Prerelease 1.013H (Shot special effects, new title screen, improved backgrounds)

[x4000]

UPDATE 1:  Version F makes some other improvements to the new title screen.

UPDATE 2:  Version G makes the title screen less busy, while still showing the chaos of a pitched battle and showing off the special effects at close range.

UPDATE 3:  Version H removes all of the battle stuff from the title screen.  Something else (much calmer, just visual with no battles) will be done in it's place later.


The Latest prerelease is now out: http://www.arcengames.com/share/AIWar1013H.zip

That version is an upgrade from version 1.012, so you have to already have 1.012 (or greater) installed. Just unzip it into your game folder (usually C:\Program Files\Arcen Games\AI War\ unless you specified something else). Please make sure that your unzip process keeps the folder structure from the zip file, rather than just unpacking all of the files into the base target directory.

What's new since 1.013D:
(Cumulative release notes since 1.012 are attached at the bottom)

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-Silent battles are now waged at the sart screen, showing off a lot of the new special effects as well as just some of the battle mechanics in general.  This also serves as a fun way to preload some of the ship graphics and thus cause the initial load of the game itself to be faster.

-All of the shot special effects have been greatly improved using additive blending and other related techniques.  Missiles now have a smoke trail, and all shots are larger (large enough that they can actually be seen from a lot of the far zoom distances).

CHANGES FROM PAST PRERELEASES
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-The star backgrounds have been improved once again, now looking more muted as well as forming better-defined shapes rather than just amorphous clouds.

[darke]

*twitch* I just moused over one of the ships on the title screen going "oooh, I haven't seen that one before, wonder what it's damage is" only to be quite perplexed as to why the stats didn't pop up in the corner. I think I've played this game too much.

Things do look rather busy, it will be interesting to see how well this works in game.

[CautiousChaos]

heh heh...  Yep, the title screen got very busy, too busy.  As a caveat, I did check it out at like 3am, but it was difficult to follow what was happening.  Possibly if the number of ships was reduced or the the zoom level was reduced it would make it feel a lot less like random zaps of color.  Cool idea, though somewhat of a jolting "hello" when starting the game. 

[eRe4s3r]

Well, very nice backgrounds now! ;P
I like zem effects
I like the patch
And with backgrouds darker now the lines for supply are not *so* bad (bright)
Missiles and shots look really nice now ;p

Well this update really changed the game a lot (again) - have not found anything odd yet 
Cool update!

Large battles look really cool now in Z1 or Z2

[x4000]

Glad you guys like it in general.  Too busy, hmm?  Lars (Fiskbit) was telling me basically the same thing last night right after the release.

The main thing is, I wanted a huge amount of explosions and activity on there, and I wanted the chaos of being right in the midst of one of the huge battles.  Having too few ships feels like the battles are too small, unfortunately.

So what I did was actually make the ships stay invisible, which then just highlights the special effects, and I took out everything with multi-shot abilities since that causes a huge influx of shots onscreen, and I halved the number of units again (which makes little practical difference for my explosions now, since the effective damage is jacked up something like 13X in order to make this battle happen more quickly).  Let me know what you think:  http://www.arcengames.com/share/AIWar1013G.zip

EDIT:  I will, of course, be interested to hear how well you guys think this works in the actual game, too.  Strangely, all of these change actually serve to improve performance, probably because less scaling has to be done on the shots since they are now larger.  Also, even from a distance now (Z1 or Z2, as eRe4s3r notes), you can clearly see what is going on in battles.  And from even further out, you can tell where the sniper shot lines are coming from, etc!  Not only does this make the game more attractive at several relevant zoom distances, I think it makes it a lot more playable at the middling zoom depths because you can see what is happening so much better.  Does this increase visibility when you are very far zoomed in?  Probably not, most likely a small step in the wrong direction, but you already could not effectively manage large battles there, anyway, so Z0 is effectively just the eye candy view anyway when it comes to battles, the only use for Z0 is either that or looking at non-currently-embattled stuff.  And even in smaller battles, I think visibility is improved at Z0, because you can now visibly track the shots across the screen rather than having trouble telling what direction they are coming from, etc.  I'll be interested to hear what everyone else thinks, though.

