New beta build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:The_Great_Refactor#Beta_3.703_Smooth_Sim
This one does two really cool things that I didn't have on my radar, but now I'm super excited about:
First, the performance of the entire simulations should now be better. You heard me! Giant planet counts, giant battles, whatever. I'm not saying it will be buttery smooth on every machine, but it should be somewhere between moderately to drastically improved, depending on your machine. A lot of the reasons why I was able to do this have to do with the timings of triggering sim steps, and less to do with the actual sim steps themselves. Essentially we had some dead air time (less than fully utilized CPU) between certain types of actions. Those gaps are now closed, so your CPU will run flat-out when it has to. Also along with this, you can now see (by right-clicking the clock in the bottom left) how close your simulation is to being at the point where it would start slowing down. Nifty!
Secondly, the speed of the simulation is measured more accurately AND it does a much better job of sticking closer to 100% sim speed when things are going well. It averages between 99-103% now, whereas previously it was almost always 95%. That 5% drop was causing visual micro-stutters in the movement of ships, so now things move much more smoothly around. I've tested this at 30, 60, and 100 fps.
There are a number of notable bugfixes in this one, including the fix to the "AIP goes up by 10 every time I load a save" bug, and errors with wave and spire debris notifications.
I also made two new youtube videos today to help modders and faction designers understand the intricacies of multiplayer and threading in the game as much as I can:
https://youtu.be/EV2WTB5l0vA
https://youtu.be/7JxIbYIy_2I
And for those who would rather skip that degree of info dump, there are diagrams: https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:The_Great_Refactor#New_Diagram_For_Modders.2FProgrammers:_AI_War_2_Threading_Model
I am now done with all of the videos and similar supplemental materials I had planned for modders, which is excellent. Now I can really continue to focus just on bugfixes and other improvements.
At the moment I know there must be plenty of bugs in here, but there have been very few reports. If you have some spare time and would be interested in testing, please do give the latest betas a play!
More to come soon.
Enjoy!