New beta build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Finalizing_Multiplayer#Beta_3.507_Spare_A_Moment_For_Your_Orbitals
Okay, this one is largely a digression. But first, what's the stuff in here for the bulk of folks?
- More tools for looking at threads that might be misbehaving. It seems to be intermittent.
- Badger got the tech window code to provide a more accurate count of upgradable ship lines. It does not fix problems with the turret count though.
- Several bugfixes that were pretty minor.
Beyond that, I took a bit of a side track today, and worked on a major new gameplay mechanic for DLC3. Well, kind of a cluster of them. The core thing is ship orbits around other ships, the gravity well center, other ships orbiting other ships, and so on. There's more I need to do there to make it fully smooth, and I haven't had time to test the versions that are not focused around the fleet leader, but it's a start.
Why this side track? I learned today that Zeus's availability for doing his portion of DLC3 is going to be ending later this month, so I was now the bottleneck for him being able to do the work he wanted to. There's a few other things along those lines that I'm going to knock out, and that will give the testers more time to test, too.
Then I'm not holding up anyone else's work while I continue to bang my head against the wall of the codebase and get all the post-pooling errors that remain fixed. The number is really shrinking, which is good, but the number did not shrink today.
As those drop in number, I will then shift back to multiplayer and work on that. There's some major ripping and tearing I plan to do in that area to make the client really work well. Interestingly, I found an unexpected source of desyncs in the ship creation code today when I was working on the orbital work, so that's something I can improve. The game already self-repairs from desyncs, but the less work I make it do in that regard, the better it is for your bandwidth and for smoothness on the client. So that was an unexpected and nice find, but it's a nontrivial fix to solve it. (Passing a Context object past a client-barring gate is insta-desync, is the short explanation).
Loadouts are one of those things that are on my short term list of things to make ready for the others, and that will be backported to DLC1 as well. Though I'm not sure precisely when on that bit.
There's a bunch of other features and work, and I'm not entirely sure how well things will fit into my schedule. We'll find out as each week passes.
Right now it looks like the "true" versions of Expert and Deathwish mode are not going to come to pass, unfortunately. Strategic Sage and I have been discussing that, and essentially trying to get the Fuel concept or the other things we wanted in there is a HUGE time gamble for us both, and there's no guarantee that it will yield the feel that either of us are looking for. And meanwhile, most players are super happy with the Humanity Ascendant mode as it is, so I'm chasing a very tiny minority goal there. It's something I wanted to do, but it's looking like it's not remotely commercially viable right now. I don't plan to remove those other modes, because they do add on some stricter rulesets, but they may never be as divergent as they were intended to be.
There's a few nice QoL improvements still planned for the near future, because they are fast and the sort of thing everyone will appreciate. I'm going to try to avoid making promises for the next little while, because I'm really having to react on my feet to what comes up in testing and what other contributors need for their work and so on, so it's hard for me to keep a straight-line focus like if I was working in a vacuum by myself.
Anyway, the release tempo is going to stay fast for a while, either way.
More to come soon.
Enjoy!