So I downloaded the demo for the game two days ago, after learning about it on Impulse. As I haven't yet been able to play a full campaign (just actually bought it, and haven't been able to complete a campaign on the demo 
) I'm kinda sad, but it is an amazing game from what I've played so far.
Hey there, thanks for your support of the game, and welcome to the forums! I'm really glad you've been enjoying it so well so far.
Btw, just wanted to say that x4000 is both insane and amazing, for taking on the whole process of devving by himself, and being so interactive with the community 
.
Thanks! It's fun for me, so that really helps. If I didn't enjoy what I was doing, I wouldn't be able to do it.
And this game has some kickass music too... I am curious though, why is it all in .ogg format? All the sounds are in .wav, but the actual, composed music, is in .ogg... out of curiosity, is there any reason for that, other then an attempt at anti-piracy? Not even that sounds like good reason to have it in that format, as you had your whole DRM shpeal on the website, and you can easily use Audacity to convert it to .mp3... but I digress . Anyway, I am curious, and wouldn't mind an answer .
I'll pass that along to our composer -- I know he'll be pleased. He did a terrific job, and I feel like he doesn't get quite as much general recognition as his work deserves. So I'm always glad to be able to pass along great feedback to him! The reason why the music is in ogg format actually has nothing to do with piracy -- you can easily play ogg files in most music players, and of course you can easily convert to mp3 if need be for an ipod or whatever other device. No, the reason we avoided mp3 is because to use that format actually requires that we pay a royalty on every sale to the mp3 overlords. For that reason, almost no games use mp3 -- most go with ogg, or some other format. I went with ogg because it is free, open source, gaining in popularity, compresses well, and because I found a great decoder for it in C#.
1. How big is the online community? I noticed a distinct lack of an online mode, just LAN, and after reading your post on how the games take 10hr each and are unplayable if somebody bows out it makes sense to not have one... but is the community big enough /organized enough for a decent amount of games to be going on?
Right now there are maybe half a dozen (more?) people at Relic News who try to play weekends, and then there are a couple of dozen or so people here, a few of which who have expressed interest in multiplayer (and meet up either through the Hamachi network we have, or the IRC channel), the rest of whom mostly seem to play single player or with friends at the moment.
The thing to remember right now is that the game is still very new, so everything is in a constant state of growth. We had absolutely zero exposure before launch, which was May 10, and then during the first few weeks before we came to Impulse, we had practically zero visibility and sales. So almost all of our sales have come since May 26, when we got on Impulse -- as you can see, we're one of the best-selling games on Impulse since that point, but for a variety of reasons our exposure is still not what I would call super-high. We're working on that with various other distribution channels, review sites, general gaming news sites, etc, but these things simply take time (no one is more eager on that front than myself and Pablo, I can assure you!).
A number of our players have also taken it upon themselves to talk about the game in other various forums they belong to, and that has also really helped our visibility, but again it's all still just in a state of early growth. Given the long nature of these games, and the way in which you really must work together, this is designed primarily around play with friends -- via LAN or the Internet -- rather than with strangers. If you're interested in meeting some new people to play with, the Meeting Grounds forum or the IRC channel are probably the best places to start.
With any RTS game, it seems that less than 5% or 10% of the playerbase actually play online multiplayer (just looking at the numbers for units sold versus registered online players for other popular games), and in our case so far, I think the number is even lower -- so far. But if you're interested in that sort of thing, posting on the Meeting Grounds is a great idea. These things tend to snowball, so the more people that post that they are interested, the more likely other new people are to come by and post.
At some point in the future, I would be interested in adding support for GameSpy or XFire or something, as a way for players to meet and connect. We don't have the server capacity to create something like that on our own at the moment (though my background is in web-based database servers, so it would be a good fit in many respects), and I'd prefer to partner with someone outside for that anyway, both to help visibility and to give players something they are otherwise familiar with. That was probably a more exhaustive answer than you were expecting, but hopefully that is helpful.
2. Are you planning on implimenting a system of unit formation? When you right-click now it bothers me that they all converge to one spot, then randomly disperse to the nearest empty space... You know the hold-both-mouse-buttons-down-and-be-able-to-organize-your-units stuff in most modern RTS's? Is there a reason AI Wars lacks that?
No, I don't plan on implementing that -- yes, I am familiar with that from other RTS games, but it seems to be a cosmetic whiz-bang sort of thing, and not something that is actually purposeful. I feel like it would actually be detrimental to the best unit strategies during combat to do formations. Here's another thread that addresses this more thoroughly:
http://arcengames.com/forums/index.php/topic,173.0.html3. Has anybody beaten a level 10 AI? o.O
Not to my knowledge.
