AI War 2 v0.527 Released! "Factious AI"

[keith.lamothe]

Release notes here!

This one is all about new AI Types and being able to choose between them in the Lobby.

There's some neat new personalities in there (I'm especially fond of "Brawler", but I always did love the Burlusts), but the more important thing is all the framework necessary to have different factions have their own set of dropdowns in the lobby, so we can support variable-intensity special factions later on, etc.

On the subject of modding, some significant improvements were made to how you can define XML entries in terms of other entries, and more specifically to how the AI's unit "draw bags" are populated.

There's also a fix to a bug that had broken the ability to start a multiplayer game. Thankfully the sim itself was staying in sync fine, there was just a null exception in the lobby for the non-hosts, when trying to show certain information.

Enjoy!
Keith

[x4000]

Regarding AI types, is that still something that is going to be set for only some of the planets at a go, or did that get wiped in our rework for the second kickstarter?  I honestly don't remember.  I was thinking there were still going to be localized groups of behaviors in clusters of planets, but I may be way off base.

[keith.lamothe]

Regarding AI types, is that still something that is going to be set for only some of the planets at a go, or did that get wiped in our rework for the second kickstarter?  I honestly don't remember.  I was thinking there were still going to be localized groups of behaviors in clusters of planets, but I may be way off base.

Still doing the regional AI thing, it just hasn't been implemented yet. A lot of the work for this one was necessary to support multiple AI factions, and in general move "the AI" towards something that's more flexibly implemented.

[x4000]

Makes sense to me!  And good to hear.

[BadgerBadger]

I ran some multiplayer experiments.

Good news! Multiplayer now lets the extra player actually capture planets. This makes the game actually playable.

Bad news: performance is terrible. It takes 8-10 seconds for a button press on the client to be reflected on the client. Machines are: OSX laptop as host, linux desktop as client.

Also, there should be some mechanism for the player who doesn't capture a planet to get science from it.

[x4000]

Were there errors being thrown on the client?  The log from that client would be useful, because a steady stream of errors would result in something like what you saw.

Beyond that, was the framerate okay but the buttons were mysteriously unresponsive?  That would be something else, potentially, than if the framerate was horrible and the responsiveness matched.

[BadgerBadger]

I repeated my experiment again, and now I note something interesting. The time delay I see seems to be matched by the "Time" counter in the top left. My host thinks the game is at 1:30 and my client thinks the game is at 1:21. Commands issues on the client (make your ark move) are immediately visible on the host at (say) 1:45, but the client then has to wait for its in-game clock to be 1:45 before the command is visible.

This starts from the very beginning of the game. When I hit "Start Game" on the host it immediately starts, but the client seems to have an 8 or 9 second delay before it gets the "game has started" message.

After some time I also saw messages like
10/20/2017 12:46:22 PM   Waiting On Server, at frame 142
10/20/2017 12:46:22 PM   Waiting On Server, at frame 142
10/20/2017 12:46:22 PM   Waiting On Server, at frame 142 <=== this is the start of the game.
10/20/2017 12:50:31 PM   Waiting On Server, at frame 2631
10/20/2017 12:50:31 PM   Waiting On Server, at frame 2631
10/20/2017 12:50:32 PM   Waiting On Server, at frame 2631
10/20/2017 12:50:32 PM   Waiting On Server, at frame 2631 <=== this one now repeats and the game seems to be desync'ed, since the client clock has stopped advancing.



I did actually hit a crash (0019255) when repeating my experiment.

[x4000]

Whew, okay -- that's a good one for mantis as well, then.  If it's simply a time sync issue, then that's vastly less intrusive than something larger with the GUI or whatever.  Multiplayer sync things are never fun and so that's it's own rate-hole of course, but at least it's a more limited-in-scope one (I hope, for Keith's sake).