AI War 2:Making Alpha Fun

Starting State

Okay! We've extended the alpha period beyond what we had originally intended, but we're going ahead and giving out the Early Access keys to kickstarter backers on the date we originally specified. Meanwhile, we're pushing the date for early access back. That link explains a lot of the reasons.

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.

And here's what we've been doing for the last few months

Known Issues

• The sidebar on the left side of the screen, which should show your ship counts and so forth, is removed at the moment as we update it.

• The interface in general is horrible, and you need to go into the PlayerData folder and edit your settings file manually if you want to make settings changes.

• In very large battles, there are still some performance bottlenecks that we intend to address. All on the visuals/fluff side, not the core simulation, thankfully. We've gotten most of the heavy-hitters thus far, though.

• Various ships are implemented but don't have real graphics, so they just show a little "rock" instead where the ship graphic would be. You can still see the ship icon and whatnot just fine.

• All ship shot types use the same graphics right now.

• No sound effects yet, and only a couple of music tracks.

• Particle effects are also limited.

• Ships currently just sit there in their squads, rather than flying around within their squads.

• Not quite all of the baseline ships are implemented off our pre-Early-Access list, but we're pretty close!

• Various bugs on mantis: https://bugtracker.arcengames.com/view_all_bug_page.php

• Balance needs a lot of attention, with your help.

• There's no tutorial yet, and there's basically not much in the way of a lobby beyond map types and seed. You can't choose your player color yet, even.
  • Compared to the actual gameplay mechanics, we felt like these were ancillary things, but they are coming up in importance sooner than later.

What Is The Purpose Of This Phase?

Short Answer: To make the game fun, which it is not yet. Please don't fret on that!

Long Answer: There's still a lot to do on the game obviously, as stated in the last blog post. But there's a lot of good stuff here to tinker with now, and we're really looking forward to having more people bashing on it. It's not a "fun, balanced game that just needs some polish" yet, but it will be really useful for us to have more people finding the pain points both in the interface (which is currently atrocious) and the actual gameplay flow (which, from a macro standpoint, is still pretty immature).

The underlying technology and components for making a fun game are here, and that'd a very critical step towards it being a fun and balanced game, but that's not where we are just yet. In a lot of respects we kind of reordered things: the underlying tech is somewhat more advanced and more polished than we had anticipated at this point, and that is pretty important because it gives us a better idea of what we CAN do in the engine. It gives us a better bounding-box for setting up things so that we can build an interface around what is possible, and have the scale of battles reflect what is possible performance-wise, and so forth. On that front, I'm super happy with where we are.

But yeah, the next step is to finish implementing the last of the "before early access" ships, and then to actually make a GUI that isn't eye-gouging as well as a game flow that doesn't have any obvious deficiencies. Right now there are some notable concerns about parts of the game flow regarding how you don't really need to keep territory as much as in the first game, and certain other bits of the feel from a strategic standpoint are "off." Some of that is just because xyz AI feature maybe isn't in place yet, but other pieces are more about the design of certain ships or mechanics. These are things we want to iron out before we go full-Early-Access, and we need the help of folks like you to do so. We're trying to streamline certain aspects of the first game, but we don't want to do that at the expense of what made the original game cool.

The engine for this one is so flexible that we could just recreate most of what the first game was if we felt like it, but we'd really rather not for a variety of reasons that should be apparent to anyone who tried to get into the first game and bounced off it, or who played the first game for a huge number of hours but wanted certain fundamental improvements. Now that all the basic frameworks are getting in place here, we're at a point where we can start thinking about those things.

Version 0.302

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

Usability Improvements

• Reorganized the bottom menu to better emphasize the function most people expect from the number keys in strategy games with real-time simulation. Namely: control groups.
  • So now the 1-9 buttons along the bottom of the screen are the control groups 1-9.
  • And the 10th button (button 0) is a "Menu" button that opens the master menu that used to be there.
    • Though that no longer has the "commands" sub-menu.
  • If you have a selection, the game shows the commands menu (as a bar instead of a stack) above the bottom bar, and the 0-9 keys map to that instead of control-groups/menu.
    • And backspace will cancel your selection (if you have no deeper foldouts), thus returning you to the bottom-bar context.
  • The upshot is that if you select your Ark, you'll see a "Build" button in the command bar at the bottom of the screen, among other things an Ark can do. Similar with other unit-producing things.

• The buttons in the command menu (now shown whenever you have a selection) now are only visible if they can be executed with the current selection:
  • FRD only shows if there's a mobile military ship.
  • Scrap only shows if there's a non-Ark.
  • Build only shows if there's exactly one type of builder unit.
  • Hacking and Warheads only shows if there's the Ark.

• Added some direct keybinds for the sake of near-term sanity:
  • P
    • Toggles pause.
  • B
    • Selects a builder unit on the planet and opens the build menu.
    • If a builder is already selected, selects the "next" builder, if any.
  • T
    • Opens the tech menu.
    • If tech menu is already open, closes all menus.
  • Escape
    • Opens the system menu (save/load).
    • If system menu is already open, closes all menus.
  • Space
    • Closes all menus.
  • You can change any of the above in your inputmappings file.

Visuals And Moddability

• TextMesh Pro has now been integrated into the game (version 1.0.55.56.0b9). We have the paid version, but we're using the free version so that we can include it with the ModdingAndGUI project.
  • This lets us do a lot more advanced text rendering at no extra performance cost, as well as giving us basic functionality like proper kerning.

• The first place we've set to using TMPro is the galaxy map, where now the text is both in a better font as well as a lot more readable.
  • The actual places where the fonts are set up for the galaxy map, and things are oriented around planets, is now also in the ModdingAndGUI project so that it can be edited by folks as desired.

