First off, thanks a lot for the amazing launch, today we peaked at more than 1800 concurrent players! It really means a lot to an independent developer like us. We are eagerly improving the game and we will add more features for you to try out soon!
To give you an idea about our biggest plans to upgrade the game, we decided to share a roadmap of key features with you. Keep in mind, this is all subject to change as we move ahead.
Shader technology improvements
In our latest update, we fixed some serious issues related to the caching of shaders that were responsible for most of the stuttering. You will still experience some moderate stuttering the first time you run the game, but the more often you play the smoother the game gets. In the future we will offer two solutions, one is to add pre-cached shaders to the game so your PC doesn’t have to do all the work on the fly and secondly we will provide an improved background shader compiler that will increase the performance while new shaders are cached by the game. In any case, you will notice a huge improvement since the last update and we will continue to work on better performance and should be able to deliver you some results this month.
New resource manager
For several months now, we have been working on a new resource manager that will further increase performance and will help us to introduce features that make the whole gaming experience more fluid. It will also help to make better use of the memory allocated to the game. We expect it to be finished sometime next month.
Netcode
The netcode was giving us a major headache as it wasn’t compatible with the multi-threaded engine and wouldn’t work in large team games at all. We lost a month trying to solve this issue and we are finally at a point where the netcode runs fine. However, it’s not perfect yet and we will continue to improve it. Once it matches our standards we will unlock large player games beyond 4v4 again.
Match-making / lobby
Currently Steamworks allows us to display 50 sessions only. So while the multiplayer looks rather unpopular, it’s absolutely not. We will think about a few solutions for this, as we want to make sure that the multiplayer lobby represents the real online activity. In case of match-making we are planning to do several improvements to the searching for players screen that will help you determine which nations and gamemodes are popular. We will also discuss the best options to display your online statistics such as victories per faction. On top of that we plan to add more statistics to track details such as the amount of units you destroyed and your K/D ratio.
DirectX 10
Once we have done improvements to the netcode and match-making we will start to convert the game to DX10. DX9c will no longer be supported from that point on, but since we don’t support WindowsXP, it shouldn’t really affect anyone negatively. Instead DX10 will be another source for improvements to the game and engine and we hope to have it ready in around 2 months.
64bit
Thanks to the help of the community we were able to solve an issue that prevented the game from using more memory from 64bit OS than the limit of 2048mb. This increased the stability of the game dramatically, as AS2, contrary to AS1 was slightly jumping over this barrier. None the less, 64bit will be a must to further increase the graphics fidelity and simultaneous units and objects displayed in-game. We will keep a 32bit client for those who do not run a 64bit OS, but graphic options will be limited. This feature should be available later this year.
DLC
1C and we ourselves at Digitalmindsoft are convinced of a great future for AS2 so we agreed on the development of DLC for the game. These DLC will add more content and unique features to the game next to the free upgrades you are going to receive. We will talk about them when development progressed, but be assured, exciting times are ahead!
So stay tuned for more news coming soon and happy gaming!