Author Topic: AI War 2 v0.776 Released! "A Legible Galaxy Map"  (Read 2405 times)

Offline x4000

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AI War 2 v0.776 Released! "A Legible Galaxy Map"
« on: September 28, 2018, 11:16:08 pm »
Release notes here.

The title of this release is only partly sarcastic.  The old galaxy map was one of the chief complaints that people had about actually playing this game; it was something I'd put off dealing with for quite some time, because I wasn't sure how to deal with some of the challenges presented by it.  This release goes through literally everything I was hoping to do with it, and the results are better than I'd hoped.

That's not to say there isn't still room for improvement -- I'm sure it will be refined for quite some time, and expanded from here.  But at this point, it's something that can be visually parsed and understood, and there is a lot of cross-compatibility with the tabs on the sidebar and the notifications up on top.  I really wanted to avoid having a bunch of search functions and markers.  Instead, just by hovering over existing elements on the GUI, I wanted those things to automatically act as filters on their own.  I'm happy to report that is functional and does the job well.  It's crazy superior to the first game's search function in terms of how quickly you can use it to do something like find all the scouts, or all the planets with some sort of capturable on them.

Especially if you hold Shift to hide the tooltips while you just want the hover effect to work -- knowing that you can hold shift to hide tooltips is actually kind of critical now, and probably something we should put in the tutorial.  Basically you can really make use of the sidebar as either a set of filters OR as a way to see tooltips, and shift is the toggle between those functional modes, unless you want to try to dodge around tooltips to see the middle of the screen.

You can also see what sort of defenses versus mobile forces you have at planets, and in general seeing what you vs the AI have is far better now.  It's just a whole different experience.  I literally couldn't tell where players even owned planets half the time when they sent in savegames for me to find a bug in, and that's... wow that was a problem, you know?  Now I can instantly see what's going on, and I hope you'll find it equally easy.

Assuming things are in the ballpark of correct here, and there aren't any egregious things that annoy people on the galaxy map anymore, I'm going to move onto the sidebar and lobby for now.

There were some other major improvements in this build, too: icons in the header notifications now are distinct and actually tell you what is happening properly.  The guards get properly aggro'd when you shoot any one of them at a post.  Several nullref exception fixes.  MAJOR command station rebalance, to make more than just the Military ones useful.  Hacking has been reworked heavily under the hood and is so much easier to tune now.  Three more AI types implemented.  And more!

More to come soon, too.

Reminder: RocketAssistedPuffin has stepped into a volunteer balancer role, and he is not only looking for feedback, but he's actively integrating lots of things that other people are suggesting on our forums and Discord, as well as things that he's finding and coming up with himself.  The more feedback the better, for sure.

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Enjoy!

Chris
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Offline BadgerBadger

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Re: AI War 2 v0.776 Released! "A Legible Galaxy Map"
« Reply #1 on: September 28, 2018, 11:37:20 pm »
It looks great! I am really pleased.

Offline Ovalcircle

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Re: AI War 2 v0.776 Released! "A Legible Galaxy Map"
« Reply #2 on: September 29, 2018, 12:04:11 am »
Most, if not all, the information is neat, organized, and easily found. The new 2d planets form a more readable at-a-glance galaxy map, rather than the bulky 3d models the game previously had. Just compare the first three screenshots. Plus, since AI War 2 is basically "New and improved AIWC", the galaxy map now bears a strong resemblance to the AIWC planet icons (see fourth screenshot). Returning players will feel right at home with the new map.

I am very pleased with the new changes.
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Offline BadgerBadger

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Re: AI War 2 v0.776 Released! "A Legible Galaxy Map"
« Reply #3 on: September 29, 2018, 12:33:50 am »
Oh, also, if people wouldn't mind trying out all the various hacks (especially of minor factions) to make sure they still work correctly it would be appreciated. I didn't have time to try them all.

Offline TheVampire100

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Re: AI War 2 v0.776 Released! "A Legible Galaxy Map"
« Reply #4 on: September 29, 2018, 03:03:37 am »
I have a question about the military station.
Does it improve the attack damage of turrets as well or only ships?

Offline RocketAssistedPuffin

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Re: AI War 2 v0.776 Released! "A Legible Galaxy Map"
« Reply #5 on: September 29, 2018, 06:23:49 am »
Far as I know it improves the damage of everything. It should work even on mines.

It's also multiplicative. I.e if a ship does 100 damage, and has an 8x modifier on the weapon system, it'll do 800. Then the Military buff comes in and increases that by 50%, up to 1200. Probably worked that way in Classic.
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Offline brianc

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Re: AI War 2 v0.776 Released! "A Legible Galaxy Map"
« Reply #6 on: September 29, 2018, 05:20:30 pm »
Hi guys, not sure if I ran in to a bug or if I've messed something up and I'm not 100% sure if it's related to this version but I can say it wasn't happening to me in the previous daily.  At some point my units stopped following orders and would default to trying to move in random directions or stopping themselves.  This wouldn't happen to every unit but happened to about half of them.  I noticed no debuffs of any kind on the units and I tried disabling auto-kite thinking maybe it was related to cloaked enemies but that did not help anything.  I've attached the save here and if there's a simple fix please let me know so I can get back to my campaign.  My specs are: FX-8350, RX 460, 8 gigabytes DDR3 RAM, Windows 8.1.  Thank you,

