New beta build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Finalizing_Multiplayer#Beta_3.603_Last_of_the_Recent_Known_Regressions
This one fixes all of the recent regressions of which I am aware. I wish chain lightning was a bit prettier than it is at the moment, but I'll worry with that later on if I need to. This still hasn't really been stress tested with a bajillion tractor beams using the new beams pipeline, and I have not tested to see if the hacking beam works, but all of the engineering beams are working great, and chain lightning works great (if slightly less fancy than I want).
All of the other strange stuff of late with pause causing some oddities, or starting new maps being not centered properly on your planet, or saves not seeming to remember your last planet you were at, are all fixed. So is the Exit to Desktop just taking you back to the main menu!
There are certainly other bugs that I'm aware of, but all of the really annoying or serious ones seem to be dealt with now. Actually in the most recent beta you couldn't change lobby settings! So that's also fixed.
Zweihand added in a new starting fleet option, for Zenith Onslaught, which has a bunch of ships from that DLC.
There's still lots more to come in terms of bugfixes and QoL and such, but depending on the urgency of those things I may just focus on multiplayer for a bit. There's still a pair of remaining issues where I really need to rip and tear some code before things get better (notifications at the top bar, and the "description appenders" for certain units), so I had probably better start there. Those might accidentally break some things for single-player (again, sigh), but those are the last really main such things involved for multiplayer.
After that I need to load up multiplayer and start fixing whatever I find until it's fully functional again in the new reduced-scope-on-client paradigm. There are some optional things that I can do to help with RNG determinism past client-or-host-gates, but honestly when it comes to those the game self-repairs so fast in MP that I'm not overly worried about the problems those cause. I will get to that, but it's probably not urgent. We shall see.
Anyhow, MP is almost certainly not going to be ready for play this weekend, because this stuff with the ship to ship lines took VASTLY longer than I expected, but I will be supremely frustrated if we aren't in a MP-ready state for the weekend after. My hope is that maybe sometime next week, or the week after at the latest, that we can merge the beta branch back into stable. I won't be ready to declare MP out of beta until we have more testing on it, but all these code upheavals of the last month should mean that the surface area where things can go wrong in MP is way reduced, as well as bandwidth itself also being reduced.
Now that we're taking more time on DLC3, I can also try for the original vision for Expert mode, so that will be sometime soon, too. But not prior to merging back to the stable branch, unless I'm for some reason just waiting on tester feedback.
More to come soon.
Enjoy!