This one is basically AVWW 1.0, unless a showstopper bug comes up between now and Monday that we need to slip in. Otherwise all further changes to the game will be post-release content. :)
Specifically, this version fixes a crash bug that cropped up in the last 3-4 versions based on a bug in unity. The release notes have all the technical details, including how other unity devs can work around the problem.
The crash bug was a fairly tame one as far as crash bugs go, because you had to alt-tab out of your fullscreen game for 10+ minutes for it to then crash. But still that's not the sort of thing you want going into an official build by any stretch.
Presuming nothing bad comes up in the meantime, the next batch of stuff is planned hit on late Monday. Enjoy!
This is a standard update that you can download through the
in-game updater itself, if you already have 0.500 or later. When you
launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found
if you're connected to the Internet at the time. If you don't have 0.500 or later, you can download that here.
Showing posts with label Beta Updates. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Beta Updates. Show all posts
Friday, April 20, 2012
AVWW Beta 0.970 "Release Candidate 1" Released!
This one is basically AVWW 1.0, unless a showstopper bug comes up between now and Monday that we need to slip in. Otherwise all further changes to the game will be post-release content. :)
Presuming nothing bad comes up in the meantime, the next batch of stuff is planned hit on late Monday. Enjoy!
This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have 0.500 or later. When you launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found if you're connected to the Internet at the time. If you don't have 0.500 or later, you can download that here.
Presuming nothing bad comes up in the meantime, the next batch of stuff is planned hit on late Monday. Enjoy!
This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have 0.500 or later. When you launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found if you're connected to the Internet at the time. If you don't have 0.500 or later, you can download that here.
Thursday, April 19, 2012
AVWW Beta 0.934 "Dastardly Lasers" Released!
This one is the second of what hopefully will only be three releases today. It contains a number of fixes, including a key fix to the "lasers" that were causing unhandled exceptions when you were in stealth mode. There's also a few other minor balance and sound effect things in there, too.
More to come soon. Enjoy!
This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have 0.500 or later. When you launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found if you're connected to the Internet at the time. If you don't have 0.500 or later, you can download that here.
More to come soon. Enjoy!
This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have 0.500 or later. When you launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found if you're connected to the Internet at the time. If you don't have 0.500 or later, you can download that here.
AVWW Beta 0.933 "The Classic Choice: Orb Or Slice" Released!
This one is probably the second-to-last release prior to 1.0. There will be another release later tonight, and hopefully that will be the last one unless some critical bugs are found overnight.
The current release has a variety of fixes and tweaks that players had asked us for, as well as a fairly good-sized list of things that we kept meaning to get to but never had time for until now.
Lots of sound effect additions again, and both the mechanics of The Deep and of stealth sections have been dramatically improved. Also energy pulse has been split into two spells: energy orb and energy slice. See the release notes for details as well as the full list of all the other changed stuff!
More to come soon. Enjoy!
This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have 0.500 or later. When you launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found if you're connected to the Internet at the time. If you don't have 0.500 or later, you can download that here.
The current release has a variety of fixes and tweaks that players had asked us for, as well as a fairly good-sized list of things that we kept meaning to get to but never had time for until now.
Lots of sound effect additions again, and both the mechanics of The Deep and of stealth sections have been dramatically improved. Also energy pulse has been split into two spells: energy orb and energy slice. See the release notes for details as well as the full list of all the other changed stuff!
More to come soon. Enjoy!
This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have 0.500 or later. When you launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found if you're connected to the Internet at the time. If you don't have 0.500 or later, you can download that here.
AVWW Beta 0.932 "The ATI Salve" Released!
This one has a whole lot of cool stuff in it, and you should totally check out the release notes. I'd tell you more about it, but I-am-so-exhausted.
The brief version: massive performance boost on ATI in particular; control scheme improvements for non keyboard+mouse players; miscellaneous fixes; less insanely difficult battlefields.
More to come soon. Enjoy!
This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have 0.500 or later. When you launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found if you're connected to the Internet at the time. If you don't have 0.500 or later, you can download that here.
The brief version: massive performance boost on ATI in particular; control scheme improvements for non keyboard+mouse players; miscellaneous fixes; less insanely difficult battlefields.
More to come soon. Enjoy!
This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have 0.500 or later. When you launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found if you're connected to the Internet at the time. If you don't have 0.500 or later, you can download that here.
Tuesday, April 17, 2012
AI War Beta 5.033 "And Other Times There Are A Few Too Many Ponies" Released!
This one is mainly more balance based on the "worst unit of all time" polls. Interestingly, with last patch's improvements to the harvesters we actually went a bit too far -- so, yeah, we're totally taking that pony back. ;) More interesting is what is getting buffed this time, which includes the Neinzul Enclave Starships and the Armored Warheads.
Some History On Armored Warheads, For The Curious
The armored warheads in particular have been an ongoing bugbear for me since AI War was just having released its 1.0 version. I think that lightning and armored warheads were the first two "free DLC" ships to come out for the game, but I could be mistaken.
