AI War 2 News

New beta build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Multiplayer_Alpha_And_Beta#Beta_2.770_Multiplayer_Metal

You need to use the current_beta branch on Steam or GOG to play this one. If you have trouble with it, there is a most_recent_stable_beta, now, too.

This one has a ton of bugfixes to multiplayer, and also a huge number of fixes to Metal on OSX, and Vulkan for Linux. I haven't tested the latter lately, but it should be doing much better (though there's always OpenGL). On OSX, Metal is vastly more performant when it comes to how textures are used in RAM and consequently VRAM, so getting that in tip-top shape was a priority.

I also managed to shave off another 600 MB of RAM usage in general between the base game ships and the DLC1 ships and a few last bits of the main game body. This makes the game load faster, and also will make a lot of scenes higher-performance if you have a GPU with low amounts of VRAM in particular. This also makes more room for the influx of new content in DLC2, but not at the sake of quality; things are just more optimized now.

But wait! So much more! Marauders got a ton of buffs and tweaks from CRCGamer. Lots of corvettes got balance refinements from him also. Coilbeams should no longer deal 100x too much damage to secondary targets thanks to ArnaudB. Forcefields have gotten a bit of a nerf at baseline, but actually get more powerful at very high levels so that they are still useful when the Fallen Spire and similar are around. Command Station balance and energy usage has been tuned quite a bit as well, with these changes to cmd and ffs being an ArnaudB project aimed to making more viable playstyles with them.

Badger fixed the bug with multi-AI games having too few Praetorian Guards (that an oops by me), and ships with ff harmonics can now use wormholes under ffs. Oh, and there was a memory leak in shots that SirLimbo found, and I got that fixed up today. It was a major performance drain.

More soon!

New beta build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Multiplayer_Alpha_And_Beta#Beta_2.768_RAM_Reduction

You need to use the current_beta branch on Steam or GOG to play this one. If you have trouble with it, there is a most_recent_stable_beta, now, too.

This one has even more buffs to frigates, and it also makes the vanilla Marauders quite a bit more buff. Thanks to CRCGamer for orchestrating both of those.

This build also sees the removal of Fleet Capacity Extenders, as they have been super overpowered in the beta. This also removes High Capacity Transports, but replaces those with a very intriguing new High Energy Transport. The new transport option provides the first major new way to get energy in quite a while, and in this case it's a ton of energy in exchange for a decent pile of hacking points (60). Please see the release notes for detailed rationale on both, but this in general should make the game substantially more balanced (players have been enjoying some very OP combinations for a bit now).

This version is also retiring support for OpenGL on OSX: nobody needs it, and it turns out that it actually does run much worse. Metal is now the sole graphics framework that we provide for OSX, which basically what Apple prefers anyhow. On my old 2011 macbook that is FAR below minimum specs for running the game, the changes in this build take me from "so laggy I can barely move the mouse properly" to "smooth as butter with models off" again.

Another big win on the technical front? Without reducing visual quality in a way that would be visible, we've massively optimized our RAM usage. The total savings are around 700MB of RAM usage removed now, which also makes the game load that much faster, too. If you have been watching our youtube channel or the watch_chris_art discord channel, then you also saw I painted the first DLC2 unit today. It's a relatively small Zenith unit, called the Hersir (pictured below). My new art pipeline is ready!

New beta build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Multiplayer_Alpha_And_Beta#Beta_2.766_Huge_Multiplayer_Speed_Boost

You need to use the current_beta branch on Steam or GOG to play this one. If you have trouble with it, there is a most_recent_stable_beta, now, too.

This one introduces a new mod that lets you basically just have nothing but frigates, and it includes some more buffs to frigates in general.

After that, there's a really huge speed boost to multiplayer networking, most notably if you are on Steam (but also present on GOG and elsewhere). The Steam networking was actually the most used, but also the most laggy, so now it has caught up to the others and they have all leapt forward.

