AI War 2 News

New beta build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Finalizing_Multiplayer#Beta_3.601_Tuning_Before_A_Respite

The last one for a few days. I'm going to be out of the office for some family functions until Monday the 23rd, after which I'll be back to working on things.

This version has a lot of really notable polish and quality of life improvements, as well as some notable fixes to recent bugs. Hopefully the single player experience is going to be really solid and playable with this build, but more testing will be needed to be sure.

Multiplayer is I'm sure all kinds of busted right now, but that's something I'm going to finish tackling after I am back in the office. Essentially, there are still some more bits that I need to split up so that they work properly on the host and the client with the client having less data being sent to it now. There are also a variety of things likely going wrong on the client at the moment (inactive thread warnings that are harmless, etc) that would make the current beta really not suitable for playing multiplayer at all.

The work of this week has made a rock-solid MP experience, which also uses less bandwidth, a lot closer to reality. I am maybe a week or two out, knock on wood, from reaching that. The downside is that in the meantime the beta branch doesn't really have playable multiplayer at all. The stable branch does. Please excuse our construction debris!

As far as single player goes, the number of serious bugs SEEMS to be falling to an all new low since the major 3.500 update and all the pooling that came with that, but I also think that people have been testing a bit less in the last week, so it may just be fewer reports. At any rate, my hope is to have another stable branch release of the game in general within a few weeks, but it just depends on what testing is like.

I am not feeling great about how things are progressing on my part of the schedule for DLC3, but everyone else's work seems to be on time, so that's good at least. I'm not sure how I'm going to really handle this predicament, but it will become more clear as I get through with the pooling-related bugbears, and get MP potentially out of beta for the first time in this game's life. It will work out either way, but I'm hoping for something that doesn't involve insane overtime on my part or a delay in the DLC3 release date.

This new build really feels a ton better with some of the QoL improvements, by the way. Holy cow does it make the at-planet window better (thanks Asteroid for the suggestion!), and the planet highlighting when hovering over notifications on the top bar working well again is really a relief (because I find I can't tell what is going on without that).

More to come next week.
Enjoy!

New beta build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Finalizing_Multiplayer#Beta_3.600_Multiplayer_Sprint

There's a saying about going through cycles of bugging and debugging, when it comes to code. The last few weeks have been debugging. Today and for a few days is mostly going to be bugging.

The multiplayer code simply doesn't need to be doing as much as it has been trying to, and so there's a bit of a shift in the design so that several new categories of data are host-directed and the clients thus do less as well as seeing exactly what the host sees. This will be a bandwidth-reducer as well as lowering the surface area for multiplayer-related bugs. There are a few benefits to general efficiency when it comes to single-player, too.

In the very short term, the beta branch of multiplayer is no longer feature-complete, as the client is now temporarily blind to a few things (notifications, intel tab) and may have some extra errors that happen when hovering over certain units. Among the other bugs already reported. My goal is to sprint through all of these things in the next few weeks, although from Thursday through Monday I'll be traveling, so there will be a brief hiatus.

This particular build also includes some excellent new fixes and tweaks for single-player, with the map darkening and focusing now working a lot better (it had been a regression sometime recently). The notifications temporarily do not function when it comes to the map darkening and highlighting, but that's part of the general rework of those that I'm doing for multiplayer purposes and now also this purpose.

Lots of mods got updates to function with the latest code, and all of them should now be functional again. And a couple of other random bugfixes.

More to come soon.
Enjoy!

New beta build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Finalizing_Multiplayer#Beta_3.510_Threads_And_Science

This one hits a number of bugfixes, and some quality of life improvements as well:

1. Double-clicking to center on a selected fleet should now work as you would expect it to, rather than being overly aggressive as it always has been before.

2. The "are you sure?" from the tech tab, including hotkeys and settings to bypass it, now also applies to the hacking tab. This is actually a pretty big deal, since hacking points are your most finite resource and you don't want to accidentally spend them when you think you might be opening a submenu.

3. The ships that benefit from a tech upgrade or downgrade, or a fleet upgrade, have been a thorn in our side for quite some time. Either not showing counts correctly, or not showing all the items being counted, etc. The presentation on all this has jumped up a substantial amount, and it now shows accurate mark levels, differentiation between mobile ships and defenses, and other things of that nature. This was quite a lot.

4. There were a number of random-seeming threading bugs that were popping up still in the last version. Those should be all fixed now, with some new strategies for tying threads together and monitoring and managing them. I wasn't directly seeing what many others were (go figure), so I can't verify that it's definitely all fixed, but fingers crossed it should be.

5. Fixed several longstanding minor bugs and ui annoyances that predate the beta, just as a palate cleanser of sorts between some of these other large items.

More to come soon.
Enjoy!

New beta build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Finalizing_Multiplayer#Beta_3.509_De-Apocalypsing_The_Code

This one is HUGE in terms of how many bugs it smashes. The recent version 3.500 added pooling to a lot of new parts of the game, and prevented a giant memory leak, but it also introduced a fairly apocalyptic number of bugs. I've been super stressed about it, honestly, wondering if that would smash my whole schedule and last for months, or what.

Well, today I wound up being able to duplicate and smash two really major bugs that were systematically destroying the game if you played for a long while in one game, or as soon as you loaded up a savegame or starting a new game after quitting to the main menu from playing previously.

Some of these are a bit amusing. The details are all on the chris-talks-code-gameplay, in really great detail as I explored through these things today. But the short version is:

1. Since 3.5, if you started a new game fresh, it wouldn't save what mods and dlc you had enabled in the save. This was troublesome, but not a world-ender.

2. After pooling kicks in (aka, after loading a save or starting a campaign after exiting to the main menu, or after playing long enough), the systems on new ships would be kind of randomly scrambled around. So... the cloaking device on ship A is now a random weapon from ship B, which has a weapon from ship C, etc. As you can imagine, this made for all sorts of truly insane bugs.

3. A whole bunch of pooled external objects were being incorrectly re-added to the pool and then redistributed, which meant that multiple things were sharing the same data storage. It's like if 400 people try to share one footlocker. Uh... yeah, it gets confused fast.

4. Pools of external objects were busted in general after the first load, and would just keep giving out the same initial object over and over again. The footlocker problem all over again, just a different location and even more severe.

Some other smaller bugs were also fixed, and many bits of preventative code were added.

This stuff will help with the stability of multiplayer (since single player and multiplayer have a huge amount of their code in common), but multiplayer on the beta branch is still not ready for playing. I have some more breaking in that area to do before I get to fixing, but the result should be really worth it. Lower bandwidth requirements, more accuracy, fewer desyncs that require repair. I'm hoping to get the main game, AND multiplayer, out of beta really soon.

I won't be around much tomorrow, as it's my daughter's birthday. Not sure how much this weekend, either. Maybe in bits and pieces. But definitely back to normal schedule on Monday.

More to come soon.
Enjoy!

New beta build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Finalizing_Multiplayer#Beta_3.508_Hotkey_Heaven

This one finishes fixing up the orbital stuff for DLC3, which you can see some videos of on discord if you're interested (the chris-talks-gameplay-code section).

More relevant for everyone, the various hotkeys (like V for pursuit mode) now work as toggles properly, versus you having to hit V for on, and Ctrl+V for off. This was really buggy prior to last October, hence the switch to this awful system, but now it works great because I took a bit of a different premise.

A number of balance shifts have been made, most notably a global speed cap on player units to keep them from being multiplicatively speed-boosted to insanely overpowered degrees.

The tooltips have seen a number of updates for added correctness and informativeness, and there's a slew of random bugfixes.

More to come soon.
Enjoy!