AI War 2
Beta 3.787 Yet More Performance
I had hoped to be out of beta a week or so ago, but we're not quite there yet. On the plus side, we're continuing to make some astronomical strides in general stability, performance, and so forth. This applies to singleplayer and multiplayer. We have a couple of dramatically-overpopulated huge savegames that would have ground to a halt in the past, and they now actually run at about half sim speed and 30fps; by simply adjusting the game speed up to 2x, you can run those in realtime, in other words.
I prefer that the game run at 60+ fps, of course, and at full sim speed; but in this particular situation, we're talking about 9.5 hours into a game with 13 intensity-10 factions, 3 difficulty 9 AIs, and three other factions in addition. In total, under the hood, 49 factions in place, and about 550k ships in 40k groups. That is... really really extreme, and the fact that it's quite playable now is something I'm really pleased by. Even better, the game now uses far more of your processor cores as of this version for these extreme sort of scenarios. It won't use excessive CPU in a normal situation, but it does scale up as-need, even on 16+ cores.
There are some safety mechanisms in here that are new for various NPC factions, which allow them to force stacking when they start getting too many units spawned. This is useful even for modders, so that if they wind up with runaway unit counts on high intensities of their factions, they can have the game automatically adapt and get better performance out of it. In the event that the automated logic doesn't get the job done, it now shows what is going over budget in a warning fashion, which should encourage people to submit savegame bug reports where more direct tuning can be done by the faction author. Overall I like giving people the tools to succeed and not shoot themselves in the foot, so this is a big step forward in that regard. These mechanisms only apply to NPC factions, not to player ones, incidentally.
Lots of bugfixes in this build, many of which are related to the recent "don't reference a wrong unit" code that was put in. But also, this fixes a couple of notable multiplayer bugs, and so hopefully the multiplayer experience is smoother than ever, as well. I still expect some remaining small issues for a bit, but so far I'm really heartened by just how well it's running on my test setup.
Civilian industries got some updates as well, and runs again (it was busted at the last moment in the prior build).
More to come soon.
Enjoy!
Beta 3.786 A Very Intense Patch
Whew, this one is absolutely giant. It's mainly focused on polish and bugfixes, but it has a number of DLC3 features in there as well. I was hoping to get out of beta last week, but there were too many things that have needed attention. I'm happy with the progress that is happening now, though.
This new build includes some performance improvements for extreme faction situations, which allows factions to detect poor performance and then throttle themselves. We had a save with a ton of intensity 10 factions in it that were getting over a million units in the game, and the performance was really suffering. Now it scales up way less rapidly in there, and the performance is much better. If we are alerted to other poor-performing faction saves, we now have tools where we can fix those up when the saves are provided. This is also something that modders can make use of.
DLC3 changes abound, such as the Elderlings having some new hacks you can do against them, and lots of Wild Hives updates, and Necromancer updates... the list is long.
Bugfixes are really voluminous here in general, too. A lot of multiplayer fixes are included, but there are also many single-player ones. There were also some really nasty bugs relating to pooling of units in really high-load games, and those are now fixed. A couple of these things were pretty giant amounts of code surgery, and some of those will give a few errors in the short term rather than silently doing something wrong. As we find those, we'll fix them and then they also won't have errors. At the moment we've fixed a few hundred cases of those, but there are likely more lurking (none have shown up in testing at the moment, but that's not an ironclad thing by any stretch).
A lot of this had to do with making things more resilient when the game is under extreme load. Making it work more correctly in those cases, as well as making it not run as slowly in those cases.
Mod-wise, Civilian Industries has seen a bunch of updates from StarKelp, and they now perform a lot better and send less data in multiplayer, too. Existing civilian industries games are broken, but all other saves are fine.
StarKelp also added a new Lost Humans mod, which is a cool new thing that allows for Travelers and Lost Colonies to spawn out in the world. This is a unique mod in that it uses a non-faction-based mechanism to have these work, which is a first among mods. Very cool feature that is also very low-load.
More to come soon.
Enjoy!
Beta 3.785 Just Bugfixes
This one just has some bugfixes, none of them TOO serious. That's kind of the idea for the period leading up out of beta. Hopefully if things are looking good, then Monday might be the day. I guess maybe Tuesday if the winter storm coming up knocks out my power, or if there are enough bugs that we need one more day of testing at that time.
More to come soon!
Beta 3.784 Tractor Recursion
Lots and lots of bugfixes, a few DLC3 additions, and some quality of life tweaks. I typed up most of a longer post, had to step away for a bit to take care of something, and discord ate it when I got back. Nice. So I'll be super brief, instead.