The short explanation is that there are many ways to interact with Steam's networking (four main ones), and the primary one that I chose turned out to be suboptimal for our particular use case. One of the nice things about running a beta. I switched from their "connection oriented" multiplayer model to their entirely-separate peer-to-peer model, and the results are staggeringly better. I am temporarily leaving the connection oriented steam multiplayer in as an option, but I'll probably comment out its xml entry if everyone is having good success on P2P.

The second part of the explanation is that -- partly now due to this shift -- we are able to run with multiple parallel data channels, rather than having a single lane for all data. If you imagine this like a highway, this shifts from being two lanes to being eight lanes -- with literal fast lanes that are all that is needed to keep the game moving. The slower traffic can take its time and it doesn't hurt anything.

If this solves the bulk of the lag that people are seeing -- and it should -- then this may mean that multiplayer is very very close to being full production ready. I'll wait until May to call that final, and fix bugs that pop up in the meantime. But it's feeling SO smooth. Enjoy!

New beta build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Multiplayer_Alpha_And_Beta#Beta_2.765_The_Hunt_For_Frigates_And_Civilians

You need to use the current_beta branch on Steam or GOG to play this one. If you have trouble with it, there is a most_recent_stable_beta, now, too.

This one is huge! It starts off the frigate buffs that everyone has been feeling we need, although more is coming. This also sees the return of the Civilian Industries mod to functional status. StarKelp, the mod author, is stepping away for a time, and I'm taking responsibility for keeping it running as our API grows, but not for any extensions. This is one of our most popular mods, and one of the few defensive allies that is just kind of a gentle presence versus a Big Brother who changes the dynamic entirely, so this makes a lot of sense to me.

Multiplayer also got a metric ton of bugfixes in this build, and should run better than ever. You can search by sidebar short name on the galaxy map filter, too. More System Defenders mod has seen a bunch of frigate buffs. AMU mod has a bunch of extensions and bugfixes, as well as some new features to collaborate with other mods.

I am also working on the art for DLC2 at the moment, which includes a LOT of figuring out pipeline details for the Zenith in particular. I want them to look amazing, so I'm making sure to take the proper time. You can watch the process unfold in screenshots and text here: https://discordapp.com/channels/240637654717300736/825178033500848149/826211731737935912 If you're curious about how a lot of things work behind the scenes with 3D art in a realtime environment in general, I am basically showing the process from initial sculpt to final shader work and LODs. Currently with this process I'm to the point of trying to choose how I prefer to paint the sculpts. More on that tomorrow, likely; feel free to follow along at any time, or ask questions.

More to come soon, including MP performance work.

New beta build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Multiplayer_Alpha_And_Beta#Beta_2.764_Command_Station_Hotfix

You need to use the current_beta branch on Steam or GOG to play this one. If you have trouble with it, there is a most_recent_stable_beta, now, too.

This one is a pretty key hotfix, since the last build wound up being unplayable thanks to you not being able to build command stations. Sorry about that!

This also reimagines the X map to be way more interesting, courtesy of Badger, and it prevents it from being a crazy unbalanced and unfun map compared to all the other varieties.

There's also a buff to the number of forcefields that economic and military command stations get. Thanks to ArnaudB for getting that sorted, and more is coming later.

Additionally, there was a pretty funky bug that was either extremely old or relatively new, and which caused issues based on you being able to accidentally give clicks to do... various things, to be honest... through the left-hand sidebar. These clicks were potentially the longstanding reason why occasionally some folks would see their ships "randomly" go to the upper left of the gravity well, seemingly of their own accord -- it was probably actually a player click on the GUI getting translated to that in a funky way. Anyhow, I haven't heard much about that issue in a lot of months, but there was a new rash of the same sort of problem when placing command stations, so hopefully this just fixes all of what we were seeing.

Knock on wood, this should now be nice and stable for the weekend.

Enjoy!