Edit: Should note that I tried restarting the game and that didn't help my situation either,
« Last Edit: September 29, 2018, 05:23:40 pm by brianc »

Offline Dominus Arbitrationis

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Re: AI War 2 v0.776 Released! "A Legible Galaxy Map"
« Reply #7 on: September 30, 2018, 11:39:35 am »
Hi guys, not sure if I ran in to a bug or if I've messed something up and I'm not 100% sure if it's related to this version but I can say it wasn't happening to me in the previous daily.  At some point my units stopped following orders and would default to trying to move in random directions or stopping themselves.  This wouldn't happen to every unit but happened to about half of them.  I noticed no debuffs of any kind on the units and I tried disabling auto-kite thinking maybe it was related to cloaked enemies but that did not help anything.  I've attached the save here and if there's a simple fix please let me know so I can get back to my campaign.  My specs are: FX-8350, RX 460, 8 gigabytes DDR3 RAM, Windows 8.1.  Thank you,

Edit: Should note that I tried restarting the game and that didn't help my situation either,

Can you go ahead and make a Mantis report for this? A link is in my signature.
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Offline brianc

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Re: AI War 2 v0.776 Released! "A Legible Galaxy Map"
« Reply #8 on: September 30, 2018, 11:55:56 am »
I just had it happen again in a new game and it had an error code in the description box when hovering over a unit doing it.  Looks like Puffin has already made a listing for it in Mantis so I'll hop in and comment on his with more detail rather than make a redundant listing.  Thank you,

Edit: sorry to be a pain, I'm locked out of logging in to Mantis (can't remember what username I used when I made an account years ago) and logging in anonymously won't work.  Only thing I have to add to Puffin's post about the Move To Bug: Zero issue that both occurred about an hour and ten minutes in to the game (this happened in two separate games on .776).  I had thought maybe the issue was related to FRD or different move options so I intentionally did not use move orders beyond right clicking during the second game and still encountered the problem.  Puffin seemed to think maybe the issue was occurring on a planet by planet basis (ie he entered x planet and the problem occurred there) but in my second play-through the issue happened on a planet I owned and had spent considerable time on.  As mentioned, closing the game and going back to the save did not fix the problem.  Puffin if you see this and think it would be useful please update the Mantis posting to reflect the additional information.  Thanks guys,
« Last Edit: September 30, 2018, 12:07:05 pm by brianc »

Offline RocketAssistedPuffin

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Re: AI War 2 v0.776 Released! "A Legible Galaxy Map"
« Reply #9 on: September 30, 2018, 02:03:14 pm »
Sadly all of that is known from when the problem originally occurred a few releases ago - but thank you anyway.

I don't think it's a per planet basis actually - I mentioned the planet name just to point the others to the exact location/units that are suffering the error. The issue does however seem to occur on a time basis...like you noted.
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Offline Dominus Arbitrationis

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Re: AI War 2 v0.776 Released! "A Legible Galaxy Map"
« Reply #10 on: September 30, 2018, 02:10:19 pm »
Edit: sorry to be a pain, I'm locked out of logging in to Mantis (can't remember what username I used when I made an account years ago) and logging in anonymously won't work.

Yea, we disabled anonymous reporting due to spam. If you send me a PM with emails you may have used I can check the database to find your account and send a reset email there. Or you can make a new account.
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Offline x4000

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Re: AI War 2 v0.776 Released! "A Legible Galaxy Map"
« Reply #11 on: October 02, 2018, 02:57:07 pm »
Is there any chance you had them in FRD (the red) mode? The one you get by hitting V?
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Offline tadrinth

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Re: AI War 2 v0.776 Released! "A Legible Galaxy Map"
« Reply #12 on: October 02, 2018, 03:15:02 pm »
Looks like not:

I had thought maybe the issue was related to FRD or different move options so I intentionally did not use move orders beyond right clicking during the second game and still encountered the problem.

This seems really suspicious, especially given that the issue persists thorugh save/load and affected two different games:

both occurred about an hour and ten minutes in to the game

Maybe some human units got allocated into the wrong data structure?

Offline x4000

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Re: AI War 2 v0.776 Released! "A Legible Galaxy Map"
« Reply #13 on: October 02, 2018, 04:35:54 pm »
I fail at reading.  Sigh.

Yeah, that's an odd one for sure.  I'm guessing that an order was added back to the pool while still retained by another unit.
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Offline x4000

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Re: AI War 2 v0.776 Released! "A Legible Galaxy Map"
« Reply #14 on: October 02, 2018, 06:29:38 pm »
Thanks!  Finally nailed it for the new 0.778 build coming out later tonight. :)

* Found and fixed a REALLY nasty bug that was causing entities to get their orders confused and do all sorts of insane things.
** This was a cross-threading issue where two different threads (short term planning and AI order reevaluation) would be both clearing out dud orders and putting the same order back into the pool multiple times.
** Now it is a lot more careful with how things go into and out of the pool, using the appropriate multithreading locks, as well as making it so that in the (very frequent) even that two orders try to go back into the pool at once, it only puts them in there once.
** There is also a lot more error checking and logging in there that throws out clearly-bogus orders and throws visible errors when finding an incorrect case.  This is a lot better than it just getting subtly incorrect in a quasi-hidden way!
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