AI War 2
Beta 3.797 Eldritch Art
This one is a bit different! It has a pretty huge amount of new art for the game, including some revisions to things in the base game and DLC1, and new art for DLC2 and 3. The release notes have videos of a couple of particularly cool items. There's more to come on this front, but it's not going to mean a full halt to work on code or anything like that.
Speaking of code, there's a number of new goodies in this version! Your ships no longer target hostile units you are in the process of hacking (like ion cannons), which is pretty slick -- thanks to Badger for that.
Additionally, a lot of updates have happened for the Necromancer and the Elderlings in DLC3.
More to come soon, including more bugfixes.
Enjoy!
Beta 3.796 Greatly Thinning The Turncoats
This one still has an occasional turncoat unit (grrr), but they are REALLY hard for us to hit, now. Versus after yesterday's build, threads were no longer insane, but turncoats were still frustratingly frequent. There was also a performance regression in the build of yesterday or the day before, and that's fixed now. Occasional turncoat aside, this is running really well right now! Pretty much all of the other recent bugs of notable severity have also been fixed.
If you get an exception in this build, please do give us your log, as it has some direct info and then some info following the exception. A screenshot of the exception doesn't show the whole story.
Necromancer also continues to evolve thanks to Zeus and Badger, and there are now tips of the day and regular tips about the "wait for stragglers" mode.
More to come soon.
Enjoy!
Beta 3.795 Deduplicating
This one hopefully is going to fix a LOT of the strangeness that we've been seeing. Essentially, this was a confluence of a couple of bugs that combined in some nasty ways, but generally speaking did so only a few times an hour per machine. The frequency has gone up a lot more recently because of how much more multithreaded the game is than before, but the root bug goes back to November 17th.
At the moment, we shouldn't see any more units switching sides, or any of the other random background thread exceptions that were suddenly extra-prevalent in the last week. So for now I'm going to close all those tickets, and if we see new things, then we'll address those fresh.
A whole lot of the codebase has also been further improved when it comes to the threading model, and so the error count really should be a lot lower coming up. Fingers crossed, but testing on my own machine so far is good.
Dire CPAs continue to get refinement from Badger, and the necromancer got a LOT of improvements, in particular in balance and in clarity and ease of use.
More to come soon.
Enjoy!
Beta 3.794 Synchronicity
This one has some (hopefully) major improvements to some of the odd threading issues we've been seeing on the beta branch. The release notes have the details, but essentially I had switched a couple of our pools that are used in a cross-thread fashion to use the (relatively) new Concurrent collections from Microsoft, and near as I can tell those have some accuracy issues. I've switched back to traditional locks, and the performance is still great, and hopefully things will be back to the former level of accuracy.
The whole turncoat unit issue is a deeper rabbit hole than before, so I've increased the debug output details for those, but it's possible that my pool thread lock changes will already resolve it. We'll see.
This build has a few other bugfixes, although there's still more I need to get to on mantis.
Also included in this version are some more Expert Mode improvements from Badger, and some DLC3 improvements from him as well.
And lastly, I've added proper official art for two of the largest DLC2 Dark Zenith units. More to come on that front, and for DLC3 and some base game revisions, too.
Enjoy!
Beta 3.793 The Turncoat Question
There was limited time today, but this one includes the new Dire CPAs feature thanks to Badger for DLC3 testers to experiment with (it will be public to everyone on the beta branch soon).
This one also includes more instrumentation to try to figure out why ships are switching sides, since they are still doing that sometimes. I'll be very curious to hear what the reason is when someone runs into it again in the new version. Thankfully, a number of other bugs were able to actually be fixed, versus just better-instrumented.
More to come soon.
Enjoy!
Beta 3.792 Thread And Entity Sanity
Wow, I keep thinking that we're getting close to being out of beta, and then more strange stuff pops up. Thank you so much to everyone testing on the beta branch, because this really helps us to make sure things are as clean as possible when we come back off this branch.
To that end, there are two major fixes in this build that should solve a lot of issues.
First of all, the way that entities (ships, etc) are centrally tracked has been reworked a fair bit. This should prevent some of the truly bizarre issues we were seeing lately such as your units suddenly belonging to the AI, or vice-versa. Worst case, it will actually give an error message and let us know what's up, rather than just silently robbing you or gifting you.
