AI War 2:Pre-Early Access Polish

Known Issues

• The lobby interface is currently temporary, and undergoing a complete overhaul.
  • It's suggested that you use the quick start option instead.

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

• Balance needs a lot of attention, with your help. Please tell RocketAssistedPuffin if you find anything you think needs changing.

• The tutorial is currently not as comprehensive as it could be.

• Multiplayer is temporarily disabled while we focus on tightening up the single-player loop.

• There are still a bunch of ships that we either want to re-implement, or new ideas that we want to implement for the first time.

• There are a variety of ships/units that don't have proper graphics at the moment.

• There is not an in-game way to see and edit the control bindings yet.
  • But you can go into the created bindings file inside the PlayerData folder to edit them in a text editor.

What's this phase all about?

We are nearing the point where we're ready for Early Access, and so we're focusing on polish and bugfixing. As well as finishing the graphics for the existing ships. More content will be added during Early Access, but right now it's all about polishing what is there.

This also marks the start of the press preview period, so hopefully those folks bear with us on the rough edges they get caught on in this pre-Early-Access state.

Version 0.781

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

• Allow marauders to be more aggressive about joining in-progress battles.
• Added ability to delete saves from in game load and save menus
  • Thanks to Mac for reporting on Discord

Version 0.780 Just Some Cleanup

(Released October 5th, 2018)

• Fixed an issue in the prior version of the game where at certain aspect ratios (16:9 included, unfortunately) the load game screen would show hanging off the side of the screen. Same with the quick start screen.
  • Thanks to Badger for reporting.

• The "color picker" tool now uses the newer, prettier style of interface.

• The "character biographies and recent history" screen now uses the same UI as everything else rather than that horrible white one.

• The load game interface now has a toggle button on it that lets you switch through sorting the savegames in a campaign by name (default), campaign time, or date modified.
  • Thanks to Badger for suggesting.

• If you had more than 9 notifications showing at once, then in the prior version of the game the second row would overlap the first. Fixed!
  • Additionally, now it only wraps the notifications to a new line after it runs out of space. This was harder to implement than you might think, but it generally means that you can have 18-20 items on a single row depending on your screen aspect ratio.
  • The ongoing message display and debug message display both now bump downwards if need be to allow for this.
  • Thanks to HeartHunter7 for reporting.

• Fixed a visual bug in the color picker where the selection box for the right-hand (trim) color was way too large, looking quite strange. Not sure how we missed this one for so long!
  • Thanks to Badger for reporting.

• The density map type has been disabled for now, as it was no longer generating maps for some reason.

• The savegame menu has now been updated to be a match to the recently-reworked load menu.
  • Clicking on savegame names in the list now properly populates the textbox at the bottom.
  • Trying to save over an existing savegame name now gives you a yes/no prompt letting you know that's what you're doing.

• The settings menu has been updated to the new visual style, while having a minimum of rewrite to its general code.
  • We've added a new ability for us to have the "old style" control creation process happen inside a "new style" prefab window at a point of our choosing. We can only do this in one area per window, but it's quite useful for cases like this particular one.

• The basic text font used on old-style pages is now updated. This includes the settings menu and lobby, mainly.

• The graphics for sliders (used on the settings window) have been updated dramatically.

• The borders for textboxes have been made more clear, which also helps set them apart from buttons better.

• The visuals for dropdowns and the last of the buttons have been updated to the newer style. This again just affects the settings and lobby pages.

• In general cleaned up some of the formatting on the settings screen so that it looks a lot nice.

• Fixed an issue (with TextMeshPro) where dropdowns would show blank text if popped open inside a scrolling area.

• Improved the descriptions of some of the game settings, and the displayed names for them and their categories. Still more to do, though, to make them truly clear across the board.

• The settings menu now shows no more than four decimals behind the float sliders.
  • Thanks to dv for reporting.

Version 0.779 Quick Starts

(Released October 4th, 2018)

• Completely redid the logos on the main menu. They are no longer 3D objects, but instead are world-space ui elements with PBR textures. They have materials set up for themselves, and new lights set just for them, and they no longer suffer from the strange clipping and aliasing issues that they previously had.
  • Thanks to Mckloshiv for reporting we still had an issue.