At that point the armored warheads were something of a safety valve for when a target you needed to kill was impenetrably well defended and you just couldn't get at it any other way. In that circumstance, you could basically just pay a fee in AIP (that was more or less how the armored warhead worked) and then Get That Thing Dead Now.
That was useful, but again only as a safety valve and only when you were already doing pretty bad to begin with. It could let you turn a stalemate into a victory (or into a hastened defeat if the AIP increase proved to be too much, as it often did). So it was a pretty interesting mechanic, and I think it worked really well.
Of course, then the game changed all around it. I'm reminded of the old man's house in the movie Up, where his house never changed but there are skyscrapers all around it rather than the rest of his neighborhood. How depressing! I think the armored warhead must feel a bit like that.
Because, fact is, the need for a Get That Thing Dead Now (in exchange for AIP) unit has pretty much dissipated. The way that AI forces and player forces are balanced, and the way that players can use tactics to take apart pieces of a planet rather than having to engage the entire planet at once, have really altered things. It used to be that if you went to a planet, you had pretty much better have been ready to take on everything at that planet. And that was then, as now, often quite infeasible.
Armored warheads are something we've thus updated every so often as the game has evolved, trying to find a new niche for them, but the simple fact is they just don't fit super well anymore. It looks like the current set of changes to them that Keith plus the players came up with are good ones, and certainly bring them back into the realm of usefulness. As he notes in the release notes, though, they are still "rot your teeth" sort of options that you only pull out when it's already going poorly.
That's as good a role as any for them at this point, and it's definitely the direction I would have gone myself as well, but it's certainly nothing compared to the glory days that the armored warheads once had. I just thought I'd point out that they weren't always such a strange blend of powerful and useless, since most newer players wouldn't have any context as to why they existed in the first place.
About The Neinzul Enclave Starships
These are another interesting sort of case. They were obviously added as part of our second expansion, and in some respects I had imagined them as being the flagships of the neinzul fleets. After all, with the short-ranged neinzul youngling ships you really need a mobile factory of some kind to crank those out right at the battlefield.
Problem is, these have always been too expensive in terms of knowledge to be worth it, and then we added the player warp gates and that really further reduced the need for a mobile factory. Back before the player warp gates I had been worried about the unbalancing effects of having a "super factory" that would basically replace the space dock in terms of being the go-to unit. Goodbye beachheads and a whole bunch of other stuff.
Well, as fate would have it, the game evolved a ton since then anyhow. The enclave starships got further marginalized, and I agree they've turned into one of the more useless ships. So now it's actually pretty cool to see them as these mobile death-star-like ships they're suddenly turning into. Or at least a star destroyer, I'd have to say. ;) The mark IV one still has to be prohibitively expensive in terms of knowledge or it breaks all kinds of things, but the mark I-III ones are now really enticing, I have to say. I look forward to seeing what other folks do with these, and I have a feeling I'm going to start using these a lot more myself, too.
Enjoy!
This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have 4.000 or later. When you launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found if you're connected to the Internet at the time. If you don't have 4.000 or later, you can download that here.
Some History On Armored Warheads, For The Curious
The armored warheads in particular have been an ongoing bugbear for me since AI War was just having released its 1.0 version. I think that lightning and armored warheads were the first two "free DLC" ships to come out for the game, but I could be mistaken.
At that point the armored warheads were something of a safety valve for when a target you needed to kill was impenetrably well defended and you just couldn't get at it any other way. In that circumstance, you could basically just pay a fee in AIP (that was more or less how the armored warhead worked) and then Get That Thing Dead Now.
That was useful, but again only as a safety valve and only when you were already doing pretty bad to begin with. It could let you turn a stalemate into a victory (or into a hastened defeat if the AIP increase proved to be too much, as it often did). So it was a pretty interesting mechanic, and I think it worked really well.
Of course, then the game changed all around it. I'm reminded of the old man's house in the movie Up, where his house never changed but there are skyscrapers all around it rather than the rest of his neighborhood. How depressing! I think the armored warhead must feel a bit like that.
Because, fact is, the need for a Get That Thing Dead Now (in exchange for AIP) unit has pretty much dissipated. The way that AI forces and player forces are balanced, and the way that players can use tactics to take apart pieces of a planet rather than having to engage the entire planet at once, have really altered things. It used to be that if you went to a planet, you had pretty much better have been ready to take on everything at that planet. And that was then, as now, often quite infeasible.
Armored warheads are something we've thus updated every so often as the game has evolved, trying to find a new niche for them, but the simple fact is they just don't fit super well anymore. It looks like the current set of changes to them that Keith plus the players came up with are good ones, and certainly bring them back into the realm of usefulness. As he notes in the release notes, though, they are still "rot your teeth" sort of options that you only pull out when it's already going poorly.
That's as good a role as any for them at this point, and it's definitely the direction I would have gone myself as well, but it's certainly nothing compared to the glory days that the armored warheads once had. I just thought I'd point out that they weren't always such a strange blend of powerful and useless, since most newer players wouldn't have any context as to why they existed in the first place.
About The Neinzul Enclave Starships
These are another interesting sort of case. They were obviously added as part of our second expansion, and in some respects I had imagined them as being the flagships of the neinzul fleets. After all, with the short-ranged neinzul youngling ships you really need a mobile factory of some kind to crank those out right at the battlefield.