Secondly, there's a lot more thread protection in there to prevent threads from overrunning themselves. I suspect that this was the root cause of a ton of issues here. Badger had figured out a way to prevent that, and applied that to some of the short-term planning threads with success, and so now this is applied everywhere throughout the game. Knock on wood, that should solve crashes and a whole bunch of other random stuff that was fairly recent in appearance.
In multiplayer, the pings now have a notification, which is a pretty major quality of life improvement. There are some other improvements to how flagships show up if they have both a control group number and an overlay (previously it just showed the overlay). ARSes also give variable numbers of units (depending on the ARS), which is quite fun and interesting.
The Lost Humans mod continues to gain more updates from StarKelp, and includes some things like a Scourge Lab that can appear, Construction Convoys, and its own galaxy map filter.
Behind the scenes, I've been working on artwork for DLC3, the latent DLC2 art, and the new DLC1 art (for new features coming to DLC1), as well as some replacement art for the base game in places where I feel like the art just needs some improvement. All in all, I have... 325 unique pieces of art to do for that, turns out. So... yeah. That's going to be a few months, since I'm going to be needing to also work on actual bugs and features and so on. It took me a day and a half just to get the list and the prep work done. DLC3 is slated for late April at this point, largely because of this big list of things.
That said, as has been happening, there will be plenty of ongoing updates, including art drops and code and balance and so on. So there will be plenty happening between now and DLC3 releasing.
More to come soon.
Enjoy!
Beta 3.791 Network Defragmentation
There are a few new expert mode additions in here, making that even more difficult and interesting -- thanks to Badger for adding those! Also some nice DLC3 improvements.
On the networking front, I've made a number of improvements that should yield a better experience, lower bandwidth usage, reduced errors in some spots, and no more "traveling back in time" for some units under heavy load/fragmentation conditions.
Beyond that, a metric ton of bugfixes are in this build, some related to MP, others related to the game as a whole.
More to come soon.
Enjoy!
Beta 3.790 Defense Against Rogues
This one has some improvements from Badger to the tech window, and also includes several bugfixes from him (including some cross-threading fixes that are high-priority and were bothering folks over the weekend).
Beyond that, StarKelp has a number of fixes and improvements to his Lost Humans mod, including adding new Rogues for you to meet.
More to come soon.
Enjoy!
Beta 3.789 Network Consolidation
This one has a whole lot of cool new things for the necromancer, if you're a DLC3 tester at the moment.
For everyone, there's a lot of networking improvements in here. Accuracy, speed, and a lower number of options when it comes to steam networking. I also found that the steam networking in particular was causing some hitching and freezing on the client and host, and moved that code onto a background thread where it no longer causes that.
I'm not sure if I got all the canaries or not, but it seems like I got a number of them, anyhow. There are some new tools that allow you to send metadata headers along with the data, and if you run into a canary, then you can go into personal settings, network, and enable that to get a more precise hit as to where the problem is. If you're the client and getting the error (most likely case), then the host actually is the one who has to enable the metadata send, because they're the one generating the data.
Oh yeah! I almost forgot, but there are literally dozens of bugfixes for nullrefs in here. It touches pretty much every faction in the game in at least a couple of places. All that carnage from a couple of builds back with the new rash of nullrefs should be solved now. Also, tachyon beams work again, unlike the last build or two where I had messed those up with a boolean inversion.
More to come soon, but hopefully this does well for folks in multiplayer over the weekend. I still have some known bugs to iron out, but in terms of random performance drops and error popups, fingers crossed those are largely a thing of the past.
Enjoy!
Beta 3.788 Canary Search
This one fixes a bunch of more stuff with multiplayer, and a few single player bugs like tachyon beams not working. This also gives some great new quality of life improvements when dealing with cloaked enemy ships on a planet.
As far as multiplayer goes, I think it's pretty much more solid now than it ever has been before, but there are a couple of places where I know the code is being sent incorrectly (we get "canary warnings" from that). At the moment, I haven't been able to find those yet, so I've put in more canaries, and that should give us proper info on it as people hit the new canaries.
More to come soon.
Enjoy!