AI War 2
3.305 Fruits Of A Snipe Hunt
(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.)
A snipe hunt is a foolish errand (and apparently is also an actual bird, as well as an interesting etymological root for sniper, but none of those bits are relevant). Yesterday and the day before I had very long days, but seemed to accomplish next to nothing. I was trying to recode how the game loads and parses its xml files, to make them more efficient and get around a rare bug I had stumbled onto three days ago and then turned (accidentally) into a super common bug.
This morning I wound up just having to check in all that work, in case I need some of the results in the future, and then just revert it all and start over. During my 12+ hour snipe hunt, I discovered the general parameters for what makes the game load a bit faster, and what does not. So I came back and used much simpler principles to get some of those speed gains, and correct the loading bug in general, and that's that. Sorry it took so long, that was super frustrating.
Various other small bugfixes and performance improvements also resulted from that diversion, so those are now in this build also.
SirLimbo was also really busy during this time period, and he fixed the coilbeam math as well as unifying beam weapon math in general. He also continued to make improvements to the tooltips, and got the new icons in there for various status effects. Unfortunately the full-color versions that I did last week looked terrible when small, so those also had to get completely redone in single-color fashion. Those look much better, but I'll probably refine them some in the future.
Several other bugs were fixed, Zeus made a number of balance tweaks to some very high-end ships, and some other experimental changes went in for purposes of testing for later.
More to come soon.
Enjoy!
3.304 Coilbeams No Longer Tickle
(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 is filled with goodness:
- You can use Ctrl+1 or similar to assign the hotkeys to fleets. This has been requested for a while.
- There's a helper command that lets you rename campaigns if you want to split a campaign you're in.
- Officer fleets and spire fleets will now "Roam if Instructed" in new savegames, which is the more-expected behavior. You can still toggle it either way.
- Lots of tooltip updates! More awesomeness from NR SirLimbo, showing debuffs and buffs in a way that has never been available before.
- Fixed several threading bugs, and a bug where spire flagships could hack the ARS, and some bugs with marauders.
- Swapping fleet leaders is no longer possible, but you can swap all the ship lines in a fleet using the prior interface's location. Same general effect, but minus negative side effects.
- Fixed several bugs with beam weapon math, most notably a recent one that made spire coilbeams basically do "tickle level" amounts of damage (100x too low).
- The mod Kaizer's Marauders is now its own separate faction rather than overwriting the vanilla Marauders faction. This means you can have both on at once, or choose between them, or even see how the two of them compete with one another! This also fixed a few bugs with it. That said: This will break existing savegames that have Kaizer's Marauders in them. To finish those games, you can temporarily use the "v3.303 - Last version before the Kaizer's Marauders split" beta build in Steam. You may have to exit and restart Steam before this appears.
More to come soon.
Enjoy!
3.303 Tutorial Hotfix
This one fixes tutorials to not murder you either instantly (AIs on your starting planet) or if you take too long (waves for some reason).
This also adds back in the recently-removed-by-alterations version X map (as the default for X), but with fixes for the planet counts being offset too high. And of course the options to keep the more recent X style.
More to come soon.
Enjoy!
3.302 Clarified Invincibility
(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 fixes several bugs, and adds a few quality of life improvements. One of those is to really clearly tell you when you're trying to attack something that is not allowed. Oftentimes there's a unit that is invincible until you kill some other units first, or until it moves out of some location, or for another 30 seconds, or whatever. And having your ships just fail to attack it was bewildering. Now it really clears that up.
This also includes wider windows for things like C-clicking, so that you don't get accidental wrapping of things that shouldn't. This also let us spread back out the columns properly for ship tooltips, so those don't wind up with armor and mass on top of one another ever, etc.
Various windows now let you hit Esc to close them that previously (by oversight) did not. The tips windows show with much nicer and more informative headers.
That on-launch popup from the prior version of the game (which was harmless but annoying) is gone.
The AMU mod has more updates.
More to come soon.
Enjoy!
3.301 I Always Wanted To Be A Ghostbuster...
(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.)
I spent at least three separate Halloweens as a Ghostbuster. One as an adult. As a kid in elementary school, I thought that sounded like just the best job. Now insert that clip of Frodo saying "but my own adventure turned out very different."
Mostly I laugh. This time, the problem with multiplayer was (at root) an endlessly-growing list of ships worried that they MIGHT be ghosts, and the client asking the host about that constantly and the host giving increasingly lengthy answers that slowed everything down.
It actually was more complicated than that, as these things always are, but "ghost suspects" were not properly having their "yes you were a ghost and died" or "no you're alive, what are you on about?" status updated in the central "ghost suspect" roll call. So the roll call just kept growing, infinitely, until the game couldn't take it anymore and your sim speed tanked to unplayable levels.
Now they do all this stuff properly, so far as I can tell, but this is hot off the presses so it needs more testing. What I can say is that multiplayer suddenly was by far the smoothest I've seen it as a client in quite a long time after these changes, and the numbers of ghost suspects and such all seem reasonable now, so fingers crossed.
