Author Topic: AI War 2 v0.606 Released! "Input-astrophe"  (Read 3377 times)

Offline keith.lamothe

  • Arcen Games Staff
  • Arcen Staff
  • Zenith Council Member Mark III
  • *****
  • Posts: 19,505
AI War 2 v0.606 Released! "Input-astrophe"
« on: November 15, 2017, 06:48:09 pm »
Release notes here!

This one is about input.

Camera input. Chris redid the entire camera system, and now it's much more configurable in the Settings window (and the code itself is massively moddable). The "Free Look" mode is a major new thing, but the default view is also very different, in response to player feedback about acceleration, etc.

Keyboard input. Each binding can now support more than one mapping, so both P and Pause/Break can trigger pause, etc. Several bugfixes and changes to make certain keys do what you would expect. Making the unit-commands context menu not open automatically to prevent conflicting with control group number input, and so on.

Mouse input. Added a much-requested feature from AIWC where bandbox selection ignores non-military ships unless they're the only thing there. Made clicking planets in the galaxy view do what it did in AIWC ("go there" instead of "select this"; you can still select with alt+click). Fixed a key bug that was preventing mouse interaction with ship icons.

Saving you lots of input. The new "budget policy" concept allows you to give high-level commands about how your metal should be allocated, from the simple "suspend spending until we've saved up" to the amusingly complex battle-support policy that has multiple levels of prioritization and looks at whether a unit is on a contested planet, etc. This is fully moddable, so if you want to script your economy you can just about do so.

There's a few other changes as well, including a helpful bit from community member BadgerBadger that reimplements AIWC's model of waves being planned, announced, and then launched after a countdown instead of just immediately spawned (previously the timer was a projected estimate of when it will be). It's great to see the modding tools put to good use :) Thanks, Badger!

(if you're wondering where 0.605 went, I think it had a run-in with the Devourer)

Enjoy!
Keith
Have ideas or bug reports for one of our games? Mantis for Suggestions and Bug Reports. Thanks for helping to make our games better!

Offline TheVampire100

  • Master Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 1,382
  • Ordinary Vampire
Re: AI War 2 v0.606 Released! "Input-astrophe"
« Reply #1 on: November 15, 2017, 07:51:17 pm »
For some reason the camera still does not move upwards when I reach the end of the screen. It works perfectly fine in any other direction but does not register the top part of the screen.
Any possible reason this might have? Something like resolution settings, not recognizing the window size according to the resolution or something like this, believing the window is larger than it actually is?
My current resolution is set to 1360x768 and the game widnow is also set to this but it might think the actual window is larger and does not notice, that I'm at teh end of the screen?

Okay, I experimented a little around and yes, it seems the game thinks my screen is larger than the window itself. I tested this in windowed mode, when the vursor is slightly above the window, the game registers this and pans the camera upwards but if its inside the screen/window, it does not take notice of it.
Also the cmaera works fine in Free Look Mode, where I can move upwards and the camera moves with it. Strange.
« Last Edit: November 15, 2017, 08:03:41 pm by TheVampire100 »

Offline Draco18s

  • Resident Velociraptor
  • Core Member Mark V
  • *****
  • Posts: 4,251
Re: AI War 2 v0.606 Released! "Input-astrophe"
« Reply #2 on: November 15, 2017, 09:38:48 pm »
Saving you lots of input. The new "budget policy" concept allows you to give high-level commands about how your metal should be allocated, from the simple "suspend spending until we've saved up" to the amusingly complex battle-support policy that has multiple levels of prioritization and looks at whether a unit is on a contested planet, etc. This is fully moddable, so if you want to script your economy you can just about do so.

You know some one will build a computational engine using it ;)
#RedstoneComputer

Offline FalseMyrmidon

  • Newbie Mark II
  • *
  • Posts: 24
Re: AI War 2 v0.606 Released! "Input-astrophe"
« Reply #3 on: November 15, 2017, 10:59:07 pm »
Keyboard inputs feel pretty good now.  I didn't notice anything different about the camera system but I didn't have an issue with it in the first place either.  Budgets need some kind of alert or something when they're preventing something from happening.  It's pretty hard to tell what, if anything, they're doing right now.

