Is there an archive of old versions of AI War?

[eRe4s3r]

also takes 4 clicks to get in and out of.

All it takes is holding down the T key.

Ah.. that was the button for it.. can't build anything while holding the T key though ,p

I still think the removal of the minimap was not an improvement. I used it religiously whenever I was building fortress worlds or attacking/research raiding back in the day, simply because you always had a directional awareness where the other wormholes were in relation to your view. And where ships attacked.... or enemy ships were parked.

[x4000]

Supposing that we could render with the fidelity of the crysis engine and could do 10 million ships, though -- I'm still not sure it would meet what people imagine.

But we could do something quite fun, I expect.

[Draco18s]

Supposing that we could render with the fidelity of the crysis engine and could do 10 million ships, though -- I'm still not sure it would meet what people imagine.

You could always fake it.  Ship "swarms" (one graphic/game object depicting a dozen units).

[keith.lamothe]

Or text like "You know that dust cloud we're flying through?  That's not dust, those are fighters."

Going after the AI's main facilities would be better fit into a different game, engine and all.

[TechSY730]

also takes 4 clicks to get in and out of.

All it takes is holding down the T key.

Ah.. that was the button for it.. can't build anything while holding the T key though ,p

I still think the removal of the minimap was not an improvement. I used it religiously whenever I was building fortress worlds or attacking/research raiding back in the day, simply because you always had a directional awareness where the other wormholes were in relation to your view. And where ships attacked.... or enemy ships were parked.

Wasn't the minimap removed because it was really draining performance or memory or something?
I'm pretty sure they didn't remove for "kicks".

[LaughingThesaurus]

Or text like "You know that dust cloud we're flying through?  That's not dust, those are fighters."

Going after the AI's main facilities would be better fit into a different game, engine and all.

I was actually thinking that as I typed my post. My expectations wouldn't be set on anything more than something sprite based, although I would have expect the marks of things to go above V, and to have the established home-galaxy that we win in more base AI War games. Thus, the challenge is attacking another galaxy, establishing a foothold, and then moving on to key points... while the AI is trying to do the same to you.
Plays more like a fusion between AI War with a little bit of other RTS elements, like the AI can attack you and build defensive perimeters and bases in your own galaxy to move forward if you press it enough. Go too far, and well... the AI does have everything you can possibly imagine at its disposal. You don't want to go too far.
Mark III nukes would be involved if I were developing this game. Then they would be removed in alpha playtesting as a balance issue.

[eRe4s3r]

also takes 4 clicks to get in and out of.

All it takes is holding down the T key.

Ah.. that was the button for it.. can't build anything while holding the T key though ,p

I still think the removal of the minimap was not an improvement. I used it religiously whenever I was building fortress worlds or attacking/research raiding back in the day, simply because you always had a directional awareness where the other wormholes were in relation to your view. And where ships attacked.... or enemy ships were parked.

Wasn't the minimap removed because it was really draining performance or memory or something?
I'm pretty sure they didn't remove for "kicks".

I honestly don't know.. I just know it suddenly disappeared in the transfer to Unity. And that after we spend like a  year finding the optimal setting, sprite design and look for the minimap to be truly functional.

[Volatar]

Or text like "You know that dust cloud we're flying through?  That's not dust, those are fighters."

Going after the AI's main facilities would be better fit into a different game, engine and all.

I was actually thinking that as I typed my post. My expectations wouldn't be set on anything more than something sprite based, although I would have expect the marks of things to go above V, and to have the established home-galaxy that we win in more base AI War games. Thus, the challenge is attacking another galaxy, establishing a foothold, and then moving on to key points... while the AI is trying to do the same to you.
Plays more like a fusion between AI War with a little bit of other RTS elements, like the AI can attack you and build defensive perimeters and bases in your own galaxy to move forward if you press it enough. Go too far, and well... the AI does have everything you can possibly imagine at its disposal. You don't want to go too far.
Mark III nukes would be involved if I were developing this game. Then they would be removed in alpha playtesting as a balance issue.

Actually, we are on to something here. Sure the AI uses their shipyards to make their standard, small, human ships in large numbers and send them at the humans.

However, the AI is supposedly fighting the Spire. Those guys with the massive ships. Why would the AI be fighting the Spire's huge ships with little ships?

No, they would fight the Spire with their own large ship designs. AI created ones. Maybe they would even make them bigger than Spire ships.

The player would be able to build an Exo-galactic Warp Gate and head over to an entirely different network of systems (maybe all this takes place in the Andromeda Galaxy?) where the AI shipyards are. They could then - at great difficulty - capture some of these shipyards and turn these creations on the AI.

How do you balance this so that the player doesn't take these big ships back to the Milky Way and roll over the AI? Easy. Make the Andromeda wormholes bigger than the Milky Way ones. These new ships are simply too much for the Milky Way network wormholes. Little ships can go everywhere but the big ships cannot.

My imagination is running wild here. I imagine the AI and Spire locked into a stalemate in Andromeda (or the Spire in the midst of losing), and then you come in. You open a new front in that war, link up with the Spire, and beat down on the AI.

[keith.lamothe]

My imagination is running wild here.

Indeed it is

Not a bad thing, just bear in mind that it's not likely anything we did in that direction would bear any resemblance at all to what you're thinking.

[Volatar]

Note to self: Copy this to word doc when done. DO NOT PRESS POST!

