New beta build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Finalizing_Multiplayer#Beta_3.509_De-Apocalypsing_The_Code
This one is HUGE in terms of how many bugs it smashes. The recent version 3.500 added pooling to a lot of new parts of the game, and prevented a giant memory leak, but it also introduced a fairly apocalyptic number of bugs. I've been super stressed about it, honestly, wondering if that would smash my whole schedule and last for months, or what.
Well, today I wound up being able to duplicate and smash two really major bugs that were systematically destroying the game if you played for a long while in one game, or as soon as you loaded up a savegame or starting a new game after quitting to the main menu from playing previously.
Some of these are a bit amusing. The details are all on the chris-talks-code-gameplay, in really great detail as I explored through these things today. But the short version is:
1. Since 3.5, if you started a new game fresh, it wouldn't save what mods and dlc you had enabled in the save. This was troublesome, but not a world-ender.
2. After pooling kicks in (aka, after loading a save or starting a campaign after exiting to the main menu, or after playing long enough), the systems on new ships would be kind of randomly scrambled around. So... the cloaking device on ship A is now a random weapon from ship B, which has a weapon from ship C, etc. As you can imagine, this made for all sorts of truly insane bugs.
3. A whole bunch of pooled external objects were being incorrectly re-added to the pool and then redistributed, which meant that multiple things were sharing the same data storage. It's like if 400 people try to share one footlocker. Uh... yeah, it gets confused fast.
4. Pools of external objects were busted in general after the first load, and would just keep giving out the same initial object over and over again. The footlocker problem all over again, just a different location and even more severe.
Some other smaller bugs were also fixed, and many bits of preventative code were added.
This stuff will help with the stability of multiplayer (since single player and multiplayer have a huge amount of their code in common), but multiplayer on the beta branch is still not ready for playing. I have some more breaking in that area to do before I get to fixing, but the result should be really worth it. Lower bandwidth requirements, more accuracy, fewer desyncs that require repair. I'm hoping to get the main game, AND multiplayer, out of beta really soon.
I won't be around much tomorrow, as it's my daughter's birthday. Not sure how much this weekend, either. Maybe in bits and pieces. But definitely back to normal schedule on Monday.
More to come soon.
Enjoy!