Problem is, these have always been too expensive in terms of knowledge to be worth it, and then we added the player warp gates and that really further reduced the need for a mobile factory. Back before the player warp gates I had been worried about the unbalancing effects of having a "super factory" that would basically replace the space dock in terms of being the go-to unit. Goodbye beachheads and a whole bunch of other stuff.
Well, as fate would have it, the game evolved a ton since then anyhow. The enclave starships got further marginalized, and I agree they've turned into one of the more useless ships. So now it's actually pretty cool to see them as these mobile death-star-like ships they're suddenly turning into. Or at least a star destroyer, I'd have to say. ;) The mark IV one still has to be prohibitively expensive in terms of knowledge or it breaks all kinds of things, but the mark I-III ones are now really enticing, I have to say. I look forward to seeing what other folks do with these, and I have a feeling I'm going to start using these a lot more myself, too.
Enjoy!
This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have 4.000 or later. When you launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found if you're connected to the Internet at the time. If you don't have 4.000 or later, you can download that here.
AVWW Beta 0.931 "Sometimes One Pony Isn't Enough" Released!
This one is, again, all about the fixes and polish -- in keeping with our agenda for the next week. We'll be back to content updates next week, once we hit 1.0.
This one is really all over the place in terms of what it addresses. Battlefield missions have some teeth again. Continents now get harder as you go, up through continent 5, to counterbalance your own growth in power through enchants. Multiplayer has seen a ton of fixes and updates and is looking mighty clean unless you tell us otherwise.
NPCs are easier to find in buildings now. The nova/fireball cursor thing is a lot more subtle by default now, but you can also adjust its size depending on your preferences. We took another go at the "My Little Ponies" fix, since the first one didn't do the job. Those one-high sections in basements and attics, which were so commonly trapping people to their frustration, are now a thing of the past.
And then lots of other minor miscellaneous polish that plows through a lot of our list of what players were most wanting fixed. Still plenty more to do tomorrow and Thursday before hopefully hitting a final 1.0 build for Friday morning, but we're getting there!
More to come soon. Enjoy!
This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have 0.500 or later. When you launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found if you're connected to the Internet at the time. If you don't have 0.500 or later, you can download that here.
This one is really all over the place in terms of what it addresses. Battlefield missions have some teeth again. Continents now get harder as you go, up through continent 5, to counterbalance your own growth in power through enchants. Multiplayer has seen a ton of fixes and updates and is looking mighty clean unless you tell us otherwise.
NPCs are easier to find in buildings now. The nova/fireball cursor thing is a lot more subtle by default now, but you can also adjust its size depending on your preferences. We took another go at the "My Little Ponies" fix, since the first one didn't do the job. Those one-high sections in basements and attics, which were so commonly trapping people to their frustration, are now a thing of the past.
And then lots of other minor miscellaneous polish that plows through a lot of our list of what players were most wanting fixed. Still plenty more to do tomorrow and Thursday before hopefully hitting a final 1.0 build for Friday morning, but we're getting there!
More to come soon. Enjoy!
This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have 0.500 or later. When you launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found if you're connected to the Internet at the time. If you don't have 0.500 or later, you can download that here.
Monday, April 16, 2012
AVWW Beta 0.930 "Bugfixes Are Always Better When They Involve Ponies" Released!
This one is all about the fixes and polish, in keeping with our agenda for the next week. We'll be back to content updates next week, once we hit 1.0.
The biggest news with this one is incredibly-better gamepad support. You can customize your analog noise filtering sensitivity and everything, and map up to 8 different axes if you have some sort of crazy flight control stick that you want to play the game with (hey, we're not here to judge). There's still more to do on the controls front to make the keyboard-only action and gamepad-only action a bit smoother, but we're getting quite close with those.
Beyond that there are really a lot of fixes here, especially for multiplayer. More to come tomorrow on those as well, but it's excellent progress towards as spot-free a 1.0 as we can get. Regarding the title of this release, there is a driver issue with some ATI cards where you literally get better vastly performance by playing My Little Ponies videos in the background while playing AVWW. I'm not joking. Hopefully this version will let the affected folks fix that issue without the involvement of cute ponies.
More to come soon. Enjoy!
This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have 0.500 or later. When you launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found if you're connected to the Internet at the time. If you don't have 0.500 or later, you can download that here.
The biggest news with this one is incredibly-better gamepad support. You can customize your analog noise filtering sensitivity and everything, and map up to 8 different axes if you have some sort of crazy flight control stick that you want to play the game with (hey, we're not here to judge). There's still more to do on the controls front to make the keyboard-only action and gamepad-only action a bit smoother, but we're getting quite close with those.
Beyond that there are really a lot of fixes here, especially for multiplayer. More to come tomorrow on those as well, but it's excellent progress towards as spot-free a 1.0 as we can get. Regarding the title of this release, there is a driver issue with some ATI cards where you literally get better vastly performance by playing My Little Ponies videos in the background while playing AVWW. I'm not joking. Hopefully this version will let the affected folks fix that issue without the involvement of cute ponies.
