Prerelease 3.163 (Bugfixes, Perf+, ForegroundObject refactoring)

[x4000]

The latest beta is available via the Updates window in version 3.060 or greater of the game.  Just open the game and you can quickly download the prerelease through the updates tab.  If you don't yet have 3.060 or greater, you can download 3.060 here.  This prerelease version is compatible with any vendor's version of the game -- Steam, Impulse, whatever.

Note:  If you have bug reports related to this release, please log them in the bug reports subforum with one bug per topic.  It makes things infinitely easier for us.  Thanks!

Looking for a Patch That Can Be Manually-Installed?
Because of the time involved in creating multiple versions of each patch, we only create manually-installable patches for official versions of the game, not each beta prerelease.  But you can easily create your own manually-installable beta patch!  Please note that current betas can only be successfully applied to version 3.060 of the game or later (if you later wish to revert to the official version for any reason, you can download the full raw files from the above link to do so).

To create your own manual beta patch, simply download these two files:
1. Current Beta Director Xml File.
2. Current Beta Zip File.

If you try to open that zip file, it will say it's corrupt -- that's okay, it's not really a zip file.  Finally, create a new zip file on your computer, and put both the director and the fake-zip-file inside it.  Call your outer zip file something that starts with Beta and ends with an extension of .zip.  Beta.zip will work just fine, or you can name it after the specific version number if you want to hang onto it.  And that's it!  Now you have your very own manually-installable package of the AI War beta version of your choice, which you can install by simply selecting via your Updates window in the game.  Please note that "Beta" in the filename is case-sensitive.

What's new since 3.160:
(Cumulative release notes since 3.120 are here http://arcengames.com/mediawiki/index.php?title=AI_War_-_Current_Beta)

-------------------

    * Fixed a bug in how the AI was calculating threat assessments in the last release.

    * Some more efficiency improvements to the AI thread.

    * A new, Unity-friendly way of handling version numbers has been implemented.

    * A major refactoring in the internal codebase has taken place, fixing a number of bugs and also leading to some performance gains (mainly RAM more than CPU, but also some CPU).

    * In recent prereleases, sometimes the resource nodes were moving from some savegames. Fixed.

Updates in 3.162:

    *  Fixed bug in recent versions where the try-protection throttle was letting the wrong ships through and never having room left for some units (so they didn't get protections from forcefields, etc).

    * Fixed bug where heavy beam cannons could shoot at astro trains but would never actually hit them.

    * Fixed a bug in the last version where lightning turret (and similar) explosions were being drawn offset from where they should have been.

    * Ships belonging to allied minor factions no longer are picked up by tugs.

    * Fixed a bug that was causing engineers to bunch up on ships in an ineffectual manner.

Updates in 3.163:

    *  More internal optimizations that make loading savegames faster than ever, reduces RAM use a bit more, and somewhat lowers the overhead of having a lot of ships moving around in the galaxy. Also makes rendering lots of ships on the screen slightly more efficient, and corrects a few display-related bugs.

    * With these latest changes, the positions of harvesters loaded from past savegames will unavoidably be off by a small amount (this has little effect other than visual), but new harvesters that are placed will be in the proper locations. Other ships may also be off by a tiny amount, but same thing with them.

[Volatar]

Sweet! More efficiency!  I love performance improvements (though I hardly need them with my awesome computer)

[Buttons840]

    * A major refactoring in the internal codebase has taken place, fixing a number of bugs and also leading to some performance gains (mainly RAM more than CPU, but also some CPU).

Shouldn't it say "and also leading to a whole new set of bugs."    That seems to be the story of most refactors.

[x4000]

Yup, for sure.  Hence why I'm doing this now, when we still have another two weeks before an official and even longer before the conversion to Unity, rather than trying to have that lumped in with something that needs to be more stable.  Refactors do lead to more bugs in the short term, but without refactoring you get a product that is increasingly crap over time, heh.  AI War would have collapsed under its own weight a long time ago if Keith and I weren't so diligent on the refactoring. But, yeah, bug influx coming.

[RCIX]

It's crazy! if you looked back over in 2.somethingsomething, you'd think you'd have gotten all the performance you could out of the game -- but now you see that there's still more or less constant boosts! *head spins*

[x4000]

Yep, for sure.  And Keith and I are both itching to get the game into the Unity deep profiler, too.

