New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Finalizing_Multiplayer#3.306_Tweaks
(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.)
These are just a few tweaks, including some new visuals for the base game and ZO, a bugfix in the AMU mod, etc. The spire hammer AI type also got some new units in ZO, which is nice.
There's more in the works, but I've spent most of the last couple of days (and a lot of the weekend) working on getting my physical and digital workspace working better. My desk for the last year and a half has been all kinds of lacking in ergonomics, and I've been feeling it quite a bit. But I hadn't put it together until it was pointed out to me a couple of weeks back. Ergonomics matter! So much easier to get more done when it isn't uncomfortable or outright painful. So depending on what your own desk situation is, I hope you don't have a blind spot like I did.
Anyhow, I've also been on a continual quest for a few years to try and get the build processes to happen faster, and make it easier for me to make art updates in particular by having them not take so long. A full build of the art packages for the game would typically take 90 minutes, and I haven't been able to get much improvement on that despite how Unity has been improving their own systems. I finally am upgrading computers (in the near future), but my current machine is kind of falling apart (keyboard keys don't always work correctly, getting inexplicably slow in other areas, etc), so I figured I'd see what I could improve in the shorter term while I wait for the new one.
And... uh... well, my wife describes it as something that you might see on The Office, and I think that's apt. Heh. Five years ago I had put together my current machine, and it included one really fast NVME SSD for the OS, a second SSD that is less fast in 3.5" form factor, and , and a 7200 RPM SSD in 3." form factor. So naturally I had my OS and some programs on the NVME drive, and then all my working stuff on the second SSD...
Except I didn't. I've been running, all this time, with all my main work stuff on the HDD. No wonder things were so slow! It took 18 hours just to transfer 375 GB off that to the actual SSD; it was getting like 6MB/sec. Today, after that was completed, I can now actually upload things faster, compile a bit faster and build those 90 minute art packages in... 12 minutes. Good grief!
So this should make me a lot more efficient, with less waiting around. And once I have my new computer in a month or so, it should get even faster than that. I'm definitely excited, since it really reduces the barrier from me updating certain parts of the game.
More to come soon.
Enjoy!