New build, with fixes to multiplayer as well as distributed economy mode: https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Finalizing_Multiplayer#3.301_I_Always_Wanted_To_Be_A_Ghostbuster...
(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.)
I spent at least three separate Halloweens as a Ghostbuster. One as an adult. As a kid in elementary school, I thought that sounded like just the best job. Now insert that clip of Frodo saying "but my own adventure turned out very different."
Mostly I laugh. This time, the problem with multiplayer was (at root) an endlessly-growing list of ships worried that they MIGHT be ghosts, and the client asking the host about that constantly and the host giving increasingly lengthy answers that slowed everything down.
It actually was more complicated than that, as these things always are, but "ghost suspects" were not properly having their "yes you were a ghost and died" or "no you're alive, what are you on about?" status updated in the central "ghost suspect" roll call. So the roll call just kept growing, infinitely, until the game couldn't take it anymore and your sim speed tanked to unplayable levels.
Now they do all this stuff properly, so far as I can tell, but this is hot off the presses so it needs more testing. What I can say is that multiplayer suddenly was by far the smoothest I've seen it as a client in quite a long time after these changes, and the numbers of ghost suspects and such all seem reasonable now, so fingers crossed.
It's possible that non-ghosts will start exploding on the client again because of this, because I put that sort of time-based code back in, but in reality I think that is just fixing particularly persistent ghosts. Knock on wood.
Distributed econ now gets science and hacking points properly, too, thanks to SirLimbo.
More to come soon.
Enjoy!