AI War 2:The Pivot
Known Issues
- The interface, lobby included, is currently temporary, and undergoing a complete overhaul.
- Beam-weapon style shot graphics don't yet display, and a couple of AOE effects don't show quite correctly yet.
- The bulk of the new soundtrack won't be in place until April 27th, but over 4 and a half hours of music is in place from a mix of a few new things and a ton of Classic tracks.
- Various bugs on mantis: https://bugtracker.arcengames.com/view_all_bug_page.php
- Balance needs a lot of attention, with your help.
- The tutorial is currently missing, as we need to redo it.
- Multiplayer is temporarily disabled while we focus on tightening up the single-player loop.
What is this "Pivot?"
The full details are on kickstarter: Pivoting AI War 2: Bring The Fun!.
The short answer is that we're dropping back from what was considered a beta status, and instead proceeding with a revised design on our existing engine in order to make sure that this sequel fully lives up to the legacy of its predecessor.
Version 0.740
(Not yet released -- we're still working on it!)
- Fix some dumb bugs in the HumanMarauders faction that was preventing the marauders from correctly analyzing your planets to see which they should attack
- Thanks to OvalCircle for reporting
- Fixed a bug where the Vis layer was not correctly setting the Shot location when we tabbed into a planet with the shot in flight; it was assuming the shots should be at the middle of the planet, which is manifestly incorrect
- Thanks to OvalCircle for reporting
- Fix a bug where where if a non-Nanocaust faction killed a unit that had taken Nanocaust damage, the killing faction would get the new zombie ship instead of the Nanocaust.
- Thanks to OvalCircle for reporting
- A new and frightening visual look for Usurpers has been added. These will be absent for a while until we get past the "Fun point" once Keith gets his first wave in place, but then we expect these to come back pretty darn fast, so we want them to look nice and scary). (These are the AI ships that recapture planets)
- The infrequently-changed space backgrounds, and planet graphics, have all been moved into a new internal AIW2Scenery unity project, which saves us a _ton_ of time when actually building the gui asset bundles, or ship asset bundles, for the game.
- The sound effects and voice acting files have all been moved out of the platform-specific projects, and out of the modding and gui project in general.
- These are now in the GlobalBundles folder, which saves some disk space if you've got multiple OSes of the game installed at once. It also saves us time when pushing new versions of the game, and has less of a footprint on the system for everybody thanks to the modding unity project now being much smaller without all those files.
- This does make some of the sound stuff a bit harder to mod, but we'll just throw that stuff up on github or google drive or something when the time comes. It's not worth inconveniencing everyone over putting it directly in the build.
- There were a variety of old "space boxes" that were from back in the kickstarter days that were just... underwhelming. They were nicely colorful, but had kind of gross large stars in them, and in some cases just junky colors in general. These have either had their gross big stars patched out, or they've been removed.
- Overall these have mostly been removed except for the best couple of them (which now have color variants!).
- This saves about 200mb of RAM for something that wasn't looking so hot in general, and makes the game load faster, too.
- Our middle-style "nebula sphere" type of backgrounds previously had a really bad problem with distortion on the starfields. This was just embarrassing, and led to some perfectly-fine spaceboxes looking really gross depending on the angle of view, instead. These have all been fixed up with a revised shader for handling those starfields as simple tiling rather than triplanar reading.
- Our most recent, and best-lookg style of space backgrounds, which are based on traditional skyboxes, were absolutely HUGE, taking up more than 450mb on disk, and in RAM. Each one was 12MB of VRAM to render, as well, although that's unavoidable to keep the starfields crisp using a non-tiling cubemap like that.
- We've now split these out so that the stars themselves are in a separate cubemap which is the larger size, and then the nebula parts are able to be a quarter of the size (half the side length) without any drop in quality. This adds 3MB of VRAM usage per draw (of which there is exactly one per frame), but saves over 300mb of disk space and system RAM during runtime, as well as making the game, once again, load faster.
- 45 new space backgrounds have been added, based on 8 source cubemaps, to replace the ones that were taken away (though this actually adds back more than were taken).
- The new skyboxes are way higher quality than the ones that were removed, is the main point, anyhow.
