting -- thanks to Badger for adding those! Also some nice DLC3 improvements.

On the networking front, I've made a number of improvements that should yield a better experience, lower bandwidth usage, reduced errors in some spots, and no more "traveling back in time" for some units under heavy load/fragmentation conditions.

Beyond that, a metric ton of bugfixes are in this build, some related to MP, others related to the game as a whole.

More to come soon.
Enjoy!