Testing AI War 2

[Kahuna]

AI War 2 seems to have improved a lot since I last played it and it's almost playable now. However there are some problems and nuisances that make testing the game, bug hunting and giving feedback unfun (unless you're the type of person who likes alpha testing). Here's a list of problems that caught my attention.

#1. Tooltips don't work properly. When I mouse over buttons in building menus the game doesn't recognize it most of the time so I'm unable to see their tooltips. I can get it to work by pressing the middle mouse button and moving the camera and then moving the cursor back on the button in the menu.
#1.2 Sometimes mousing over a ship does literally nothing.
#2. Unable to hide the menu when the Ark is selected. It takes up quite a bit of screen space and gets in the way in combat. In addition the 3 second delay before the tooltip disappears seems too long. There's also the 3 second delay when deselecting a ship (the ship stays highlighted for ~3 seconds in a different color after deselecting). It feels quite wonky.   
#3. When starting a new the game, the game sometimes spawns you right next to the AI Controller which is where all the AI turrets and ships are. And some times clearing the first planet takes 10 minutes in-game time because of AI shields and shield guardians.
#4. I'm unable to unlock new technologies. Ok I found the tech button now. Imo the tech menu should be in the command station, science generator or there should be a research station.
#5. Infra buildings have no tooltips so I have no idea what each of them does. Turrets have no tooltips either but I can see their damage multipliers in their tooltips so that's ok for now.
#6. It's not possible to deselect units by simply clicking in the background.
#7. It's not possible to remove ships from building queue.
#8. It's not possible to double click a ship type to select all of them. (Or triple click to select all Mark levels of that ship type.)
#9. The galaxy map is always out of focus when I open it so I have to drag it with the middle mouse button every time.
#10. Moving the camera with the middle mouse button is way too slow and it's basically the only way to move the camera. In the Classic AI War it's possible to zoom in and out by pressing Q, W, E and R from maximum zoom to minimum zoom. In addition the camera moves faster sideways than it does forwards and backwards. Probably because of the camera angle how it's tilted. Imo it would look better if the camera was "more perpendicular" to the plane. Also rotating the camera by pressing Q and E doesn't seem to add any value so the camera could as well be locked from rotating.
#11. I have no idea how I can get more energy (besides capturing more planets?).
#12. Random explosion noises when the game is paused and literally nothing is going on. (Doesn't really make the game "unfun" to play per say but it's just weird)
#13. The icons of the ships, turrets and buildings look too similar. It's hard to tell them apart and they're too blurry. In the Classic AI War the graphics are sharper. In general all the buttons, symbols, icons, menus and the whole UI is sharper and more compact in the Classic AI War.
#14. There seems to be no keybindings in the options.

[BadgerBadger]

For #3, I think the "Start with first planet captured" really needs to be the default. Capturing planets seems to be balanced around having starships, so not having them makes it a brutal slog.

For #2,  There's a "Hide build menu" button on the bottom of the screen that will probably do what you want.

For #7, alt-click will remove a ship from the build queue. This isn't exactly obvious though.

Lots of useful critique here.

[keith.lamothe]

Very helpful feedback, thank you. Not much made it directly into 0.612 just now (had enough to chew through as it was) but I'll get to a lot of it soon.

#1 and 1.2 - yea, I need to rework the mousehandling there; it was set up to be "sticky" so you could mouseover the tooltip itself to get explanations of the icons that were there. But now we've gone back to text and I should get rid of the stickiness as it just makes it feel unresponsive.

#2 - big ol' button at the bottom of the screen to do exactly that, because that menu is huge.

#3 - solved in 0.612

#4 - maybe I could just make a tech button under the science display at the top of the screen?

#5 - those do have tooltips but the stickiness was evidently getting in the way in your case, hopefully those will be solved together

#6 - it works in my testing but perhaps there's an input bug that's selective about when it happens

#7 - it is, as Badger said, but I should change it to also respond to AIWC's right-click-to-remove behavior

#8 - I also need to add that; in general the mouse handling on a lot of stuff is still pretty primitive (left-single-clicks only) but I gotta handle that anyway

#9 - hmm, I can back that up; I should probably pull that value out into the external constants (a modder can change the "this.desiredBackupWhenMovingToPosition = 600;" line but they have to recompile the external project to use it).

#10 - these things are all tunable in the external camera code; I don't have a middle mouse button on my main computer (laptop with touchpad) so I haven't tested that recently.

On the perpendicular thing, you can use settings to switch to the topdown camera type for planet and/or galaxy view if you like

#11 - you used to be able to get it through research but I just nixed that because it was unintuitive (as you saw). Instead now turrets don't cost power, so that's less of an absolute limit (just research more turrets to get more turrets per planet). To get more power for other things like shields you can pick planets that are high in power and/or use the buildings that convert metal-income and/or fuel into power production.

#12 - yea, along with the explosion particles if you look close enough; I need to ask Chris to take a look at that, it's been going on forever

#13 - I also preferred the AIWC icons; I don't know how much can be done about that at this stage. The flairs (colorful lines under the icons) have started growing on me, though, because I can tell at a glance what has tractors, what has plasma (bad for my shields), where those annoying snipers are, etc.

#14 - yea, that's still only editable by file ( PlayerData/inputmappings.dat ) ; I need to address that.


Thanks