[Revenantus]

Thoughts/Suggestions

The new weapon effects look great in far zoom and are very informative, however when zoomed in they look slightly exaggerated and excessively large next to the ships that fired them - my suggestion would be to scale them down beyond a certain zoom threshold. I'm especially pleased by the smoke trails on the missiles!

The star maps look much better in their new more subtle form.

Unfortunately I must say that I greatly dislike the weapon effects on the main menu, I find the rapidly fluctuating colours very distracting. My suggestion would be to procedurally generate an action-heavy combat scene and then display a still copy of this in the background, with the ships visible.

Bug Report

IMPORTANT: The game hangs and crashes when I click the Host New Campaign button on the main menu. I can load existing save games but cannot start new campaigns. This is on Vista32.

If the player quits to the main menu whilst they have units selected the text, 'Selected Units: None', is displayed at the bottom left on the title screen.

Occasionally when quitting to the main menu from a game the weapon effects will not be drawn. Unable to find specific circumstances that cause this to happen.

On one particular instance of the main menu a flashing red Cruiser II was drawn on the background, and remained there for the duration of my time on the menu. Unable to find any specific circumstances that cause this.

EDIT: Holding A on the main menu draws selection circles around all the invisible ships.

[CautiousChaos]

In the name of honest feedback, I also dislike the weapons effects in the main menu.  I can clearly see your vision behind the changes, though for me personally it comes across as a chaotic or random display of colors and not the thick of battle. 

Another idea for conveying the scope of the battles may be to show fleet movements where ship counts are high (500+ units) attacking an opponent fleet of the same size.  You'd need to zoom out a bit to see that scope, but it would put more context into the effects that are displayed.  As it is now zoomed in all the way it really is tough to "see" what is causing all of the miasma of colors and explosions. 

Weird Worlds, a Return to Infinite Space did a great job of accomplishing what their space battle experience was like, but they also had far, far fewer units to focus on and the pace of battles was no where near as frenetic. 

Any way you go, the title screen isn't going to stop me from playing, but today it does make me want to get past it a bit quicker. 

-cc

[eRe4s3r]

Dynamically scaled effects would indeed be quite useful, maybe not for explosions but for firing effects ;p I would go so far to even say that all effects are a bit too big, but especially the missiles and those round things , thats at Z1 and Z2 (i have the icon fade range set to that it fades half way between Z1 and Z2)

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But i agree with Revenantus and CautiousChaos that the BG shouldn't be moving, or indeed show any battle scene at all, i am also more an "needs to be calm and relaxing" guy when it comes to menus - I could contribute this image (mine) - http://ere4s3r.deviantart.com/art/Blue-Serenade-Planet-Pt-2-121616845 - for background use in the main menu if that would help? Is large enough not to be scaled even for 22" lcd users  ;p

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There is also one nagging thing - those round things with trail look really odd (what bombers shoot) even odder than the missile trails but more so because they.. look weird

[x4000]

Thoughts/Suggestions

The new weapon effects look great in far zoom and are very informative, however when zoomed in they look slightly exaggerated and excessively large next to the ships that fired them - my suggestion would be to scale them down beyond a certain zoom threshold. I'm especially pleased by the smoke trails on the missiles!

Added to my list.

The star maps look much better in their new more subtle form.

Glad you like it!

Unfortunately I must say that I greatly dislike the weapon effects on the main menu, I find the rapidly fluctuating colours very distracting. My suggestion would be to procedurally generate an action-heavy combat scene and then display a still copy of this in the background, with the ships visible.

Hmm.  It would be difficult to do that.  What if it was just the explosions and not all the shot effects?  Or maybe I'll just remove this feature entirely.  Phil is quite possibly going to create some sort of new image for the title screen anyway, so that might make this all moot.  But I like having some life and action in there, I think that serves the game well.

IMPORTANT: The game hangs and crashes when I click the Host New Campaign button on the main menu. I can load existing save games but cannot start new campaigns. This is on Vista32.

I cannot duplicate.  I'll fire up Vista to test a bit later, but do you have the errors files that it created when it crashed?  I'd need to see those.

If the player quits to the main menu whilst they have units selected the text, 'Selected Units: None', is displayed at the bottom left on the title screen.

Added to my list.