We need to keep an eye on this for a bit longer before we let it out of beta, clearly, but I'm quite encouraged in the main. Thanks to everyone for all your bug reports.
More to come soon!
Beta 3.783 The Return Of Multiplayer!
Multiplayer is BACK, folks. There were a lot of beta-branch-specific bugs since the great refactor started, because I needed to get singleplayer working first, and then get multiplayer going.
I am very very happy to report that this should be the most stable and most performant version of multiplayer yet, beating out the stable branch most likely, knock on wood. There are still some things that I'm sure will come up in testing, but the ghosts issue seems to finally be fully resolved, which means the "my stuff explodes for no reason" issue, in other words.
There are some other small bugfixes here, but mainly this is MP stuff. There are also a number of notable balance adjustments to DLC3 content, mostly thanks to Zeus.
This feels really good, although it did take me a day longer than I originally expected. I've been able to play 10-20 minutes of multiplayer gametime at once without issues now, though (and I just didn't test further than that).
More to come soon.
Enjoy!
Beta 3.782 Smooth Reloading
Hopefully we are in the last few days before this comes back out of beta. I have some known issues I need to fix in multiplayer, but once again we've cleaned up the full (I think?) list of known bugs of any seriousness that are afflicting multiplayer.
This build also makes it so that when you reload the xml for the game by changing enabled mods or dlc, it now does so in a smooth way with actual interface feedback about what is happening. This is how it was prior to the beta period, but since the beta period it's been jerky and slow and seems like the program is frozen at times. All fixed now!
This build sees tractor beams able to drag ships around again properly, tachyon beams no longer over-negating cloak, invulnerable ships truly being invulnerable again, necromancy working again, stacks splitting less aggressively, ships no longer losing orders when going through wormholes, no "infinite threat spawn" situations anymore, and so on.
Improvements-wise, this includes a feature where ship lines transferred between fleets now take on the orders of the fleet they are being transferred to. And some work on vassals in DLC3, though that doesn't have its control interface yet. Necromancers also got a number of balance improvements and tweaks.
More to come soon.
Enjoy!
Beta 3.781 Tachyon Healing Reversal
This one... fixes all of the really major bugs that I'm aware of in single-player! So heap on some more, see what you can find! ;)
I still have some known multiplayer bugs that I need to fix before we're able to leave beta, but beyond that and whatever new is reported... that's where we are. So that's quite exciting!
Also exciting? Your own tachyon beams (you know, the ones for revealing clocked enemies?) will no longer accidentally heal enemy cloaking devices, making them perma-cloaked no matter how much the enemy shoots you. Yes... in the past build, I made an error and tachyon beams were your own worst enemy, creating invisible unhittable terrors of enemies who could shoot you with impunity. Seeing that was actually pretty menacing, and I understand it cut a swath through several player empires. Uh... my bad!
This new version has some performance improvements (again), and also a lot of improvements to how notification hovers work. If a notification talks about things on multiple planets, it now highlights all the planets of relevance.
The necromancer got a number of new powers in this build thanks to Badger, and also got a bit of a nerf to the very late game since they were getting absurd apparently. Finding the ideal power curve for that new player faction is a work in progress, but sounds like it's coming along. I particularly like that the Neinzul Elderlings have sanity that they lose, and are losing it faster now. That's fun.
The build yesterday also had some bugs in the new hull system from SirLimbo, which is understandable for something so huge. Those are fixed now, although it sounds like there are a few final gasps from other bugs in that bit of code.
Thanks to everyone who has been testing, and hopefully the next few builds are uncommonly clean for how things have been the last half year. We're finally nearing the exit of beta, and the end of the great refactor, which is a milestone I will really relish.
More to come soon.
Enjoy!
Beta 3.780 Nomadic Ark Empires And The Hull System
The last couple of builds had some notable bugs, apologies for that. Those are all solved, and performance has been boosted yet again (compared to the distant past, not just the recent past), and there are some quality of life improvements.
Beyond that, there's a very cool hulls system that -NR-SirLimbo has added to the game, mainly for mods. This is something that lets you create more AI War 1 style hull types and ammo types and vulnerabilities and strengths. It's not something the main game uses much, but it is used in order to provide Heroic Ship traits (really big ships that are immune to most "bs attacks," so to speak). Beyond that, it's a really interesting platform for mods to do cool things.
The More System Defenders mod has returned, and there was at least one other mod depending on it that is now working again, too.