More to come soon. Enjoy!
This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have 0.500 or later. When you launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found if you're connected to the Internet at the time. If you don't have 0.500 or later, you can download that here.
Sunday, April 15, 2012
AVWW Beta 0.929 "Leafy Black Smoke" Released!
This one is mostly a content update to add some new spells. Now that the mana changes in the prior version are in place, it was time to start adding more spells at various points along the spectrum. So now we have leafy whip, clinging fetor, cleft smoglet, and flameout for your enjoyment.
The other thing that we're trying to do here right at the last is make sure that each of the six elemental colors has enough spells that you can realistically specialize in them. Up until now that hasn't really been possible, because you've had to really play cross-color in order to get access to all the various styles of spells.
The goal now isn't to make all the colors homogeneous -- they each should play differently and have their own style of spells beyond the basics -- but to make it so that each one is more self-contained within itself, if that makes sense. For the purposes of offensive combat spells, anyhow. When it comes to logistical, defensive, and movement spells you'll be crossing colors like crazy no matter how you choose to play (and it won't really matter, because enchant buffs don't apply to non-combat spells in an elemental sense, typically).
There are also a couple of key bugfixes in here, as well as improved visibility for the mouse cursor during combat (which lots of people complained about).
More to come soon. Enjoy!
This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have 0.500 or later. When you launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found if you're connected to the Internet at the time. If you don't have 0.500 or later, you can download that here.
The other thing that we're trying to do here right at the last is make sure that each of the six elemental colors has enough spells that you can realistically specialize in them. Up until now that hasn't really been possible, because you've had to really play cross-color in order to get access to all the various styles of spells.
The goal now isn't to make all the colors homogeneous -- they each should play differently and have their own style of spells beyond the basics -- but to make it so that each one is more self-contained within itself, if that makes sense. For the purposes of offensive combat spells, anyhow. When it comes to logistical, defensive, and movement spells you'll be crossing colors like crazy no matter how you choose to play (and it won't really matter, because enchant buffs don't apply to non-combat spells in an elemental sense, typically).
There are also a couple of key bugfixes in here, as well as improved visibility for the mouse cursor during combat (which lots of people complained about).
More to come soon. Enjoy!
This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have 0.500 or later. When you launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found if you're connected to the Internet at the time. If you don't have 0.500 or later, you can download that here.
AVWW Beta 0.928 "Achieving The Leading Causes Of Death " Released!
This one was supposed to come out yesterday, but then, well... it grew. A lot.
Achievements
So, not that long ago we weren't sure if we'd have time to have these at all. Then a few days ago I was saying we'd probably have 15-20 or so for 1.0, and then get to more later on. Ah... yeah. This version adds 104 achievements, which will be the sum total of what we do in terms of achievements for 1.0; and we will indeed add more after 1.0, too. Did I mention that they all have unique art? That's a lot of icons...
Lots Of Other Miscellany, And The Last Of The "Things We Learned At PAX East" Stuff
So, yeah. The release notes are long, and varied. A goodly number of fixes for multiplayer, and lots of fixes for solo also. In no particular order, here were some particularly salient changes:
- The randomly generated professions of NPCs on continents beyond the first is now a lot more friendly.
- Warp gate function is now clearer based on a second sign seeding in them, and you can also now use warp gates without actually entering them (handy if you're not being chased by monsters and want to save a tiny bit of time).
- Wooden platforms work oh-so-much-better now. You can make literal staircases with them that you can just walk up by moving to the side. And you don't fall through them crazily anymore when it looks like you shouldn't and you're walking across multiple of them. And they hang onto background walls that are near sky a lot better now. All in all: holy cow, these are completely different and better. And there were some small camera improvements to the Y axis to support this, and that also makes a subtle improvement in terms of smoothness, too.
- Ridiculous numbers of more changes to the intro mission to make things briefer and clearer wherever possible, and to hopefully instill the idea that tactics actually matter when choosing your attack position, etc. We also put in a lot more safeguards to prevent some of the more common shooting-yourself-innocently-in-the-foot cases that people were commonly getting into.
- This one is huge: the recharge rate for mana is now about twice as fast, but most characters also get less mana. The full rationale is in the release notes, but basically: a) waiting around for mana recharge isn't fun; and b) having some characters that have access to high-mana spells that other characters can't even wield is really interesting, but only when they can actually cast those higher-mana spells with a good degree of frequency as well. All in all the idea is to make mana a more valid and interesting gameplay choice to focus in, although obviously that will depend partly on the new spells we'll be adding soon to really make that pop.
More to come soon. Enjoy!
This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have 0.500 or later. When you launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found if you're connected to the Internet at the time. If you don't have 0.500 or later, you can download that here.
Achievements
So, not that long ago we weren't sure if we'd have time to have these at all. Then a few days ago I was saying we'd probably have 15-20 or so for 1.0, and then get to more later on. Ah... yeah. This version adds 104 achievements, which will be the sum total of what we do in terms of achievements for 1.0; and we will indeed add more after 1.0, too. Did I mention that they all have unique art? That's a lot of icons...
