AI War 2 v0.516 Released! "UI Scaling and Rally Commands"

[keith.lamothe]

Release notes here!

This one contains a few quality-of-life improvements from prolific community-member BadgerBadger, and two features that range from the minor to the major depending on how you play:

1) UI Scaling
New slider on the settings menu, defaults to 1 and you can bring it down from there if you've got a very pixel-dense display or otherwise just want to make the gui not take up so much screen space. This will make it harder to read.

2) Rally Commands
You can now tell one of your unit producers to have its newly-produced units "rally" to one of your control groups. That will put them in the target group, but will also have them find the "primary" (strongest) unit in that group and catch up to it, even if that means flying halfway across the galaxy and re-routing as the thing moves around.

Translation: your starship constructor can now send your replacement starships to catch up to your Ark or other main force wherever it happens to be

Both features have plenty of room for improvement, so please let us know what you think.

Enjoy!
Keith

[BadgerBadger]

Changing the UI scaling while in the game seems to break things. There is no UI after updating the scaling. 0/10

However, setting the UI scaling then closing and restarting AI War 2 leaves one with a very pleasantly scaled UI.  10/10

Rallying is great. Two issues. First, I can't figure out how to create a new control group.  I select a bunch of units, then opened the Menu ==> Control Groups ==> CreateNew. Now I theoretically have a new control group. But I have no idea how to again select those units. Hitting "2" doesn't do it (the way hitting 1 re-selects my Ark). Clicking the number 2 on the bottom doesn't do it. And the Rally seems only to know about control group 1. I'm not sure it works at the moment.

Second, I sometimes want to be able to just rally things to a planet. I suppose I could set the planetary controller as my control group, but what happens when the attacking AI troops blow up the controller? Would my rally stop, even though I could keep sending ships to the planet?  One solution would be to let me set a planet as a control group (this would be handy; lets say I have control groups 7, 8 and 9 as my primary defensive planets during a CPA. I could really quickly bounce between them to make sure my defenses were holding up.

[keith.lamothe]

Changing the UI scaling while in the game seems to break things. There is no UI after updating the scaling. 0/10

Does the log have any errors? It's possible that in the process of re-initializing the UI (which it does in a very thorough way as part of a scale change, down to reparsing the xml iirc) it's hitting something that prevents it from completing the process, leaving you with no visible UI.

If it's not that it sounds like another platform-specific problem because changing scale mid-game works great for me, even if I'm using the buggy-as-all-get-out fullscreen mode.

First, I can't figure out how to create a new control group.  I select a bunch of units, then opened the Menu ==> Control Groups ==> CreateNew.

That creates it just fine, but it doesn't assign anything.

The hotkey in AIWC was Ctrl+2 to assign to control group 2. Of course, in this game that would... scrap them Very funny, computer.

So I need to add a way that actually does it. Probably something that looks a lot like setting the rally-to group, but it sets the control group of the selected units.

Second, I sometimes want to be able to just rally things to a planet. I suppose I could set the planetary controller as my control group, but what happens when the attacking AI troops blow up the controller? Would my rally stop, even though I could keep sending ships to the planet?

It depends on whether the controller is removed from the control group when it reverts to neutral. Which it probably should be.

Either way, yes, there needs to be some way to rally to a planet, not just a control group.

[BadgerBadger]

Well, on OSX I can't even load the game, I get about a dozen errors like the following, followed by the UI not appearing.

Code: [Select]

A script behaviour (probably FXAA?) has a different serialization layout when loading. (Read 32 bytes but expected 44 bytes)
Did you #ifdef UNITY_EDITOR a section of your serialized properties in any of your scripts?
 
(Filename: /Users/builduser/buildslave/unity/build/Runtime/Serialize/SerializedFile.cpp Line: 1895)

A script behaviour (probably ISRTSCamera?) has a different serialization layout when loading. (Read 32 bytes but expected 232 bytes)
Did you #ifdef UNITY_EDITOR a section of your serialized properties in any of your scripts?
 