The Ark Empire in DLC1 has been very close to completed! Thanks to Badger on the most recent batch of items there. I still have a very few last bits to add in, but in general you start with an Ark that is nomadic in the middle of enemy territory. In other words, you don't automatically have your first planet, you have to fight for it... or you can opt NOT to take that planet at all, and instead to take one of the neighbors as your first planet. And your actual king is an ark that is mobile and that you can move around as you wish, so your empire is permanently fluid.
It's a very interesting way to play, and gets back to the original kickstarter goals and designs. I don't think it's going to be the way that most people prefer... but then again I could be wrong. It also includes build-your-own-starting-fleet mechanics, which are super exciting. The normal empire that we have now is something that we built because the Ark Empires just "didn't feel like AI War" when it was the only way to play. But now the Ark Empires are much more advanced, and optional, so I'll be curious to see what people find is more fun in the end.
Badger also made a number of major improvements to the Intel menu, making it way more readable. Necromancer got some tweaks from Badger, and expert mode got some tweaks from Tom.
Puffin is also still steadily working away on his massive Classic Fusion total conversion mod.
Lots of cool things afoot! More to come soon.
Enjoy!
Beta 3.777 Last Refinements For The Year
This is quite a big one! Dozens of bugfixes to the game and to various mods, and things should be running better than ever. Plus a whole lot of other things:
Doomsday mode (a new DLC1 feature) got some refinements from Badger.
Expert mode got some more refinements from Tom.
The message log has been upgraded a ton so items in it are clickable, and same for the right-side temporary messages that pop up. They have tooltips explaining what will happen when you click each line, and the message log has a new icon in the bottom left so it's clearer that it's not just for MP chat.
Speaking of icons, the tabs on the left sidebar have gone iconic rather than text-based. We have more room now, they're more attractive, and people have not been a fan of the sideways text that used to be there.
Puffin has been busy on his Classic Fusion mod, which is not yet released, but which is seeing a lot of internal updates frequently. Three new mechanics have been added by him to the game in general to support some of what he wants to do there, and that's the devourer, weapon points, and infestation ship mechanics. Goodness!
The list of bugfixes is pretty intense, and StarKelp has made both improvements and fixes to his Civilian Industries mod.
And lastly, a last-day-of-the-year surprise from ArnaudB, he's created a new "From Spire Frigate to Dreadnought" mod, which lets you hack the lone spire frigates to turn them into massive spire battleships or dreadnoughts.
Wow! Well, more is going to be coming very soon, but not before the end of the year (which is in about five hours where I am).
Happy New Year!
Beta 3.774 Metal Flows
Whew, okay, lots of cleanup in this one, largely from the work yesterday. The way that metal outflows were working is much faster as of yesterday, but there were a variety of problems I needed to fix up today. It's even faster now, and also actually fully correct as well.
Another thing that has been really-wrong for a long while (during the beta) was the way that tech previews were showing ship counts. That's now vastly more efficient, as well as actually -- again -- being correct. This also applies to the strengths/weaknesses R view, all of which I had to pretty majorly re-code.
The other bug that has been biting a lot of people lately is one where a bunch of ships would complain about the "squad in central registry was actually" errors flooding through the game. The root issue is there in the stable build (though silent), and has been there for years (it's the root of the ghosts in multiplayer, also), but it's gotten much worse in the beta since we now do so vastly much more multithreading (and now has errors that pop up when there's a problem). That should now be fixed, and we should not be seeing that error anymore, knock on wood. There are a few specific cases where we might see an error about the central registry if the timing is just wrong and I need to update some code, but that should be rare.
Right! There's still other bugs that people have noted, and I plan on trying to plow through a ton of those tomorrow, as well as actually getting to my correspondence. I wanted to go ahead and get these major fixes in today, though, so I focused there first.
This build also includes a planet cap of 120 by default now (though you can unlock it with a personal setting in the performance section), because anything above that is kind of death by a thousand paper cuts for performance on even very modern machines. 120 planets was the original limit in the first AI War, and things should perform quite nicely up to there on machines in this game now. The only places where I'm still seeing performance lag (though I'll need more data) is currently on 180 planet maps with tons of factions and deep into the midgame, and even there I'm still averaging 60 fps now, with full sim speed, so that's a lot of wiggle-room and should see normal map sizes really play very nicely.
And lastly, now the expatriate tech can upgrade human resistance fighters and ALL outguard (not just some of them), which makes the HRF in particular way more useful as an ally than they ever have been in the past.
More to come soon.
Enjoy!