Offline BadgerBadger

  • Arcen Volunteer
  • Hero Member Mark III
  • *****
  • Posts: 1,229
  • BadgerBadgerBadgerBadger
Re: AI War 2 v0.606 Released! "Input-astrophe"
« Reply #4 on: November 16, 2017, 12:05:34 am »
I love the Top Down camera, a la AIWC. The game spends a lot less time in your way than it used to, which is great. I spent some time playing this evening, and here are a few comments.

I think the Settings menu is way too filled with unlikely-to-be-used options right now. We need to split it by topics. Main Camera settings (this means "planet view", right? I might call it Planet Camera or something more obviously descriptive), Galaxy Camera Settings, Sound settings, Window/UI, etc... right now it's hard to find what you are looking for.

Threat sometimes does this rubber-band thing with my fleet. I'll have my fleet on a planet then move it off the planet. Just as my fleet leaves the planet, the Threat shows up; Which is menacing and alert, sure, but half the time I'm still looking at the planet so I see the Threat fleet come in. As a result it's easy to defend against but rather annoying and unfun. I propose that as soon as a planet that the Threat is waiting on becomes weaker, the Threat waits some number of seconds before striking. That would make it less predictable. One other means of accomplishing this would be to just have the threat waiting on a different planet. To illustrate, lets say X is my planet, Y and Z are the AI planets and a wormhole is <-->, like so: X <--> Y <--> Z. Right now the Threat waits on planet Y camping the wormhole onto X. What if the threat were waiting on Z? Then it would take a few extra seconds to arrive, which would accomplish my desired waiting as well as making it a bit less obvious what the Threat is doing.

I really don't like that I now have to hit the extra ` to get to my Pursue button. I very often want to select a Ctl-group and toggle pursue and I don't like the extra button press. I think Pursue needs its own hotkey if we are putting Pursue behind a opening menu.

Fabs, ARS and so on need to show what Tech they'll grant, before I actually capture them.

This might be my fault, but waves are being a bit weird. I'm an hour and 70 progress into a game and I have a wave with a total of 13 ships incoming. It doesn't sound like much, but they're all Mark V. I kinda preferred the AIWC behaviour where the AI would hold back their high Mark ships till later in the game.

I'm wondering if I could get that behaviour back by tweaking the line
Code: [Select]
                buildMenus[i].AddEligibleItemsToBag( bag, faction, BuildMenu.EligiblityFilters.Standard );
to use MarkLevel_RequiredAIPLevel? This is where the AI picks which ships it gets to draw from for a wave.

There are some bugs in Nanocaust balance right now for me to investigate, but as a heads up I wouldn't use the Nanocaust unless you are just messing around. Speaking on the Nanocaust, right now the Galaxy "Threat" meter includes Nanocaust forces, which is quite deceiving (since the number will now always be > 20K, so it's not helpful). To check the Threat to be displayed the code checks
Code: [Select]
planet.GetLocalPlayerFaction().DataByStance[FactionStance.Hostile].ThreatStrength
How can I control whether the Nanocaust forces are Threat? If the Nanocaust is sending a fleet to attack you I should make sure it does get tagged as Threat, but not otherwise, so a means to control it would be desirable.
« Last Edit: November 16, 2017, 08:53:14 am by BadgerBadger »

Offline tadrinth

  • Hero Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 507
Re: AI War 2 v0.606 Released! "Input-astrophe"
« Reply #5 on: November 16, 2017, 01:41:01 pm »
 
Threat sometimes does this rubber-band thing with my fleet. I'll have my fleet on a planet then move it off the planet. Just as my fleet leaves the planet, the Threat shows up; Which is menacing and alert, sure, but half the time I'm still looking at the planet so I see the Threat fleet come in. As a result it's easy to defend against but rather annoying and unfun

In AIWC there was a mechanic added relatively late where the AI would count your unengaged mobile military as strength for all planets within three hops.  The idea being that if your mobile military is within 3 hops, they're likely to 'ride to the rescue' so the AI won't attack.  Once your military is tied up in a fight, or moves far enough away, then the AI stops counting it and attacks.

