AI War Beta 5.004, "The RAMinator," Released!

[x4000]

Original: http://arcengames.blogspot.com/2011/03/ai-war-beta-5004-raminator-released.html

This one is very exciting for me personally, because it addresses one of the hugest bugbears for me with the post-Unity-porting version of the game, which is RAM use.  As long-time players will know, we've already gone through a huge number of gyrations to get the per-frame RAM usage down, with great success, but the problem was that we were still having too much baseline RAM -- in other words, too much RAM in use right when the program was launched and when a savegame was loaded.

This version literally halves -- or actually in some cases quarters -- the baseline RAM usage.  Here's how  we did it, if you're curious.  Be aware that this was some pretty major surgery to the innards of the game, so things may be wonky.  I haven't seen any issues whatsoever, but I can't stress enough how many files this change touched, so there's bound to be something.  If you do find something, just let us know, and we'll fix it as soon as we can.

If you want to revert to the 5.003 version of the game if you run into problems with 5.004, then you can download that directly from here.  Just unzip that file directly over your existing AI War folder (unless you're on a Mac -- you'll have to move the files individually there, because of how OSX handles file transfers.  Bear in mind that saves made in 5.004 won't be able to be opened in 5.003 or before, so overwrite with care.

Honestly I don't think there's really much cause for alarm here, but better safe than sorry when this sort of change comes down the pike.  All things considered, anyway, this is a really exciting change that will really improve the experience for folks pushing the game to its limits.  Enjoy!

This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have 4.000 or later. When you launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found if you're connected to the Internet at the time.  If you don't have 4.000 or later, you can download that here.

[Zeba]

Neat. You guys are overcoming the limitations of the engine with some interesting ingenuity.

This is why I think indie developers are the future of real gaming as they love dashing off code just as much as building the worlds we play in. 

[Ozymandiaz]

ooh, nice!

[RogueThunder]

Great job. The memory optimizations should be glorious all around XD

Mmm. Group move bind. Thanks for giving me a use for one of my mouses aux buttons.

The uncompressed save part made me laugh. *glares at minecrafts save format the horror it is* Handy none the less in rare cases. Lol. Uncompressed saves.

Edit: In unrelated awesome. I just played a game of AI Wars over remote desktop using the new RDP7.1 on W7 SP1(W7U hosting, WES7 client). Its quite playable, tho there's a lil delay that reminds me of playing transcontinental games. Albeit this was over local net, Ill be testing to see if my upstream can handle RDP at that high of quality tomorrow... Curiosity is fun.

[fiorenzospa]

I installed 5.04
If I load a game from previous version and then I save it, when I try to reopen it, I receive an error message... 

[bigdread]

And as i was just about to to report a savegame bug with the new patch, it is fixed already...thanks.

[x4000]

Glad it's a hit!

as they love dashing off code just as much as building the worlds we play in. 

Depends on the individual, of course, but that's certainly how we feel!

The uncompressed save part made me laugh. *glares at minecrafts save format the horror it is* Handy none the less in rare cases. Lol. Uncompressed saves.

Bear in mind that Minecraft doesn't have "savegames," it has an on-disk database of sorts.  I'm not overly familiar with the specifics of their format, but the broad concept of it is pretty sound, and doing it uncompressed in that sort of situation where the read/write time is important to have as low as absolutely possible (because of the dynamic streaming, etc), is sensible to me.

Anyway, I don't know much about their specific format, but in AVWW our "world database" format is actually tons of folders and files all within one larger folder per world, and each of those files is also uncompressed because otherwise it causes RAM/delay spikes on saving/loading.  But it's all organized really sensibly for the process to get at it as quickly and efficiently as possible, and we store the most condensed version of the world data that we possibly can in the format itself (moreso than AI War, even, actually).

But we're condensing, not compressing, anyway.

Edit: In unrelated awesome. I just played a game of AI Wars over remote desktop using the new RDP7.1 on W7 SP1(W7U hosting, WES7 client). Its quite playable, tho there's a lil delay that reminds me of playing transcontinental games. Albeit this was over local net, Ill be testing to see if my upstream can handle RDP at that high of quality tomorrow... Curiosity is fun.

Wicked!  That's a huge improvement in RDP in general, sounds like.

I installed 5.04
If I load a game from previous version and then I save it, when I try to reopen it, I receive an error message... 

Yep, the new 5.005 is now out, as bigdread points out.  So you're all set when you update to that one!

[x4000]

New one: http://www.arcengames.com/forums/index.php/topic,8440.0.html

[RogueThunder]

Wicked!  That's a huge improvement in RDP in general, sounds like.

Lol. The only bad news is it only supports OpenGL 1.2-1.4ish... Many games requiring OpenGL 2.0 or more. DirectX games seem to pretty much just work tho.