AI War 2 News

New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Finalizing_Multiplayer#3.501_Shot_Compression_And_Bugsmashing

This one has a major new feature in it that NR SirLimbo has been wanting to put in for a while, and he was waiting for the next big beta period (that's now!) to do it. It's called "shot compression," and it's basically like stacking for shots. In a lot of respects, it lets stacks of ships with multi-shot abilities work a lot more like they do when they are not stacked, replacing a number of more ad-hoc types of approximation that I had put in over the years instead. I like this solution a lot, but SirLimbo notes that it definitely does need more testing by folks.

This build also adds the major feature of RANDOM FACTIONS to the base game! That was a cool feature that Badger cooked up, and it was going to be in DLC3 for a while, but instead it's free to everybody. We'll properly announce that as a marquee new feature when we come out of the beta branch, but for now folks willing to deal with this beta period can go nuts. :)

In other news, since the release of that last build there were certainly a number of bugs that folks have reported, and some of those are fixed while others are still a work in progress. It's coming fairly quickly so far, knock on wood, and hopefully a release tomorrow will affect the last really large things.

1. Fixed a whole mess of exceptions and errors that could happen, many of which predated the beta period, at least for multiplayer.

2. The ability to use HDR displays apparently was causing certain displays to be very dark. At least I hope that's what it was. There's no good reason for this game to use HDR displays, to be honest, so I just turned that back off.

3. Fixed some super longstanding Astro Train bugs, so now they work properly.

4. Fixed some even MORE longstanding bugs relating to energy and metal displays per planet, and things like that. There were a number of them that were showing correctly in one spot (and calculating correctly for the actual bonuses), but then showing incorrectly on a variety of screens. That's all consolidated now and shows correctly everywhere now.

5. Notifications at the top of the screen don't flicker anymore (that was a regression in the last version).

6. Galaxy map icons now react visibly to being hover-over, like icons in the planet view do. This makes things feel so much more responsive! Also, the underlays behind planets react like their planet itself, which is also really helpful when you're using the search tool in particular.

Major bugs still known:

- Hovering over units and planets on the galaxy map DOES always highlight them (so the hovering is working perfectly), but the actual tooltip does NOT always show up. There are some other places in which the tooltip also does not always show up correctly.

- Double-clicking and a few other mouse items are acting a bit funky. I need to read those reports in more detail.

- Going into the lobby the first time is still mis-centered.

- Some various other exceptions that folks have run into and reported.

I'm hoping to have those things wrapped up tomorrow, and then we'll see what new things folks run into as it gets more and more stable here. It is annoying to have a bunch of code regressions, but that's part of the territory when making such large changes. These should hopefully pass quickly, and in general things just feel so much more smooth!

More to come soon.
Enjoy!

New build! Wow it's been a while, so this is huge. https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Finalizing_Multiplayer#Beta_3.500_Data_Integrity_And_Game_Tech_Upgrades

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 3.500 as the version.

On Steam, there is a most_recent_stable_beta if you have problems with this one and need to fall back to 3.313 as the previous beta.

So what's going on with this release? Well... a lot!

1. We've upgraded the version of the unity engine that we're using by a lot of versions, and so now we have native M1/Silicon support for macs, as well as better support for OSX and Linux in general. Also also, it's probable that the bug with Radeon cards on OSX in Metal is fixed.

2. I made a ton of improvements visually and performance-wise to the main menu yet again, so that runs better than ever even on very low-end machines.

3. There have been a number of UI performance improvements in general. Visually nothing is different much.

4. Random bugfixes, but really only a handful of them in the main.

5. A HUGE architecture rework when it comes to how data is loaded and pooled. It turns out that we were having a ton of memory leaking out in various ways, and I've now pretty much entirely put a stop to that. Thanks to Daniexpert for bringing this to my attention. This particular thing is so overwhelmingly large in how much of the game that it touches that there may be some lingering bugs that are unknown, and there are a handful of fairly minor known issues listed in the release notes, too.

6. There are now anti-memory-leak tools for modders and faction developers to be able to monitor their own stuff, too. So far just by watching at the OS level, it doesn't look like much is leaking there at the moment, if anything, but it's nice to have.

7. The memory leak work, which was extensive, also doubles as a helper for multiplayer client integrity checking. I haven't gotten into that yet, but it's going to be very useful for getting the last of the MP oddities out of the way.

Known issues? Sure:
- Centering is off when going into the lobby usually the first time.
- Notifications at the top of the screen flicker at the moment.
- Mods: Chrysalis Devourer and Kaizer's Marauders are probably re-broken despite SirLimbo just fixing them a bit ago.
- Mods: The Reprocessors mod is likely broken until it gets a code update.
- All other other mods should be working fine from what we can tell.

- Unknown factor: not sure if we are clearing playeraccounts the proper amount, in multiplayer in particular. Will need testing by me.
- Unknown factor: who knows what else is wrong. This has been a tectonic shift for the game. But those are the known issues, at least.
- Unknown factor: It is probably going to be important to check that things like the Zenith Miner Mining, and any other units with particle effects (Zenith Miner Probe, etc) all are properly working and not getting stale, too.
- Unknown factor: Same deal with some of the special effects, like lightning blasts and such. Those haven't been tested yet, and are at a minor risk of having the same problem, although the code review looks good so far.

This has been an absolute slog and a ton of work, but I'm really pleased with how much more responsive the game is, and all the new power and capabilities. This is one of those items that wasn't on my radar at all, but I'm glad I was able to put in the time and get it improved. Now let's just have fingers crossed that we don't run into too many regression bugs over the next days and weeks.

More to come soon.
Enjoy!

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!