Lots Of Other Miscellany, And The Last Of The "Things We Learned At PAX East" Stuff
So, yeah. The release notes are long, and varied. A goodly number of fixes for multiplayer, and lots of fixes for solo also. In no particular order, here were some particularly salient changes:
- The randomly generated professions of NPCs on continents beyond the first is now a lot more friendly.
- Warp gate function is now clearer based on a second sign seeding in them, and you can also now use warp gates without actually entering them (handy if you're not being chased by monsters and want to save a tiny bit of time).
- Wooden platforms work oh-so-much-better now. You can make literal staircases with them that you can just walk up by moving to the side. And you don't fall through them crazily anymore when it looks like you shouldn't and you're walking across multiple of them. And they hang onto background walls that are near sky a lot better now. All in all: holy cow, these are completely different and better. And there were some small camera improvements to the Y axis to support this, and that also makes a subtle improvement in terms of smoothness, too.
- Ridiculous numbers of more changes to the intro mission to make things briefer and clearer wherever possible, and to hopefully instill the idea that tactics actually matter when choosing your attack position, etc. We also put in a lot more safeguards to prevent some of the more common shooting-yourself-innocently-in-the-foot cases that people were commonly getting into.
- This one is huge: the recharge rate for mana is now about twice as fast, but most characters also get less mana. The full rationale is in the release notes, but basically: a) waiting around for mana recharge isn't fun; and b) having some characters that have access to high-mana spells that other characters can't even wield is really interesting, but only when they can actually cast those higher-mana spells with a good degree of frequency as well. All in all the idea is to make mana a more valid and interesting gameplay choice to focus in, although obviously that will depend partly on the new spells we'll be adding soon to really make that pop.
More to come soon. Enjoy!
This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have 0.500 or later. When you launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found if you're connected to the Internet at the time. If you don't have 0.500 or later, you can download that here.
Friday, April 13, 2012
AVWW Beta 0.927 "Brief And Clear" Released!
This one is our first release of today, but it won't be the last. The main reason we're pushing this one out is that we have folks working on screenshots and videos, and we want to make sure that two graphical glitches that are finally fixed in this version (after having been present for the last week+) don't infiltrate those.
In general, this version really pares down the opt-out messages and makes them a lot more... brief and clear, like the title of the release says. But it also makes the world map interface a lot more unified, where there's only a single way to learn about a region (walking on it), rather than two (walking on it, or right-clicking it). The new combined interface is both a lot more attractive as well as a more functional and clear.
More to come soon. Enjoy!
This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have 0.500 or later. When you launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found if you're connected to the Internet at the time. If you don't have 0.500 or later, you can download that here.
In general, this version really pares down the opt-out messages and makes them a lot more... brief and clear, like the title of the release says. But it also makes the world map interface a lot more unified, where there's only a single way to learn about a region (walking on it), rather than two (walking on it, or right-clicking it). The new combined interface is both a lot more attractive as well as a more functional and clear.
More to come soon. Enjoy!
This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have 0.500 or later. When you launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found if you're connected to the Internet at the time. If you don't have 0.500 or later, you can download that here.
AVWW Beta 0.926 "Things You Might Like To Know" Released!
This one is our first release since getting back from PAX East, and it's a big one. Not only does it have all the stuff that Keith and Josh were working on while the rest of us were at the convention, it also has a first round of improvements based on our observations of players playing the game at the convention.
Observations From PAX East
Turns out that if you get five staff watching about three hundred players playing the game cold for the first time, you notice certain things. People, by and large, make the exact same decisions when given the same stimuli; and consequently they also run into exactly the same trouble spots. There are always outliers on any given issue, sure, and people in general obviously aren't carbon copies of one another.
But when all five of us were able to identify pretty much the same exact trouble spots after having independently watching different groups of players, the results were pretty clear. That alone was probably worth the cost of going to PAX, I'm coming to realize; the game was already really polished, but this helps us really grind down the last of the sharp edges off the start of the game.
PAX East went great for us, by the way -- I'll write more about it later when there is more time, but we met a lot of awesome folks in terms of both press and attendees. It was really cool to meet several AI War fans in person (first time that's ever happened for me, actually), and I was really jazzed to be able to show off this new game to a lot of people who had never even heard of it. From the sounds of things, people in turn went away pretty excited about the game, which was rewarding to see.
Anyway, in terms of this particular release, there are a whole bunch of changes in there that I think you'll really like, and which are a direct result of our PAX East experience. For the sake of organization I went ahead and just stuck them under their own category in the release notes, because there were so many of them.
So far we've hit roughly half of our list from PAX, but we hit the most critical items first. The hope is that we'll be able to knock out the rest of them tomorrow, along with some other stuff.
What Keith's Been Up To
Keith has been a busy guy while the rest of us were gone, too. His work mostly centered on three areas: multiplayer, achievements, and guardian powers.
Multiplayer
Multiplayer has jumped forward quite a lot in terms of polish with this version, as Keith finally nailed a mega-bug that was underpinning a wide variety of bug reports. This was a bug that had been eluding both of us for a while, so that was nice to see. At the moment we're not aware of any serious bugs in multiplayer, so we definitely want your feedback: any bugs at all that you're running into, we definitely want to know! Only a little over a week left to go prior to 1.0!