Most people seem to be maxing out at level 7 right now, which is where I also play. There might have been someone playing an 8, but I'm not sure. I don't even know if a level 10 AI is possible to beat, but basically I balanced the game so that there would still be several levels of difficulty higher than what I am comfortable with (7), so that players who are a lot better than me will still have something to do!
4. People use some sort of VOIP client to talk... right? A campaign would be hellish, if not worse, if I had to go 10 hours typing out "Move now" and "No, take this planet", and junk like that. I guess this is another "How organized is the community?" question .
Oh yeah -- there's a thread on this in the technical support forums. We have an official teamspeak server that you are welcome to use, but personally I just use open Skype calls. But whatever you prefer is just great! We didn't build in voice capabilities of our own because 1) that's not what we're best at, and 2) there are already so many other free solutions out there that are cross-game compatible, and most people already seem to have a solution they would prefer to something we would cook up (or license) ourselves. But yes, we definitely don't expect you to be typing everything out!
5. (@ x4000) Did you create this game on your own, from scratch? If so, you deserve many a cookie .
Thanks! I did indeed do all of the programming. I used SlimDX as a DirectX wrapper, I used an Ogg Vorbis decoder, a graphing component for the in-game graphs... and I think that's all. Anything else would be in the credits document. But anyway, the engine is completely custom and coded from scratch in my spare time.
6. Is there any noticable lag online? Or over LAN, rather...
Most people who play the game play it over the Internet, not just over LAN. The older versions of the game said "Find LAN Games" which was misleading -- it now says "Join Multiplayer Game," with more options in there for how to find more players, etc. If you are playing on a broadband connection, there is not much if any noticeable lag online. My alpha group of four players has been playing this game biweekly since last November, with 60,000+ ships in many games and no lag.
A few players have posted about moderate to extreme lag in the forums, but I think there is something else going on there outside from the game. In one case it was computers that were way below the minimum system requirements (which is fine, often), but which were in a game of 100 planets that lasted over 25 hours so far -- with machines meeting the minimum requirements, that would be fine, but with ones that are 2/3 of the minimum cpu power that is pushing it a bit. However, that was a CPU bottleneck on the host, and not a network bottleneck, and I've put in a few optimizations in 1.009 that will hopefully solve the problem for them (we'll see next week, when they get back to their game).
The only other reports of lag that I have had were indeed network-related, but my current theory is that there was something else going on on on of their networks at the time (torrent seeding, video streaming, something). The resolution on that one is still pending. But as for everyone else who has been playing online, I have not heard any other reports of lag.
7. (@ x4000) You seems *extremely* active on the forums, especially for a single dev. I'm curious if you're to be found playing a campaign or two with the community .
Unfortunately, I only have time for my weekly sessions with my alpha group at the moment -- that's as much testing as it is playing, and I doubt the community would be real happy with stops for a quick code update to the current prerelease, etc.
The main limiter for me, really, is time -- I do spend a lot of time here, as well as coding the game, as well as working on the next game (a puzzle game) that Arcen is going to put out. So, at least in the short term, that leaves me comparably little time for actual play.
EDIT: 8. Open source? Upon reading some more posts here, I came to the conclusion that at least one person has it... Is Revenantus special, or is the open source just out there ? Not that I have anywhere *near* the skills neccissary to do anything with it, but I would love to see the source for an RTS, especially one where the AI doesn't suck 
.
Nope, it's not open source -- no one has the source for the game but me. Revenantus is creating his charts, etc, based on some xml exports that anyone can now use the game to create (you can see how by looking all the way at the bottom of the controls document in 1.009 or later). Parts of the code for things like the AI, or fixed-int math, etc, I have opened the source for on my blog or at places like StackOverflow. My blog has a lot of information about the design and some about the code, both regarding the AI and otherwise. I have more articles planned, too, but that has been one thing that has slipped in the last few weeks just because I am so crunched for time that something had to give. :p
So now that I typed all that up it seems to all come down to, mostly, a single question... how organized /mature is the community?
These forums are the center of the community, so you can judge that for yourself, I imagine. We have a couple of dozen regulars, maybe a dozen really frequent contributors. Most of the forums posts are regarding suggestions/feedback right now, particularly as regards the cycle of prereleases, but we're also getting a growing set of people talking and sharing strategy, as well. That's blossomed into a fullblown Community Wiki, but that's very new.
Every day we get at least one new member, it seems, and of course there are new players in general every day since our sales are pretty steady, but we're still new and growing. We're one of the bestsellers on Impulse, but outside that and a few other communities online, we are still little known. Of course, you're welcome to help with that -- a lot of our success outside of Impulse has been from players spreading the word!
p.s. Sorry for the inorganization of the post, I'm just too tired /lazy to fix it right now 
No worries, it doesn't bother me a bit.
Thanks for taking the time to post!