That seemed to work pretty well.  You can still bait the AI but you have to move your military fleet pretty far away, at which point there's significant risk involved.

Offline FalseMyrmidon

  • Newbie Mark II
  • *
  • Posts: 24
Re: AI War 2 v0.606 Released! "Input-astrophe"
« Reply #6 on: November 16, 2017, 02:28:04 pm »
I tried the tutorial last night.  Nuking the final AI planet spawned AI avengers which popped through the wormhole and killed everything.

I'm not sure how to reveal cloaked ships.  I had a tachyon array on a planet and all the cloaked ships just flew around impunity destroying everything and were never revealed.  The description for the tachyon array makes some kind of reference to not having enough of them but I can only build one?

Also, is there a attack move command/modifier?
« Last Edit: November 16, 2017, 02:32:12 pm by FalseMyrmidon »

Offline BadgerBadger

  • Arcen Volunteer
  • Hero Member Mark III
  • *****
  • Posts: 1,229
  • BadgerBadgerBadgerBadger
Re: AI War 2 v0.606 Released! "Input-astrophe"
« Reply #7 on: November 16, 2017, 09:30:24 pm »
Hey Keith, super minor Nanocaust bug. This version of Nanocaust.cs contains a one liner fix (moving where we check for Nanocaust Influence; I was having it set the Influence whenever a nanocaust ship was on a planet, not where a Nanobot Center was on a planet).

Offline BadgerBadger

  • Arcen Volunteer
  • Hero Member Mark III
  • *****
  • Posts: 1,229
  • BadgerBadgerBadgerBadger
Re: AI War 2 v0.606 Released! "Input-astrophe"
« Reply #8 on: November 17, 2017, 11:11:20 pm »
As the Muse of Discord, I come bearing some comments from darkarchon:

new camera is much better
ui scale at 0.5 is actually a good size
but fonts are tiny now
missing the ability to see turret ranges when building turrets
Camera still a bit floaty, also how are you supposed to build any defense with that low energy
How am I supposed to turtle?

and Captain Taz
Turtling for life
I have so many screenshots of my turtling its not even funny

And from me:
I wish some of the backgrounds in AIW2 really looked more like what I think of as Space; black, some stars, a few background features, like AIWC. I actually managed to get Unity running and spent a few minutes trying to make a background like it, but then I was reminded that I have zero artistic skill and Unity is confusing for a novice. I realize AIW2 has a different look and feel to it, but it just doesn't feel like "Space".

I see there's some forthcoming variety for wormholes in the next build. Cool! I had a thought; what if one wormhole style was done to feature some Red and be Menacing, and then whenever a wave was incoming through that wormhole, the wormhole would be changed to be the Menacing wormhole. No idea if this is possible/in budget, but it's an idea to think about.

I booted up AIWC, and in AIWC when you were prepared to build a turret it would show that turret's range on screen (ie the icon of the ToBeBuilt turret would be surrounded by a circle showing its range). This is probably a worthwhile feature to hold onto.
« Last Edit: November 18, 2017, 12:01:15 am by BadgerBadger »

Offline lessster

  • Newbie Mark II
  • *
  • Posts: 23
Re: AI War 2 v0.606 Released! "Input-astrophe"
« Reply #9 on: November 18, 2017, 11:21:40 am »
For some reason the camera still does not move upwards when I reach the end of the screen. It works perfectly fine in any other direction but does not register the top part of the screen.
Any possible reason this might have? Something like resolution settings, not recognizing the window size according to the resolution or something like this, believing the window is larger than it actually is?
My current resolution is set to 1360x768 and the game widnow is also set to this but it might think the actual window is larger and does not notice, that I'm at teh end of the screen?

I have exactly the same problem. I'm playing in fullscreen mode (resolution 1920x1080) and can only scroll left, right and downwards, but not upwards when I move my mouse. Using the keyboard I can scroll in all 4 directions.

Game version ist 0.606.