There's also a number of new admin commands for multiplayer, targeted for anti-griefing purposes. We strongly suspect we'll see an explosion of such admin commands shortly after 1.0 when more people get their hands on the game and actually start griefing each other; to some extent the exact griefing vectors are hard to predict. But we're definitely trying to hit the obvious ones in advance, at least, just to make things smoother right from the start.
Achievements
Achievements are coming to the game, and will integrate with Steam in the same manner that we did with AI War and Tidalis. These achievements will be more individual-focused and are cross-world, rather than being cross-player and per-world like the unlockables are. So it's a completely different set of achievements compared to unlockables.
The set of achievements that we're going to start with is only something like 20ish achievements for 1.0, but we'll likely grow that in post-release content. It just doesn't seem like the most pressing need to be doing a ton of those prior to 1.0 at the moment, although we certainly want to have a healthy number of then.
Continent-Wide Buffs From Guardian Powers
This is something Keith has been planning for a while, and they're really cool. They finally bring a purpose to the skill level 4 and 5 of NPC professions, and they also bring a lot more variety to guardian powers in general.
All in all 51 new guardian powers were added, although 20 of them are currently disabled pending proper unlockables that are pending some new enemies that will be added in the next week for continents 2 and 3.
The cool thing about these continent-wide buffs is that they provide a completely new way to focus on the community and thus help the self by extension. These can provide a much-needed vector for overcoming a challenging mission or an overlord or whatever, and they really should expand the decision space for the game.
More to come soon. Enjoy!
This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have 0.500 or later. When you launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found if you're connected to the Internet at the time. If you don't have 0.500 or later, you can download that here.
Observations From PAX East
Turns out that if you get five staff watching about three hundred players playing the game cold for the first time, you notice certain things. People, by and large, make the exact same decisions when given the same stimuli; and consequently they also run into exactly the same trouble spots. There are always outliers on any given issue, sure, and people in general obviously aren't carbon copies of one another.
But when all five of us were able to identify pretty much the same exact trouble spots after having independently watching different groups of players, the results were pretty clear. That alone was probably worth the cost of going to PAX, I'm coming to realize; the game was already really polished, but this helps us really grind down the last of the sharp edges off the start of the game.
PAX East went great for us, by the way -- I'll write more about it later when there is more time, but we met a lot of awesome folks in terms of both press and attendees. It was really cool to meet several AI War fans in person (first time that's ever happened for me, actually), and I was really jazzed to be able to show off this new game to a lot of people who had never even heard of it. From the sounds of things, people in turn went away pretty excited about the game, which was rewarding to see.
Anyway, in terms of this particular release, there are a whole bunch of changes in there that I think you'll really like, and which are a direct result of our PAX East experience. For the sake of organization I went ahead and just stuck them under their own category in the release notes, because there were so many of them.
So far we've hit roughly half of our list from PAX, but we hit the most critical items first. The hope is that we'll be able to knock out the rest of them tomorrow, along with some other stuff.
What Keith's Been Up To
Keith has been a busy guy while the rest of us were gone, too. His work mostly centered on three areas: multiplayer, achievements, and guardian powers.
Multiplayer
Multiplayer has jumped forward quite a lot in terms of polish with this version, as Keith finally nailed a mega-bug that was underpinning a wide variety of bug reports. This was a bug that had been eluding both of us for a while, so that was nice to see. At the moment we're not aware of any serious bugs in multiplayer, so we definitely want your feedback: any bugs at all that you're running into, we definitely want to know! Only a little over a week left to go prior to 1.0!
There's also a number of new admin commands for multiplayer, targeted for anti-griefing purposes. We strongly suspect we'll see an explosion of such admin commands shortly after 1.0 when more people get their hands on the game and actually start griefing each other; to some extent the exact griefing vectors are hard to predict. But we're definitely trying to hit the obvious ones in advance, at least, just to make things smoother right from the start.
Achievements
Achievements are coming to the game, and will integrate with Steam in the same manner that we did with AI War and Tidalis. These achievements will be more individual-focused and are cross-world, rather than being cross-player and per-world like the unlockables are. So it's a completely different set of achievements compared to unlockables.
The set of achievements that we're going to start with is only something like 20ish achievements for 1.0, but we'll likely grow that in post-release content. It just doesn't seem like the most pressing need to be doing a ton of those prior to 1.0 at the moment, although we certainly want to have a healthy number of then.
Continent-Wide Buffs From Guardian Powers
This is something Keith has been planning for a while, and they're really cool. They finally bring a purpose to the skill level 4 and 5 of NPC professions, and they also bring a lot more variety to guardian powers in general.
All in all 51 new guardian powers were added, although 20 of them are currently disabled pending proper unlockables that are pending some new enemies that will be added in the next week for continents 2 and 3.
The cool thing about these continent-wide buffs is that they provide a completely new way to focus on the community and thus help the self by extension. These can provide a much-needed vector for overcoming a challenging mission or an overlord or whatever, and they really should expand the decision space for the game.
