Video Dev Diary for February 10th!

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Now available on kickstarter: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/arcengames/ai-war-ii-0/posts/1804536

Cheers!

[BadgerBadger]

So I'm curious how Keith does a good multiPlayer game by himself. does he run from comPuter to comPuter moving mice frantically? Use virtual machines?

[Misery]

Wow, the game is really coming along, isn't it?  Looking really good.

I'm curious, when does the alpha phase start?  Or whatever it is?  Are you doing like a closed phase first, or letting in a bunch of us for the initial test?  You might have mentioned this before but heck if I can remember.

Either way, cant wait to give it a try whenever it becomes available.

[Tridus]

I'm curious, when does the alpha phase start?  Or whatever it is?  Are you doing like a closed phase first, or letting in a bunch of us for the initial test?  You might have mentioned this before but heck if I can remember.

Either way, cant wait to give it a try whenever it becomes available.

Soon:

Alpha: End Of This Month!

We're looking quite on schedule for that.   No promises on how horrible the GUI will still be for the first build for you alpha folks, but a lot of the visual stuff will have been filled out further by then.

Multiplayer, Linux, OSX, and Windows will be available from day one of the alpha. 

If you have trouble running the game on your system on day one for performance reasons, then I'll go ahead and say right now -- please TELL me!  With you alpha folks, I'm particularly counting on that.  I have four good computers representing a range of capabilities for me to test on, but there are always surprises. 

In response to those things I can both optimize in unexpected places as well as providing toggles for simply turning off some visual whiz-bang bits for machines that can't handle those bits.  But I'm definitely counting on you alpha folks to tell me rather than just assuming it will get better without saying anything!

Early Access At The End Of May!

We're still looking great for the Early Access launch at the end of May, too, and of course well before then the GUI will be massively cleaned up and improved.  In large part thanks to feedback from the alpha folks, I have no doubt.

And yep, the "sometime in October" schedule for 1.0 is still holding steady, too.

Our production of ship graphics has been substantially slower than we desired originally in terms of the final models, but we're also putting out much higher-quality work than we originally expected.  In my original pitch for 3D with this game, I never expected to be doing fully-painted models, but we figured out a way to do so (and thus massively improve the look of the game) without completely destroying the budget and without sacrificing much in the way of performance thanks to LODs.  It's a worthwhile improvement that I'm footing the overage bill for.

[keith.lamothe]

So I'm curious how Keith does a good multiPlayer game by himself. does he run from comPuter to comPuter moving mice frantically? Use virtual machines?

When I test MP I just run two instances of the game in separate windows (processes). So it's not a good latency test, but it accomplishes the basic "does MP stay sync'd?" purpose, and that's the one that gets super tricky to fix if it's not right.