AI War 2:Earlier Than Early Alpha

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Starting State

Okay! So the title of this document is somewhat-facetious, but it gets at the intent behind this first phase. This earliest phase of the alpha is not about being able to play end to end and thumb your nose at all the suckers who are waiting for a later build for no particular reason.

"Earlier than early alpha," in this case, means that we're getting you in place to see what is going on absolutely ASAP. There are some folks who will relish this opportunity, and who have specifically requested it -- they then get to help shape the balance and details of our implementation of the game from the earliest days.

Ever hear developers say "well it's too late in the process for us to change that now" and feel frustrated that you weren't consulted earlier? This is us consulting you super early. Nothing is too late in the process, because this is "earlier than early."

To someone coming to this first build without that context, they may go "holy cow, what hot mess is this." This is not your typical alpha. We'll be to that point in a month or two. If you want the typical alpha experience, then feel free to register your steam key now and just wait around for the go-ahead from either other alpha players or Arcen staff to get a more typical experience.

On the other hand, if you want to be in there from minute one... well... welcome! We're sure glad to have you, and excited to show you what we've been up to. :)

If you're one of the many who struggle with playing the game such an incomplete state, check out the instructions

We also have a blog at https://blog.arcengames.com for dev diaries and other fun topics.

Also, here's Chris's todo list.

Version 0.102

(Not yet released -- we're still working on it!)

  • Added some internal code that helps Cinth do live-testing for LODs, which thus lets us get better results from them. Right now our initial LODs were way too cut off, which was one thing that was leading to such unexpectedly good performance most likely.
  • LOD adjustments on smaller scaled models to make them more visible and attractive at standard game zooms and sizes.
  • Team color brightness adjustments, pattern change on red.
  • Adjusted the size on the numerals to help with flickering at ultra far zoom.
  • Updated the game to no longer allow for drag-resizing the window, since that can wind up really confusing things when you're trying to click near the edge of a window.
    • Thanks to Thalone for reporting.
  • New lower poly gimbals for the Fighter, Bomber, Missile Corvette, Laser Turret, MLRS Turret, and Needler Turret.
  • Completely redid the gimbal shaders from the ground up so that they are now more efficient, view-direction independent, and less neon-blinding-you.
    • No fresnel effect is used at all anymore, and normals/uvs are completely ignored, with it instead using part of the tangent data as the uv channels and then feeding that into a two-color emission blend mixed with an underlying diffuse texture that is mostly used for value (but also a bit for hue).
    • TLDR: Much nicer results, less work on the GPU (not that it was expensive before, terribly), and also easier to configure.
  • 13 New Team Colors
    • Cinth made these to look more flat
  • Fixed a bug where resizing the game window during runtime would not properly reinitialize the UI.
    • Thanks to daktaklakpak and others for reporting.
  • Game now shows the current version in the upper-right corner under the hide/show gui toggle.
  • Changed the behavior of the "Try to Capture" toggle to not prevent _direct_ attack orders on an enemy controller or warp gate.
    • Thanks to many of you for inspiring this change.
  • The game no longer uses unity-style "performance profiles," but instead uses our own settings under the hood for the following, which you can now edit in your settings.dat file:
    • IsFullscreen (actually used now!)
    • FullscreenWidth and FullscreenHeight (actually used now -- when in fullscreen mode only!)
    • WindowWidth and WindowHeight (actually used now -- when in windowed mode only!)
    • VSyncCount (valid values of 0, 1, or 2 -- please, please use 0 for the sake of performance).
    • UseSoftParticles (valid values of false or true, default false; doesn't make a big difference either way; last build this was true, though).
    • BillboardsFaceCameraPosition (valid values of false or true, default false, was true last build, doesn't make a big difference either).
    • AnisotropicMode (valid values of Disable, Enable, or ForceEnable; default is ForceEnable, same as last version).
    • AntialiasingMode (valid values of Off, x2, x4, or x8; default is x2, down from x8 last build).
    • TextureQuality (valid values of Full, Half, or Quarter -- this will make things look absolutely terrible if reduced from Full, but can be useful for truly ancient GPUs; probably nobody should use this).
  • Whenever the graphics settings are updated, it now writes to your output log to say what it did. It does them all in one batch whenever the game flags there as having been changes, which helps keep things efficient.
  • Fixed a bug during game setup where regenerating a map (from changing the map type) could lead to the game trying to re-draw the map before generation was done, leading to chaos.
    • Thanks to Dominus Arbitrationis, daktaklakpak, and Jeremiah921 for reporting.
  • Fixed a bug in some map types (notably Wheel) where the mapgen would fail due to not being able to find a planet X hops away from the human starting point and Y hops away from the AI homeworld.
  • Fixed a bug where doing multiple map generations would not properly remove the remains of the previous generations and would try to draw them when you started the game (i.e. Ghost Arks).
    • Thanks to Zogheen for reporting.
  • Tightened up the time between giving a move order and it taking effect. The main difference will come in tightening up the visualization layer to react more quickly, but this should help in the meantime.
    • Thanks to Cyborg, Zogheen, and many others for bringing this up.
  • Added an Exit Game button to the in-game "escape" menu (opened from the upper-right "Menu" button) that dismantles the game and puts you back at the main menu.
  • Added an Exit Game button to the main menu that closes the application.
  • Fixed a bug where switching between various build menus, etc, would not properly clear the previous menu's buttons out.
  • Now when an error occurs in the game, it shows it to you clearly with three options: open the log file, ignore the error, or ignore the error and prevent this window from opening again during this run of the application.
    • Previously you didn't know there were errors unless something obviously bugged out or you checked the log file. No wonder players thought the game was so stable! (just kidding... mostly)
  • Fixed a bug where trying to connect to a remote host, and then trying to start your own game, would throw errors because the game had not switched out of MP-client mode.
    • Thanks to Cyborg and waylon531 for reporting.
  • Now when a ship dies or enters a wormhole, any shots it had already fired but were visually delayed (so that you could tell there was more than one shot) skip the rest of their visual delay so you don't see a continuing stream of shots from the now empty space in cases of stuff like MLRS with very high rate of fire.
    • Thanks to Zogheen for reporting.
  • Now when the game ends (i.e., you lose) you now get vision and intel on all planets (previously it would look like everything despawns when you die).
    • Thanks to Cyborg for inspiring this change.
  • Removed several old debugging keybinds, including some that could break the game if you pressed the wrong key.
    • Thanks to Cyborg and Zogheen for reporting.
  • Replaced the Snake map type (which was generating maps that filled way too much space) with the Spiral map type; looks different but has exactly the same topology.
    • Thanks to Dominus Arbitrationis and Lakshata for inspiring this change.
  • Improved several map types to be way less likely to have two neighbors at the same "angle" such that the wormholes to those two neighbors exactly overlap.
  • Added a new DisableShipFlameTrails settings option that lets you turn off flame trails on ships if you wish. For the super low end hardware, this may be a big deal, we'll see. The batching is really good on them, but for the lowest-end hardware it might make a notable difference just beause of how many pixels can get drawn.
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