More to come soon. Enjoy!
This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have 0.500 or later. When you launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found if you're connected to the Internet at the time. If you don't have 0.500 or later, you can download that here.
Wednesday, April 4, 2012
AVWW Beta 0.925 "Dispelling The Lieutenant Pact " Released!
This one is our second release of today, and it's just another bunch of bugfixes and polish. Basically, the last bit of tidying up prior to PAX East.
Unless there are some major issues found with this one, this will probably be our last public update to the game until next Wednesday the 11th. It seems like a very solid build, but if you find any issues then please let us know.
Keith and Josh are still going to be working away on stuff while Erik and Pablo and I are at PAX East, but we don't plan on actually releasing that until the conference is over just to make sure we keep a stable build during that period. After the conference we'll resume yet more polishing and bugfixing as we close in on 1.0, and we'll go through that last sprint of content with more enemies and spells in particular.
Enjoy!
This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have 0.500 or later. When you launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found if you're connected to the Internet at the time. If you don't have 0.500 or later, you can download that here.
Unless there are some major issues found with this one, this will probably be our last public update to the game until next Wednesday the 11th. It seems like a very solid build, but if you find any issues then please let us know.
Keith and Josh are still going to be working away on stuff while Erik and Pablo and I are at PAX East, but we don't plan on actually releasing that until the conference is over just to make sure we keep a stable build during that period. After the conference we'll resume yet more polishing and bugfixing as we close in on 1.0, and we'll go through that last sprint of content with more enemies and spells in particular.
Enjoy!
This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have 0.500 or later. When you launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found if you're connected to the Internet at the time. If you don't have 0.500 or later, you can download that here.
AVWW Beta 0.924 "Gaping Caverns" Released!
This one focuses on more polish and bugfixes relating to the new player experience as we move toward PAX East. In particular a lot of things relating to caverns and underground seeding, hence the name above. We're only showing solo directly at PAX, so that's where the bulk of our focus has been on the fixes.
If you're aware of any other single-player affecting bugs that are in particular need of attention, please do feel free to let us know (as in, today, because I depart tomorrow). We have a list of other last-minute fixes of our own that we still need to get to, including that bug with the lieutenants hiding from you in their own keeps, but in general there's not a lot that's really terrible at this point.
More to come soon. Enjoy!
This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have 0.500 or later. When you launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found if you're connected to the Internet at the time. If you don't have 0.500 or later, you can download that here.
If you're aware of any other single-player affecting bugs that are in particular need of attention, please do feel free to let us know (as in, today, because I depart tomorrow). We have a list of other last-minute fixes of our own that we still need to get to, including that bug with the lieutenants hiding from you in their own keeps, but in general there's not a lot that's really terrible at this point.
More to come soon. Enjoy!
This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have 0.500 or later. When you launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found if you're connected to the Internet at the time. If you don't have 0.500 or later, you can download that here.
Tuesday, April 3, 2012
AVWW Beta 0.923 "Your Mission Description, If You Choose To Accept It" Released!
This one was certainly slower than we had anticipated on releasing, but PAX East preparations have been really kicking us in the teeth the last few days. A lot of stuff had to get off to printers and so forth in time to actually make it to the show, and we left some of that until way too late. Along with other hilarious things like forgetting to order any electricity for our booth, etc.
Now we've got the PAX East prep seemingly in hand now, and now we're back to trying to make as clean a build as we can for demoing at the show. That's our focus for the rest of today, and in a smaller way tomorrow, and then there's going to be the better part of a week break where we work internally on some new stuff but don't really release it much until after all of us are back in the virtual office fully.
Things have gotten a lot crazier with this conference than we had expected. I think it will be an enormously good thing for us and the game, but it's just been a time sink even before it's started. With that, we're thinking about actually pushing our release date back a week, because we're losing a week of work on what would be 1.0. But no official word on that yet, that's just what we're mulling and discussing with partners.
So, About This New Version Itself?
Oh right! So you want to actually know about what's new here? Well, a slew of bugfixes and some balance tweaks. The draconites are a lot more unique as a player class now, among other changes.
The way that mission failure and abandonment works now is a lot better and matches up more with what players were expecting.
Also, the mission signs that you walk by and see the information about the mission now show you the description text without your having to hover over the mission name. That was leading many people to previously think there were no mission descriptions, when in fact there were all along. Having to go into missions with no explanation is not fun!
More to come soon. Enjoy!
This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have 0.500 or later. When you launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found if you're connected to the Internet at the time. If you don't have 0.500 or later, you can download that here.
Now we've got the PAX East prep seemingly in hand now, and now we're back to trying to make as clean a build as we can for demoing at the show. That's our focus for the rest of today, and in a smaller way tomorrow, and then there's going to be the better part of a week break where we work internally on some new stuff but don't really release it much until after all of us are back in the virtual office fully.
Things have gotten a lot crazier with this conference than we had expected. I think it will be an enormously good thing for us and the game, but it's just been a time sink even before it's started. With that, we're thinking about actually pushing our release date back a week, because we're losing a week of work on what would be 1.0. But no official word on that yet, that's just what we're mulling and discussing with partners.
