AI War 2:The Pivot
Contents
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 0.742
(Not yet released -- we're still working on it!)
- Rather than looking like the application is hung when it starts, the game now shows the loading progress in the form of what it's doing at the bottom. It doesn't show a loading bar, but it does show a counter of how long has elapsed, and how long specific long-running bits are taking.
- This is useful both for us to know in terms of telling when something is overly slow to load, and it also gives players something to look at and a cue that there's not just a frozen application in front of them.
- Surprisingly, the sound effects loading is taking twice as long as the loading of the graphical data right now (9.6s versus 4.4s on Chris's machine), so this is already an example of where we can optimize our loading speeds a bit, which saves everybody a lot of grief and saves the devs here time staring at the screen when it's time to test each item.
- Additionally, now if the game has an error during load, it won't show a mishmash of all the gui windows all overlapping themselves in an insane and obviously-glitchy way. There is no functional difference between before and now, but it seems a lot less terrifying now if you're seeing it for the first time.
Version 0.741 Music Part 1 Of 2
(Released April 29th, 2018)
- The first half of the new tracks for the AI War 2 soundtrack are now in place: Abandoned Ship, Absolute Zero, Bouncing Lights, Event Horizon, Light Year, and Supercluster.
- All by Pablo Vega, mastered by Dio, and all fantastic.
- Update to Human Marauders behaviour. If they destroy all your forces on a planet then they will begin to construct Marauder Outposts which will spawn Marauder new units. This will make it harder to recapture planets. Every so often a new MarauderOutpost will be added, and existing MarauderOutposts will upgrade themselves to make stronger units. Note also that when the Marauders capture a planet they get a permanent boost to their MaxBudget, making them more dangerous.
- If you allow the Marauders to get Mark 3 outposts then they will start getting Budget faster.
- The balance levers are in XML for ease of use
- The default game volume is now quieter in the hope of not deafening new players
- Thanks to Flavin for the report
- Improved the performance of music loading at the start of the game and during the game.
- Fixed a regression in the prior version of the game where the first time any camera loaded a "traditional skybox" type of background, it would be solid black instead.
- Fixed an issue where the construction part of the sidebar could show some stale data when switching from a planet with a builder to one without a builder.
- Thanks to hawk for reporting.
- Fixed a bug that nobody had reported yet with lightning attacks being very strange-looking and not like lightning bolts anymore.
- Fixed a bug with the various type of geometry-based explosions (flak, lightning, etc) so that they now render additively in the transparent queue rather than the overlay queue, and so that they read from the zbuffer but no longer write to it.
- This changes the effects a fair bit so that they no longer do things like eat into one another or the ship icons around them.
- These will need further tuning to not be over-bright in huge battles, and they're on our list for further improvements visually anyway, but for now it's a good enough start.
- Risk Analyzers: code tidying, also track the total and net AIP generated by Risk Analyzers. Eventually this is going to turn into 'When X AIP is generated by Risk Analyzers, do something unpleasant to the player', probably an exo wave, once exo waves are added
- Map Types: Add a new planet placement mechanism for Simple and Realistic, and tweak one of the previous placement algorithms for Simple and Realistic
- Fix some bugs with Marauders, where outposts weren't upgrading properly.
Version 0.740 Clean Up That Nebula, Young Man!
(Released April 26th, 2018)
- 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.
- 49 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.
- The starfield backgrounds on the galaxy map are now much more neutral, with mostly black and a little bit of white. Easier to see foreground objects on them, now.
- Fixed a bug where once you viewed an old-style spacebox background, it wasn't letting you view any "traditional skybox" backgrounds, which explained the over-prevalence of the former.
- The settings option for "background style" has been removed, as that's no longer really relevant to anything.
