AI War 2 News

New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Finalizing_Multiplayer#Beta_3.313_Input.2C_Selection.2C_And_Flagships

This one is on the beta branch! In Steam, you will need to select current_beta to see it. On GOG Galaxy, you'll need to select Beta. In the game you should then see 3.313 as the version.

For now, we're going to leave 3.309 as the main non-beta version for everyone. These new builds are killer, and bring a lot to the table, but are buggy in the short term because I had to change so much, and I can't remotely find every edge case when making such large changes.

This one changes the input system around a lot in a low level way, so it should feel a lot better.

This one also makes HUGE changes where you can suddenly select anything and everything -- enemy units, neutral things, etc. You can pause neutral units before you would even be capturing them. It also hides cloaked enemy units even from your sidebar.

Stationary flagship mode is a really useful (but harder to get used to from the start) mode, and it has a "punch through" key of Z that lets you issue orders to a flagship in that mode. Now you can hold Z to give ignored-by-the-flagship orders to fleets NOT in stationary flagship mode. So you can use it either way, which is handy.

A laundry list of bugfixes in here, although there are still some issues with engineers that I'm aware of, and drones don't build, and a few other things. It should be plenty playable in the main, but there's some stuff that will need attention for sure.

More to come soon, as this shakes out and we find all the bugs and grind those into paste.
Enjoy!

New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Finalizing_Multiplayer#3.312_Hotfix

This one is just a hotfix for a boneheaded compile chain error that slipped in at the last moment before I did the release last night. Sorry about that! This also has a few other random fixes and improvements in there from Badger and Zweihand, since they were already ready to go when I made the hotfix.

More to come soon!

New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Finalizing_Multiplayer#3.311_Engineer_Multitasking

(Reminder that if you have trouble with the build, you can always go into betas and choose most_recent_stable to go one build back. This is how I sleep at night after making some major changes.)

This one continues the improvements from the beta build I put out yesterday, which is rewriting a huge amount of how engineers make their decisions and how they go about their work in general. For one thing, did you know that engineers can do a bunch of things at once? Specifically, they can repair something, build something, and boost a factory all at the same time if they are in range of them all. This is not new, but it only ever drew one assistance line.

Now you can properly see all that sort of thing, and the lines themselves are more attractive and informative about the state of metal flows going to each thing. There are also slightly different line colors and styles for things like assisting construction of a structure versus boosting a factory versus doing a repair (before these were all identical).

The line visuals are more efficient on the GPU/CPU AND prettier now in general, which also includes tractor beams and a few other unrelated lasers and such.

Also, in terms of multiplayer, or assisting NPC factions, the math is finally settling down into something that is very close to correct. There's more things that I need to fix up with this, but it's demonstrably better than two releases ago, so I'm taking this back out of beta. Tomorrow I hope to finalize all the rest of this, but it will partly depend on feedback and what folks notice that might still be a bit off.

More to come soon.
Enjoy!

New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Finalizing_Multiplayer#Beta_3.310_Engineering_Intelligence_Injection

This one is on the beta branch! In Steam, you will need to select current_beta to see it. On GOG Galaxy, you'll need to select Beta. In the game you should then see 3.310 as the version.

If you have a chance, please do try this new beta version, and pay careful attention to your economy and your engineers and repair, etc. There are still some known issues with engineers (getting indecisive at times, choosing not-the-optimal-order-I-say-in-the-release-notes to do things in), but I think that they're still actually more functional than the prior version. And I'm not aware of any other bugs right now that are new.

However, as with any version that changes so many things (this serious changed a LOT, and I still have more to do next build to get those last known things fixed), there is the chance for something to be dramatically wrong with it. Hence a beta that is possibly just going to last a day or so. If your economy is correct and not getting eaten by things improperly, then I'll be happy; that's honestly my main worry, because I changed so much there.

So what's up with this build in general?

1. Network privacy settings if you play by IP and are streaming and want to hide that from your screen.

2. Fix a bug that was causing slowdown by spamming the error log in the prior build.

3. Completely re-code most of the engineering logic, and a lot of how assistance from engineers is applied to things they are building or boosting, etc.
- Previously in MP, the person receiving help from your engineer paid for it instead of you. Some help you were! ;) Now you pay for it properly, as expected.
- Way more options on being able to help out allies in MP and even SP.
- Ability to boost factories in general in MP, or build things for allies.
- Fix to engineers running off to strange corners of the gravity well (and possibly same fix for melee units).
- New injection of intelligence in engineer priorities for what to build first, etc. (This doesn't work fully yet, but all the other new features do.)
- Engineers no longer move in small jumps to get to their target. They go there much more quickly and smoothly.

4. Bit of data savings, and several minor performance improvements.

5. Fix to the bug from the last few months where a lot of ship-to-ship lines were not drawn, AND a fix to them sometimes hanging around TOO long.

Feedback is really welcome, and I hope to get the rest of the remaining issues with these tomorrow, along with some other bugs and improvements. If you're curious how some of these longstanding engineers could last so long... well, check out my last playthrough, where I show myself playing the first two hours (gametime) of the game. Notice my use of engineers? Essentially, whatever was auto-created I let happen, and I ignored them beyond that. It's part of my general playstyle that I rarely have the extra metal to spare, and I play on accelerated time, so engineers just put me in the Drain economy state more often than not. It's a very strange thing not to play with engineers much, but I don't, and so I was completely blind to how prevalent this stuff was. Sorry about that!

More to come soon.
Enjoy!

New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Finalizing_Multiplayer#3.309_Hangar_Staff

(Reminder that if you have trouble with the build, you can always go into betas and choose most_recent_stable to go one build back. This is how I sleep at night after making some major changes.)

Wow, it's been over a week since the last release! I've really been pretty absorbed with some of the art updates, including all of the wormholes, and the title menu for the game (as shown below). I'm really pleased with how much more detailed it turned out, AND how much more efficient. The overall visual quality of the hangar scene in the main menu is much much higher, but it also probably runs much faster on every spectrum of machine.

We also finally have some human characters hanging around in the dock -- having a chat, waiting impatiently for doors that never open, and taking a break by themselves, respectively. This helps give a sense of what the scale of the doors and ships and objects are. And, per discussions on discord and unlike the Death Star, we did build in a safety railing.

Meanwhile, Badger made some notable improvements to hacking estimates. A lot of hacks didn't really give an indication of the strength of the response you are likely to see, but now do. He also improved the battle notification trigger code, making it easier to notice where battles that actually require your attention are located.

A couple of minor tweaks and fixes, and lots of updates to many mods by several authors.

More to come soon.
Enjoy!