(Filename: /Users/builduser/buildslave/unity/build/Runtime/Serialize/SerializedFile.cpp Line: 1895)

A script behaviour (probably AmplifyBloom.AmplifyBloomEffect?) has a different serialization layout when loading. (Read 32 bytes but expected 892 bytes)
Did you #ifdef UNITY_EDITOR a section of your serialized properties in any of your scripts?
 
(Filename: /Users/builduser/buildslave/unity/build/Runtime/Serialize/SerializedFile.cpp Line: 1895)

A script behaviour (probably SgtBeltModel?) has a different serialization layout when loading. (Read 32 bytes but expected 44 bytes)
Did you #ifdef UNITY_EDITOR a section of your serialized properties in any of your scripts?
 
(Filename: /Users/builduser/buildslave/unity/build/Runtime/Serialize/SerializedFile.cpp Line: 1895)

A script behaviour (probably FXAA?) has a different serialization layout when loading. (Read 32 bytes but expected 44 bytes)
Did you #ifdef UNITY_EDITOR a section of your serialized properties in any of your scripts?
 
(Filename: /Users/builduser/buildslave/unity/build/Runtime/Serialize/SerializedFile.cpp Line: 1895)

A script behaviour (probably FXAA?) has a different serialization layout when loading. (Read 32 bytes but expected 44 bytes)
Did you #ifdef UNITY_EDITOR a section of your serialized properties in any of your scripts?
 
(Filename: /Users/builduser/buildslave/unity/build/Runtime/Serialize/SerializedFile.cpp Line: 1895)

On linux the game immediately starts to misbehave as soon as I apply the UI scaling. There's nothing in the unity log or the Arcen log to indicate a problem though. Fortunately, while this is a problem, it's an easy workaround (just restart AI War 2).

[keith.lamothe]

Well, on OSX I can't even load the game, I get about a dozen errors like the following, followed by the UI not appearing.

Wow, nasty. Looks like it got very confused about those four classes, if it only saw 32 bytes for all four of them despite very different actual size. Probably related to something not building properly for OSX. I've asked Chris to look into that one since I don't have a mac.

[BadgerBadger]

I did a bit more investigation with the settings/UI change problem. Turns out that the game doesn't unpause automatically when you click "Close" or "Save" from settings; is there a reason for this?

Once you change the UI scaling then no UI elements reappear after you Save the Settings, and no keyboard shortcuts seem to work. You can still control your fleet and send it through a wormhole. If you change the settings from the "Start Game" menu (ie before you've started a game) then the "Start New Game" button does not work (you can click on it but nothing will happen). The "Load Game" button will let you load a game, but once you load the game it won't be responsive to most commands.

[Sounds]

Game locks up on start. Is this new?

[BadgerBadger]

@Sounds, that's the error I was hitting on OSX. Which OS are you running?

[BadgerBadger]

Also, is this new message at start time on linux important:
<previous output>
Started listening to [0.0.0.0:55346]
Preloaded 'ScreenSelector.so'
Unable to preload the following plugins:
   ScreenSelector.so
PlayerConnection already initialized - listening to [0.0.0.0:55346]
<more output>

[Sounds]

@Sounds, that's the error I was hitting on OSX. Which OS are you running?

Whoops, I was so in a rush I forgot to mention that bit. 

Yes. It is on macOS 10.12.6 to be exact.

I so wish I had time to test this game further, but I'm very snowed under with my own work load these last 9 months that there's insufficient time to even boot up the game itself, let alone actually kick the tyres.

Oh well, keeping it positive: here's hoping that it all works out in the long run.

[BadgerBadger]

Yeah, .516 has some issues. You also can't load games (you get immediate deserialization errors, even on a brand new game). See mantis 0019229.

[keith.lamothe]

Yeah, .516 has some issues. You also can't load games (you get immediate deserialization errors, even on a brand new game). See mantis 0019229.

Yea, sorry about that, found it myself yesterday and fixed it. Just a stupid case of me reading a 32-bit int when it's actually a 64 (it could theoretically do it just fine, but enforcing that keeps the serialization order cleaner).

Spent yesterday on the new external-data architecture...

[keith.lamothe]

Ok, 0.517 is out with a fix to the load-game problem, a change to how the mac build is built so that hopefully it doesn't die so hard, and the stuff in the release notes. I'll put up an announcement later but I need to run.