New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:The_Great_Refactor#Beta_3.765_Easier_Upgrades_And_Necromancer_Surge This one feels fairly game-changing just because of one QOL feature in it, which is that you can upgrade your fleets (and see more details about them) right from the techs tab. Various folks had requested that over the years, and having that in now is really awesome. You can still use…
New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:The_Great_Refactor#Beta_3.763_Necromancer_Reanimation_And_Refinement This one has a number of bugfixes, and a number of extensions for player types and map generation. It also has some improvements for total conversion mods, which is letting Puffin get a lot further along with his Classic Fusion mod. The necromancer is now nearing completion, pending testing at least. They…
New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:The_Great_Refactor#Beta_3.762_Expert_Necromancers This one mostly has a lot of work from Badger and Tom from over the weekend, and a lot of it is centered around making the necromancer more balanced and functional. One notable improvement from Tom is that a lot of the build menu is now more moddable, which makes it easier…
New beta build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:The_Great_Refactor#Beta_3.761_Savegame_Safety The biggest takeaway from this one: we’re not going to be intentionally breaking savegames anymore after this version. As has been the case for most of the last 5 years, there’s occasionally a version that corrupts itself or something, but aside from those rare incidents the savegames from now on should…
New beta build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:The_Great_Refactor#Beta_3.760_Chaotic_Maps_And_Ark_Empires This one has been inwork for 12 days now, and it has 9300 words (29 printed pages) of release notes. Uh… enjoy? So what’s happening here, broadly? Well, there’s a lot of bugfixing and quality of life stuff, for sure. Just all, all over the place. This is bringing us a…
New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:The_Great_Refactor#Beta_3.754_Player_Types This one adds a whole lot, all at once! This paves the way for some MAJOR cool things that we are going to be doing in the near future, and that modders can also do. First of all, there’s a whole new system where modders can now expand the central GameEntityTypeData in…
New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:The_Great_Refactor#Beta_3.753_Necromancer_Externalizing This one is the earliest part of the work to allow for multiple types of human player factions without actually having to choose separate factions. This part of the work is mostly focused on moving a lot of the Core code (closed source) for the necromancer to be in External code (open…
New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:The_Great_Refactor#Beta_3.752_Pathfinding_Efficiency In the past, whenever I’ve talked about the efficiency of pathfinding, I’ve universally been speaking about CPU usage or “number of paths calculated per second” or something along those lines. This time, I’m talking about RAM efficiency — how much RAM is used, how it gets reused, and so on. We do…
New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:The_Great_Refactor#Beta_3.751_Faction_Processing_Groups Friday I was out because I was just exhausted and needed a day of recovery. Others went gangbusters on that day and over the weekend working on the game, though. There’s lots of bugfixes thanks to Badger, tom.prince, Puffin, and NR SirLimbo; improvements to contextual info provided by the ARS thanks to…
Ho. Le. Mo. Le. Wheeew, new build: https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:The_Great_Refactor#Beta_3.750_Smooth_Simulator This one rips up the entire threading model that we’ve been evolving for the game since 2016, and replaces it with something more modern, as well as fixing a number of threading-related bugs and other issues. The TLDR is that it’s faster than ever, especially on older…
