We're still in beta, but today strikes a solid blow against the forces of entropy that are keeping us captive there for the moment: https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Finalizing_Multiplayer#Beta_3.506_Setsuna_Notices_A_Lobotomy
SirLimbo made a number of improvements to shot compression (which was a really huge overhaul of multishot by him to work better with stacks), and this build fixes a number of things that he found over the weekend. Some of the "ships not shooting despite there being plenty of targets" bugs sound like they are fixed. All of them? Hopefully, but who knows.
On my end, I've been chasing the bug that originally Setsuna and Zweihand reported, where certain factions just seemed to go stupid every so often. The most egregious was the Zenith Trader just camping out on a planet for 45 minutes. Based on reports, Badger figured out that this had to be something to do with the long-range-planning code, and managed to replicate the problem.
I chose to go in a rather comprehensive direction, and started reviewing all of our threading code in and around that area. I'd rather not be purely reactionary to bugs as they come up, you know? In the end, today I only found the one bug (and it was two lines of very well hidden code), but along the way I simplified a lot of code, and made a lot of the threading code faster.
How much faster? It's... really going to depend a lot. The older and slower your CPU is, but the more cores you have, the better for these improvements. So older quad-cores will probably see the largest gains. Even for me on a really new octa-core (as of late last month), I seem to be feeling extra smoothness, though. This also prevents a number of possible bugs that MAY have been affecting things in the beta period with various messages from the background threads getting lost on their way to the simulation. I can't prove that was happening, but I strongly suspect it, and based on some of the bug reports that were very intermittent, that would fit. At any rate, it's no longer possible, so the problem will either go away or not.
I'm mainly setting my sights now on bugs relating to the FakeEntity, and those related to the unit cap multiplaction insanity of which Zweihand has been exploring the nature. I know that multiplayer in the beta is quite broken right now, but I'm going to do another two rounds of ripping and tearing on that before I patch it fully back up. I have some great ideas to really put a stake through the heart of the main multiplayer woes that we've had for a while, and it should also lower bandwidth requirements.
Hopefully after all those bits are done -- hopefully this week -- we'll be back off the beta branch. And hopefully we'll have multiplayer in an official state, rather than a beta state, before the end of the month.
Meanwhile, this weekend I spent my time working on concepts for ludonarrative coherence in the next game I want to make (in super early preproduction right now), and that's a fitting new goal after most of a decade chasing procedural storytelling. I really hit the high note of that with The Last Federation, and AI War 2 has mostly been a technical and design and art reawakening/exploration/R&D period for me, so having a new mission for the next half-decade feels really good. October and November will be winding down AI War 2, but there will still be lots of little releases for it throughout 2022, plus whatever modders get up to. And in the meantime, I have lots to do here, myself!
More to come soon.
Enjoy!