It's possible that non-ghosts will start exploding on the client again because of this, because I put that sort of time-based code back in, but in reality I think that is just fixing particularly persistent ghosts. Knock on wood.
Distributed econ now gets science and hacking points properly, too, thanks to SirLimbo.
More to come soon.
Enjoy!
3.300 Mapsplosion
(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.)
I had been planning on working on more bugfixes today, but honestly I was feeling pretty fatigued and unmotivated and so I decided to work on something else as a bit of a diversion. I'll be back on bugfixes and game mode stuff soon, but I hope you enjoy the fruits of this diversion.
This is essentially a Summer Of A Lot Of Free Stuff, which I think is good because we're planning on releasing three paid DLCs in 2021, so I feel a lot better about that with also loading you down with lots of new free base game stuff. Your financial support is greatly appreciated (and needed), but I don't want you to feel strongarmed into it.
So what's up this time? Last time it was variable-sized gravity wells. And campaign types are still evolving. And interplanetary weapons are coming sometime in the next month or so.
This time around it's map types. Not new map types, at least not right now in the base game. But the curious thing about AI War 2 is that it has a TON of map "types" available in sub-options for each larger type. AI War Classic had 4 different Maze map types, for instance, versus AI War 2 has the same thing with one main type and four sub-options. None of that is new.
What is new is that there are dozens of new options for a variety of map types in the base game in particular, and a lot of these really radically change the maps to the point they are almost unrecognizable. Both X and Honeycomb have some particularly interesting new variants. There are many QoL improvements in relation to choosing map settings, too.
More to come soon. Apologies for taking a break from bugs.
Enjoy!
3.203 More Bugfixing
This one re-fixes (properly, this time, hopefully) that gost-related exception that was happening in multiplayer.
This one also reworks a lot of the map design logic and code so that it's easier for us to manage those.
It has a couple of mod updates in it, and Nr SirLimbo also put in a fix for ship chase ranges that was making them a bit stupid in large gravity wells.
More to come later today, but I wanted to get this MP hotfix out while I have some folks able to test it.
Enjoy!
3.202 General Bugfixing
(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 is not super exciting, unless you were impacted by one of the bugs this one fixes. That said, these are some juicy fixes, so YMMV
- Fixed a multiplayer exception that was happening trying to bust ghosts. Those darn ghosts again!
- (Not a bug, but) Humanity Ascendant now defaults to using all uniform gravity wells the same size as they always have been. It only starts introducing variant grav well sizes in Challenger mode, but you can change your preferences from the defaults in any of the modes.
- Beam weapon math has been adjusted and fixed in a variety of places. The spire ships will no longer miss their primary target at the end of a coilbeam, as one resulting improvement from this.
- Distributed economy mode wasn't working properly after saving and then reloading. Now it does.
- A variety of tooltips in the lobby were missing last build, but are back now.
- A complicated fix to an edge case when you're ordering units around on the galaxy map. There was a situation where they would ignore your orders if you told them to leave a planet and then "no wait stay after all" by clicking the planet. Now they listen properly.
More to come soon.
Enjoy!
3.201 Location Hotfix
This fixes a bug in the prior build where older saves had their units all shifted around in location, along with a few other related coordinate issues. Sorry about that! That did inspire a potential new AI type for sometime in the future, at least.
This hotfix also happens to include some mod updates that fix a few things, and also potentially a fix to the Reset to Defaults breaking client connections in the MP lobby. That's been on my list since MP started, so we'll see if this really fixes that one.
3.200 Variable Planet Gravity Well Scales And QoL
(This changes a ton and may have bugs. If you run into an intractable one, 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.)
Okay! First up, this build might fix the multiplayer ghosts issue. Fingers crossed. But I made a lot of changes and simplified that to get that good and dead.
Secondly, for anyone who uses mods or has expansions installed, you can now see what is mod or expansion content all over the place. I'm talking fields in the lobby, items in dropdowns, and even quickstarts. The works. Mods can also now include quickstarts for the first time, too! Overall the idea is to help it become clear where things come from. Sometimes even I forget how much was packed into DLC1 (TSR), which really gets a lot less love than DLC2 (ZO). To make all this work, I had to re-code and extend a surprising amount of UI code, but all the bugs seem fixed now, knock on wood.
This build also introduces variable-sized gravity wells. The first AI War had larger gravity wells, but only one size. This game has always been more intimate in battlefield size (and/or more cutthroat, depending on how you look at it), but again there was no choice. Now there's a choice! And in fact, there are various "schemas" for various types of planets that helps you randomize in various interesting ways. The new defaults are to have some variable planet sizes, but nothing too extreme most of the time.
There are a number of bugfixes in this one, although the list of things that are on my short-term todo list grew a lot while I was implementing those two giant features above. So more soon on that front.
More soon in general.
Enjoy!