With Empire Earth 2, they reused the same engine from EE1, but also added in a ton more detail, etc, which you would think would have made EE2 much slower than EE1.  Instead, they also got a 400% boost in speed out of it.  Granted, they then messed it up so that it ran slower anyway for other reasons, at least on my machine, but the core engine speed was reputedly 400% better.  Iterative development is good.  I think that's why the Unreal Engine and some of those other industry-standard ones are able to do what they can do, it's that constant engine refinement.

[superking]

I was wondering, why is the gaurd post so fragile? it is a much larger sprite than the turrets surrounding it, yet it considerably weaker

[x4000]

I was wondering, why is the gaurd post so fragile? it is a much larger sprite than the turrets surrounding it, yet it considerably weaker

Well, I guess I could answer that two ways:

Method 1: Well, turrets and so forth used to have less health, and ships did less damage, but then that was rebalanced while the non-military stuff (including guard posts) was left the same.  This makes guard posts, resources, etc, all die faster compared to what they had initially (back in alpha) been balanced for.  That in turn made for a faster game (if you can believe it, it was unbearably slow for a while there in alpha), which is more fun to play.

Method 2: Semantically, these aren't armored and aren't units of priority for the AI, so they die pretty fast despite being large.  A 747 is easier to break than a Humvee, despite the fact that the 747 is larger, etc.

It might be something to revisit soon, to bump up the health on these, but I'm not entirely sure.  Possibly I'll introduce variable types of guard posts, with varying degrees of health, instead.  That might be more interesting overall.

[Buttons840]

I like the attack of the guard posts.  That 5 damage can really save the day for the AI.

[x4000]

  I forget why, but at one point it was important for them to have a token attack value to be considered military targets, etc.  I think the game has evolved such that that no longer matters, but that's why it was originally there.  Guard posts have not seen any substantial changes in a LONG time.

[superking]

different varities of gaurd post sounds fun

[x4000]

Updates in 3.162:

    *  Fixed bug in recent versions where the try-protection throttle was letting the wrong ships through and never having room left for some units (so they didn't get protections from forcefields, etc).

    * Fixed bug where heavy beam cannons could shoot at astro trains but would never actually hit them.

    * Fixed a bug in the last version where lightning turret (and similar) explosions were being drawn offset from where they should have been.

    * Ships belonging to allied minor factions no longer are picked up by tugs.

    * Fixed a bug that was causing engineers to bunch up on ships in an ineffectual manner.

[keith.lamothe]

It's crazy! if you looked back over in 2.somethingsomething, you'd think you'd have gotten all the performance you could out of the game -- but now you see that there's still more or less constant boosts! *head spins*

Yea, with all the boosts it keeps getting I wonder how it even ran at version 1.0

I'd be really interested to see apples-and-apples performance comparisons between, say, 2.0, 3.0, 3.060, 3.120, and the latest prerelease.  I just don't have time

Now if I could just optimize how much time *I* take to do things

[x4000]

Well, I can tell you from memory that it used to start chugging at around 40k units, and it became basically unplayable at 60k (on a 2.4Ghz Q660 Quad Core).  This was around 1.0.  Most games had around 20k units in them at most, then.  Since that time, a lot has changed and the game has almost doubled in scale, actually, which is something not a lot of people realize.  The battles are way larger than they were at 1.0, the AI guards wormholes and has stuff all over the place, which they didn't used to do (just guard posts, nothing at wormholes), and so on.

So a lot of the performance improvements that were made had to be made in order to support the growth of the game in that fashion.  But on the flip side, we also reduced our system requirements from 2.4Ghz to 1.6Ghz based on a lot of the performance improvements, and we moved from max effective ships being around 80k at 2.0 to currently being around 175k.  So a lot of the performance improvements are either helping lower-end hardware play it, or people on monster hardware play the insanely-large games.  And the people in the middle benefit from generally larger games and less lag during the attendantly larger battles, etc.

But yeah, it would be cool to take an old savegame and do benchmarks against all the various major versions at some point.  Maybe later this year, if there's time.

[Buttons840]

Updates in 3.162:

    *  Fixed bug in recent versions where the try-protection throttle was letting the wrong ships through and never having room left for some units (so they didn't get protections from forcefields, etc).

    * Fixed bug where heavy beam cannons could shoot at astro trains but would never actually hit them.

    * Fixed a bug in the last version where lightning turret (and similar) explosions were being drawn offset from where they should have been.

    * Ships belonging to allied minor factions no longer are picked up by tugs.

    * Fixed a bug that was causing engineers to bunch up on ships in an ineffectual manner.

Is this a challenge to find more bugs?