• Darkened all of the new skyboxes to fit with the new HDR rendering.

• Made it far easier for people to edit skyboxes quickly, thanks to a new button in the header of the skybox editor.

• The ruined network nodes now have proper graphics.

• The advanced starship constructor now has proper graphics and animation now.

Misc

• Fixed a bug where saves triggered in the save menu could happen while some changes to gamestate were still ongoing, leading to the data being saved in an inconsistent (and sometimes non-loadable) fashion.
  • Also added a warning message that will show if this particular corruption happens again, though it shouldn't be able to.
  • Thanks to BadgerBadger for the report and save.

• Fixed a bug that could cause a hang in the mapgen logic.
  • Thanks to drspikes and BadgerBadger for reporting.

• Fixed a bug where various internal tech-groupings were showing as selectable menus (ironically named "Not Shown").
  • Thanks to BadgerBadger for reporting.

• When there is invalid data somewhere on trying to load a ship that does not exist, the game now does a better job telling you what the heck is happening. This would mainly be something helpful to modders and us devs.

• Put in massive numbers of performance improvements in how the GUI interfaces with unity.

• Put in a bunch of new error checking on the GUI side, so that if things are set up wrong at any point, it now yells instead of failing silently.

Version 0.301 The New HDR Visual Stack

(Released May 30th, 2017)

• Engine Damage Repair has been implemented.
  • Works similarly to hull/shield repair, but does not actually cost metal.

• Changed balance_seconds_per_fight to 15 from 20, and balance_seconds_per_shot to 2 from 4, massively speeding up the feeling of combat from what it felt like in the prior version. It's now much more like what it was in past versions, without having such bullet spam in giant battles that there's a bunch of slowdown.
  • Thanks to BadgerBadger for reporting.

• Fonts are now sharper in the GUI, although there's still room for improvement. Blurriness causing legibility problems is a definite issue to some extent still.
  • We've also updated the font on the small buttons at the bottom of the screen to be more readable, although we still want to update that even further in the future.
  • Thanks to Sounds and BadgerBadger for reporting.

• New backgrounds for dropdowns.

HDR Graphics!

• We had thought this wouldn't be possible with our visual style as recently as one version ago, but it turns out it is!
  • Also, prior to version 5.6 of unity, it literally wasn't possible at all, at least not without losing hardware MSAA support (which is the best sort of antialiasing available these days, and fastest).

• The game now uses HDR graphics for the main camera, allowing for a better color range and fancier lighting effects, etc.
  • One of the most obvious examples is the way the rings on the end of the laser turrets glow very bright blue now, whereas before they would white out fast and so we had to keep them pretty non-bright.

• We're using a new reflection cubemap against our scenes, and have tuned a ton of the materials to have better values to give themselves really high quality results without an over-blown specular highlight at certain angles to the main scene directional light.
  • Kinda related to this, we're doing new tonemapping now, which maps back down from HDR to the LDR range better, and helps give us a richer color without things having to be so darn glowy _everywhere_.

• The bloom effects have been completely replaced with another set, which is able to use a lot more precision in what it does.

• The game now uses the bloom and tonemapping from the relatively-new official unity postprocessing uber-stack.

Known Issues

• Thanks to the tonemapping, the backgrounds are presently too bright relative to the ships. We simply didn't have time to get to that, and didn't want to hold up the rest of this release over that.

AIW2ModdingAndGUI Capability Updates!

• Since this unity postprocessing uber-stack is freely available, and even open source at that, we're now able to show you actually what ships would really look like in the real game when you are working in the AIW2ModdingAndGUI project.
  • This is enormously important in particular for being able to reliably set up the space nebula backgrounds, which have their characteristics altered some by the post-processing stack and which you need to be able to see in order to properly create them.
  • As part of this, we're no longer using Amplify Bloom or Beautify.
  • Also as part of this general work, we've updated all the various shaders and ship models and materials in the examples folder there.

• To aid in background creation, as well as in general giving more examples of ships and how their shaders are used, there are a bunch of new ships that have been added to the example project: data center, lightning corvette, mlrs corvette, spider, and starship constructor.

Bugfixes

• Fixed a bug in the improvements to shot staggering that caused divide-by-zero errors when the game was paused (because it actually runs zero-length frames during that time so the game can still respond to you).
  • Thanks to BadgerBadger for reporting.

• Fixed a variety of errors that could happen with accidental extra calls to clean up objects (those extra calls are GOOD, since they often are coming from a few sources that need to double check things properly). This should also help performance minorly when objects are destroyed compared to pre-0.300 versions.
  • Thanks to BadgerBadger for reporting.

• Fixed some bugs that could prevent shield repair.
  • Thanks to BadgerBadger for the report and save.

• The sidebar is removed temporarily, since it was so busted anyway and overlapping things strangely.
  • Thanks to BadgerBadger for reporting some of the related issues it was having.

• Fixed some bugs that caused the build menu buttons to collapse into a pile in the bottom-left of the screen.
  • Thanks to BadgerBadger for reporting.

• Reworked the "Quit Game" button on the master menu to no longer be a "immediately chuck the gamestate into the grinder" function, but rather "tell the game that once it's done executing the current sim frame to close the gamestate". This avoids various race-condition null exceptions when quitting while the sim threads are going.
  • Thanks to BadgerBadger for reporting.

• Improved the inter-cluster connection logic of Clusters to be much less likely to draw long connections that overlap other clusters.
  • Thanks to BadgerBadger for reporting.

Prior Release Notes

AI War 2:Earlier Than Early Alpha