• The visual styling for buttons is now completely different, and in keeping with the new visual theme that was added a while ago in the main HUD.

• The add/edit profile screen no longer includes the ability to select a default Ark, since that was completely unused anyhow.

• Ships/structures that have been destroyed and turned into remains no longer consume any energy.
  • Thanks to HeartHunter7 for suggesting.

• The lobby screen now includes, literally, an apology notice. It's still under construction, but will be done prior to Early Access.

• There is now a resume button in the escape menu.
  • Thanks to Dominus Arbitrationis for reporting.

• The hacking line items are now substantially taller, allowing for more sane-looking spacing between each one. Mercenaries, too.

• The sizing and spacing of items in the left sidebar for objectives is now far better. It takes up more room, but is now actually legible.
  • Additionally, categories that are empty no longer show up at all.
  • Also also, fixed the bug with collapsing categories not actually hiding the items inside them.
  • Also also also, there is now colorization on pretty much all of the category items to make them easier to visually parse.

• The load savegame window has been completely redone in the new style of the ui.
  • It also now has two columns: one on the left, which has the campaigns, and one on the right, which has the savegames.
  • Savegames are now individual rows, showing the basic info on them in an easy to read format, and the extra data in a tooltip.
  • The sorting of savegames is also now simply alphabetical, so you can actually find what you're looking for!

• The graphics for the textboxes and buttons have all been updated to match the newer GUI style.
  • A few out of date windows, like Save Game, Settings, and Custom Game still use old-style buttons, though.

"Quick Starts" Now Available!

• The game now has an official Quick Start option. This works by loading existing savegames that are placed in the new GameData/QuickStarts folder (even categorized by subfolder so there can truly be a ton of these in there).
  • All of the parameters are fully baked in, including things like difficulty and the number of human players, so there is a limit to just how flexible a given savegame can be.
  • THAT said, the starting planet is randomized every time, as is the map seed; so the planet layouts, and all that other stuff with what is seeded on each planet, is different every time. It's basically like going in and hitting random seed and then generate on the galaxy map, and throwing a dart to see what your starting planet is.
  • Thanks to having the ability to categorize these into folders, this is probably flexible enough for our purposes of letting players get into the game quick and explore things. If they really want a lot more customization, the list kind of keeps expanding until you wind up recreating a scaled-down version of the lobby itself. So at that point, they should just graduate to the lobby from quick starts.

• There are now 5 different quick start scenarios available, each with detailed descriptions on them if you mouseover them.
  • Two are very basic vanilla scenarios, while three of them are varied multi-faction situations.

Bugfixes

• Fixed a bug where, since the automatic strength calculation work was put into place, parasitism, zombification, and metabolization were not working.
  • Thanks to zeusalmighty, HeartHunter7, and BadgerBadger for reporting.

• Fixed ALL of the issues relating to the mouse being over some non-tooltip part of the GUI, and you using the mousewheel and it causing the planet view or galaxy map to zoom.
  • This also fixes the issue when you're mousing over a dropdown and trying to zoom with that.
  • This WAS working, a while back, at least in cases like the sidebar. But upgrades to the ui system and the underlying unity system broke it. The new fix should be future-proof, knock on wood, as it is no longer timing-sensitive.
  • Thanks to Kahuna for reporting.

• Fixed an issue where modal popups were not visible when triggered from certain windows that were saying "suppress all other windows." Load screen, for instance. Now the modal popups push past even those kinds of screens.

• The little notification indicators at the top of the screen FINALLY no longer have the overlap that makes them largely illegible.
  • Additionally, their background has been updated and they now are more legible thanks to not being on a partially transparent background.
  • Thanks to Ovalcircle and many others for reminding us about this one.

• Fixed the color picker window examples all just being big boxes since the icon rework.

• Fixed an issue that could lead to flickering in various tooltips.
  • Please let us know if you still see that in the sidebar, though.

Prior Release Notes

AI War 2: The Era of Discovery