Occasionally when quitting to the main menu from a game the weapon effects will not be drawn. Unable to find specific circumstances that cause this to happen.

Yeah, I noticed that, too.  I'm not certain what the exact cause of that is yet.

On one particular instance of the main menu a flashing red Cruiser II was drawn on the background, and remained there for the duration of my time on the menu. Unable to find any specific circumstances that cause this.

Hmm, okay.  That does give me something to go on.

EDIT: Holding A on the main menu draws selection circles around all the invisible ships.

Added to my list.

[x4000]

In the name of honest feedback, I also dislike the weapons effects in the main menu.

Honest feedback is the only kind I want, and I definitely don't want people to bite their tongues, either.  If everybody hates this, then it needs to go.  What do you think about explosions only, as I mentioned above?

I can clearly see your vision behind the changes, though for me personally it comes across as a chaotic or random display of colors and not the thick of battle.

I can see your point there.

Another idea for conveying the scope of the battles may be to show fleet movements where ship counts are high (500+ units) attacking an opponent fleet of the same size.  You'd need to zoom out a bit to see that scope, but it would put more context into the effects that are displayed.  As it is now zoomed in all the way it really is tough to "see" what is causing all of the miasma of colors and explosions.

Yeah, that might work.  Maybe that would make the whole thing seem less chaotic and more inline with the regular game experience, anyway.

Weird Worlds, a Return to Infinite Space did a great job of accomplishing what their space battle experience was like, but they also had far, far fewer units to focus on and the pace of battles was no where near as frenetic. 

Any way you go, the title screen isn't going to stop me from playing, but today it does make me want to get past it a bit quicker. 

Points taken.  This is why I do the prereleases, after all.

[x4000]

Dynamically scaled effects would indeed be quite useful, maybe not for explosions but for firing effects ;p I would go so far to even say that all effects are a bit too big, but especially the missiles and those round things , thats at Z1 and Z2 (i have the icon fade range set to that it fades half way between Z1 and Z2)

The main thing is that the effects simply were not visible before even when really zoomed in, and a lot of people complained about that, so I've made them more visible.  But I'll see what I can do to scale them more down when zoomed in further.  I think that the ability to actually see what is going on in the battles when zoomed further out is really key.

But i agree with Revenantus and CautiousChaos that the BG shouldn't be moving, or indeed show any battle scene at all, i am also more an "needs to be calm and relaxing" guy when it comes to menus - I could contribute this image (mine) - http://ere4s3r.deviantart.com/art/Blue-Serenade-Planet-Pt-2-121616845 - for background use in the main menu if that would help? Is large enough not to be scaled even for 22" lcd users  ;p

I really want to make any background that is there out of component parts, so that it doesn't have to be scaled for any crazy resolution that is out there, so I think I'm going to stay away from static images even with Phil.  But I'll work on something that is more calm, perhaps with ships just floating serenely by, etc.

There is also one nagging thing - those round things with trail look really odd (what bombers shoot) even odder than the missile trails but more so because they.. look weird

Yeah, I took the trails off the energy bombs already for the next release.

[eRe4s3r]

Here is a bit of a change about the missiles and trails

They are now much less chaotic (imo)

Not a mod, but missiles are still very visible - also energy bombs changed

I used the latest rel as base and applied level , brightness range 0 - 100 (from 0 - 255) to each of them, i don't touch the other effects though, these are not really as spammed as missiles (i have a lot of MRLS ;p)

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Modular BG it is then

[x4000]

Here is a bit of a change about the missiles and trails

They are now much less chaotic (imo)

Not a mod, but missiles are still very visible - also energy bombs changed

I used the latest rel as base and applied level , brightness range 0 - 100 (from 0 - 255) to each of them, i don't touch the other effects though, these are not really as spammed as missiles (i have a lot of MRLS ;p)

Those particular versions are not quite to my liking (they lose some of their punch), but your point is well taken.  I'll look into it more.   The main issue that I have with the ones you did is that they start looking rather dull instead of bright, and also they are way less visible.

Modular BG it is then

[eRe4s3r]

Well was just an example eh! I need some stuff for my own big mod after all ;p

[x4000]

Well was just an example eh! I need some stuff for my own big mod after all ;p

Sure thing.