New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Finalizing_Multiplayer#3.305_Fruits_Of_A_Snipe_Hunt
(Reminder that if you have trouble with the build, you can always go into betas and choose most_recent_stable to go one build back. This is how I sleep at night after making some major changes.)
A snipe hunt is a foolish errand (and apparently is also an actual bird, as well as an interesting etymological root for sniper, but none of those bits are relevant). Yesterday and the day before I had very long days, but seemed to accomplish next to nothing. I was trying to recode how the game loads and parses its xml files, to make them more efficient and get around a rare bug I had stumbled onto three days ago and then turned (accidentally) into a super common bug.
This morning I wound up just having to check in all that work, in case I need some of the results in the future, and then just revert it all and start over. During my 12+ hour snipe hunt, I discovered the general parameters for what makes the game load a bit faster, and what does not. So I came back and used much simpler principles to get some of those speed gains, and correct the loading bug in general, and that's that. Sorry it took so long, that was super frustrating.
Various other small bugfixes and performance improvements also resulted from that diversion, so those are now in this build also.
SirLimbo was also really busy during this time period, and he fixed the coilbeam math as well as unifying beam weapon math in general. He also continued to make improvements to the tooltips, and got the new icons in there for various status effects. Unfortunately the full-color versions that I did last week looked terrible when small, so those also had to get completely redone in single-color fashion. Those look much better, but I'll probably refine them some in the future.
Several other bugs were fixed, Zeus made a number of balance tweaks to some very high-end ships, and some other experimental changes went in for purposes of testing for later.
More to come soon.
Enjoy!