AI War 2 News

New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Finalizing_Multiplayer#2.805_Relentless_On_Several_Levels

This fixes an absolute metric ton of multiplayer bugs. It also makes the "relentless" AI waves way smarter, and able to pursue more complicated and unexpected objectives.

This version also introduces per-difficulty variants of the AI Overlord (the final boss), so that the challenge is appropriate at each level. We had based it around difficulty 8 during the paradigm shift, and donblas was quick to let us know how much of a difficulty spike that created at the end of a difficulty 6 game. The overlord should now be nicely tuned for each difficulty level, with 9 and 10 being even harder than before. Speaking of difficulty 10, there are two different versions that you can run into; the x-4000 and the PFFN. They are definitely terminators in relentless pursuit of your tasty home station.

A lot of other bugfixes and balance tweaks in this one, and still working on DLC2 art as well. One key balance change is to make the dyson sphere substantially LESS relentless in turning its neighborhood into a parking lots for its giant (now unopposed) armada. They were a wee bit overtuned.

Enjoy!

New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Finalizing_Multiplayer#2.803_Multiplayer_Option_Overload

Second one in a day usually isn't a good sign, but this isn't too awful. There are a few minor bugfixes and lore tweaks that just happened to be ready, but the main reason for this release is to give you a truly absurd number of Steam networking options. We are having trouble getting any one method to reliably work for everyone. Some methods are better than others, but they don't all work for everyone. And some work better or worse depending on what part of the world you live in.

So we have options, at least temporarily, that look like this:



Hopefully over time we get to pare that back down, with a small number of options that work for everyone.

Enjoy!

New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Finalizing_Multiplayer#2.802_Multiplayer_Steams_Onward

We briefly had a v2.801, but had to revert that because it had a couple of critical bugs. The changes from that have been included in this new build, which runs great.

Overall this is just a laundry list of bugfixes and tweaks that people reported, but most of them are centered around multiplayer -- specifically on Steam.

Our dalliance with the Steam P2P networking framework is likely coming to an end, because that was incredibly unreliable and a lot of people actually had commented that other games had problems with it, too. That leaves us with Steam Sockets, which is Valve's newer networking model, but it doesn't support multi-channel data, which causes a lot of slowdown for this specific game.

Thankfully, Steam Sockets does support multiple ports, so I've adapted it to use four ports as if they were four channels, and the performance is through the roof from that. Additionally, we now support using Steam Sockets either in a relayed fashion (goes through Valve's network, which they say is faster than the general Internet backbone, but varies a lot based on where you and your friends actually live), or via a direct fashion (just connects you and friends directly, even across a LAN if need be). The direct fashion is WAY faster in my experience, but it's slightly more of a pain to set up (host tells others their IP).

Badger also slew his own dragon, which was a way for the AI threat against the dyson sphere to turn against you unexpectedly. It was actually a general memory leak that has been around since October 2019, as well, so this was really a great one to find and fix. Not sure how much this may have been negatively impacting performance in some games.

The load game menu also now performs better when you have a really huge number of savegames or campaigns. Previously it had an annoying delay when first opening.

Enjoy!

New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Finalizing_Multiplayer#2.801_Initial_Hotfixes

This one is just a couple of hotfixes, which probably are not actually that urgent but I wanted to err on the side of caution. There was one bug that could impact players upgrading from certain much-older versions of the game, and there was a super rare bug that could corrupt the occasional savegame (autosave was almost always going to rescue that situtation, but I'd still rather not rely on that).

Beyond that, this also potentially improves the ability of Steam P2P networking to connect, and it also adds the ability to use Steam P2P without allowing relay through Valve's servers. The fact that LitnetLib has been outperforming Steam's networking so much so far has been really disconcerting and quite annoying.

In our Steam Sockets implementation, I don't yet have a way to avoid the relay servers, but I think I have a method that will work both for that as well as allowing for multi-channel (read: faster) communications even when relay servers are in use. I'll have to experiment with those options a bit more, but hopefully we wind up with a minimum of choices (because choices can be overwhelming) while still providing reliable and simple network options for everyone.

More to come soon, though my focus is mainly going to be split between art and the multiplayer stuff for a bit.

Enjoy!