------

Evil master plan steps

• 1 - Get to know Keith and Chris personally IRL.
• 1b - Take them out disc golfing
• 2 - weasel way into (unpaid?) internship at Arcen
• 3a - slowly manipulate them into accepting my ideas
• 3b - OR modify Arcen internal planning documents (and cover tracks) then run to Canada (or Asheville, that's probably far enough)
• 3c - OR place CD player on loop under Keith's bed that whispers my ideas during sleep hours (note: track Keith's sleep hours first)
• 4 - bask in the glory of grand warfare

The above is humor.

[doctorfrog]

also takes 4 clicks to get in and out of.

All it takes is holding down the T key.

Ah.. that was the button for it.. can't build anything while holding the T key though ,p

I still think the removal of the minimap was not an improvement. I used it religiously whenever I was building fortress worlds or attacking/research raiding back in the day, simply because you always had a directional awareness where the other wormholes were in relation to your view. And where ships attacked.... or enemy ships were parked.

Wasn't the minimap removed because it was really draining performance or memory or something?
I'm pretty sure they didn't remove for "kicks".

I understand that particular set of reasons for removing the minimap, but I suspect there were others as well, rooted in design philosophy, and a need to trim screen bits that many feel were extraneous.

I've argued (fairly quietly) before that the minimap doesn't need to render every ship that's out there. Or very many at all. Even a reduced-information minimap with simple glyphs representing the simple, immobile 'geography' of the planetary map would be helpful. Little, mobile dits representing larger spacecraft would be even better, circular blobs representing medium-sized clusters of ships would be still better.

So no, using 'T' and constantly zooming in and out doesn't do it all for me, any more than having an OS capable of only displaying single windows in fullscreen with no taskbar would work for me.

However, I am a user and not a programmer, and can only desire functionality without really knowing the costs that lie behind it. But as I said before, I think this is tied not just to programming difficulty or resource consumption, but some minor philosophical differences. And heck, Arcen's put out a game that agrees with me, I won't get all worked up about the 10% of things I don't like.

But I will mention it now and then!

[LaughingThesaurus]

I imagine though, the whole problem with the grand awesome warfare of fighting the AI where the bulk of their fleet is really the game engine. I've vaguely (detailedly) followed Ancient Shadows and remember hearing all of the ways that things that seem simple had to get done. Within the limitations of what AI War is set up to do, it seems at least unfeasible and at worst impossible to do something that amazing with the same game engine essentially.
This is purely me logic-ing around though. I don't know much about programming. I can probably print text on a screen in java but that's it. Point is, if we wanted something like that, we're essentially wanting "AI War 2: Spire Wars"

[x4000]

Reasons for removing the minimap:

1. In the old engine, we were able to use "sprite batching" to render a large number of blips really cheaply.  In the case of the new engine, that was not something I knew how to do until the last half year or so; without the Direct3DX extensions, that's a lot more involved to do in an efficient way (changing vertex geometry a lot can be really slow just as much as rendering in an unbatched form can be).  So there was a performance concern there, though even in the old game we were only rendering stuff that wasn't going to completely cover another blip.

2. Additionally, we simply don't have the screen real estate.  In the old version it sort of fit because we had less to show, but even there we were constantly fighting for screen real estate on that side of the screen.  If you play at the lowest supported screen resolution in particular.

3. Given the above two things, and the fact that pressing T could bring up something much larger and easier to see -- not to mention the zooming-out option -- we felt like that sort of option was both the most straightforward and functional at the time.

[eRe4s3r]

But "Minimap" under T is entirely unusable for anything, it nearly seems like nobody ever actually tested playing with it to be honest. Because whatever it's supposed to do.. it offers literally 0 Information or feedback. I mean.. If we got the way of a fullscreen overlay then what the heck is that grey thng supposed to even do?

FP 1000 Fortress World clear view (You can tell where everything is even from this view, so a MiNIMAP should offer SUPERIOR information flow)
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=103577877

FP 1000 Fortress World minimap (What?)
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=103577760

Wormholes can be covered by things build near them (my staggered turret defenses)
No wormhole names
No color coding except for wormholes (the ones you can see, that is)
No way to tell where the home station is at a glance
Grey on Grey
No labels for anything, (like groups?)
No way to tell what the white things are (they are dyson gattlings)

(By the way, this is a save from a setup where I just build endless parasites to swarm a superfortress in order to get that "100k killed ships" achievement from way back, cool to see it still works. ^^ You can tell how my fortress worlds are designed with a staggered lined defense that gets denser the closer the ships come to the wormholes too... those "arrows" are tractors and gravity turrets ,p

But this "pseudo" mini map is entirely useless, you can not even tell what is what. There is no option to filter, and there are no labels anywhere.

I am actually kinda inclined to give you a mockup to show how it should look ,p To be of any use at all.

To actually not sound entirely so negative. I think there is a good reason not to have a mini map as such.. but the "planet view" (I guess it was renamed in 6.000 or somesuch) is not an adequate functionality. It does simply not do what a minimap does. Mainly you can't click on anything. So it is not even useful where it could be useful. Maybe we ought to think about a proper overlay view that abstracts and filters out anything unimportant. But mocking something like that up is not easy ,/

To give you a VERY basic idea of what I envision when I press T (a proper planet view screen, that is) with filters like that... the GREEN thingy sets the text color and toggles text on/off, the "Star" is a toggle for color and icon shape..



I guess that is way out of scope at this point.. so just ignore my ramblings. I just think the current planet view serves no purpose.