So, About This New Version Itself?
Oh right! So you want to actually know about what's new here? Well, a slew of bugfixes and some balance tweaks. The draconites are a lot more unique as a player class now, among other changes.
The way that mission failure and abandonment works now is a lot better and matches up more with what players were expecting.
Also, the mission signs that you walk by and see the information about the mission now show you the description text without your having to hover over the mission name. That was leading many people to previously think there were no mission descriptions, when in fact there were all along. Having to go into missions with no explanation is not fun!
More to come soon. Enjoy!
This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have 0.500 or later. When you launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found if you're connected to the Internet at the time. If you don't have 0.500 or later, you can download that here.
Friday, March 30, 2012
AI War Beta 5.032, "Then The Pendulum Swung Back," Released!
This one has more balance and bugfix changes, and more responses to the "worst unit" polls. This time, the Mobile Repair Station gets some overdue love. Most substantially with this release, however, are some bug/balance fixes relating to the AI and how it gets reinforcements.
Those were being held artificially low on certain difficulties, in certain circumstances, and when the AI had certain ships. So we fixed the glitch, and this will just work itself out naturally. Haha. In some recent versions, players were wondering why we were being so nice to the player team in terms of balance changes; well, now the other shoe drops, I guess!
It's not all that bad, really, but it's nice to sound ominous sometimes.
Enjoy!
This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have 4.000 or later. When you launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found if you're connected to the Internet at the time. If you don't have 4.000 or later, you can download that here.
Those were being held artificially low on certain difficulties, in certain circumstances, and when the AI had certain ships. So we fixed the glitch, and this will just work itself out naturally. Haha. In some recent versions, players were wondering why we were being so nice to the player team in terms of balance changes; well, now the other shoe drops, I guess!
It's not all that bad, really, but it's nice to sound ominous sometimes.
Enjoy!
This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have 4.000 or later. When you launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found if you're connected to the Internet at the time. If you don't have 4.000 or later, you can download that here.
AVWW Beta 0.922 "Come Out, Shy Little Monsters..." Released!
This one is a hotfix for some issues in the prior version. Sigh.
More to come soon. Enjoy!
This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have 0.500 or later. When you launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found if you're connected to the Internet at the time. If you don't have 0.500 or later, you can download that here.
More to come soon. Enjoy!
This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have 0.500 or later. When you launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found if you're connected to the Internet at the time. If you don't have 0.500 or later, you can download that here.
Thursday, March 29, 2012
AVWW Beta 0.921 "World Of Darkness" Released!
This one is a lot cheerier than our last release, in that it's not fixing critical bugs. Minor ones, sure, but that's a much better way to end the day as far as I'm concerned. It also changes around the balance on the supply depot meteor defense missions, and makes the world map way more oppressive-looking in a way that players have been asking for. Plus the world map just seems to look better now, too.
More to come soon. Enjoy!
This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have 0.500 or later. When you launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found if you're connected to the Internet at the time. If you don't have 0.500 or later, you can download that here.
More to come soon. Enjoy!
This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have 0.500 or later. When you launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found if you're connected to the Internet at the time. If you don't have 0.500 or later, you can download that here.
AVWW Beta 0.920 "Thog No Like Jurassic Bugs" Released!
This one has got to be about the least fun sort of release to be working on, for everyone involved (players and developers). There was still a memory leak in the prior version, and it was harming performance as well because of all the garbage collections it was causing.
So all day today for Keith, myself, and Josh has been spent on this one issue. That's the bad news. The good news is that we found all the issues (knock on wood) and the game is running more memory-efficiently than it ever has before.
Some of the "recent" bugs withe memory leaks were actually just us having cleaned up some code that then revealed an older and longer-standing bug. There were multiple bugs that we fixed today that dated back to when this game was from the top-down perspective.
What essentially happened was some more recent bugs (as well as some more recent fixes) combined with the older bugs to create major problems. But we've been through this thing backwards and forwards today, Keith added memory profiling capabilities into the game engine itself, and it's now incredibly lean. If you hit F3 and look at the managed memory usage, it's absolutely through the floor.
Unfortunately this means we didn't get anything else done today, but this evening hopefully I'll have time to get a little more done. As well as fix any new bugs that might crop up if you guys find something.
More to come soon. Enjoy!
This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have 0.500 or later. When you launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found if you're connected to the Internet at the time. If you don't have 0.500 or later, you can download that here.
So all day today for Keith, myself, and Josh has been spent on this one issue. That's the bad news. The good news is that we found all the issues (knock on wood) and the game is running more memory-efficiently than it ever has before.
Some of the "recent" bugs withe memory leaks were actually just us having cleaned up some code that then revealed an older and longer-standing bug. There were multiple bugs that we fixed today that dated back to when this game was from the top-down perspective.
What essentially happened was some more recent bugs (as well as some more recent fixes) combined with the older bugs to create major problems. But we've been through this thing backwards and forwards today, Keith added memory profiling capabilities into the game engine itself, and it's now incredibly lean. If you hit F3 and look at the managed memory usage, it's absolutely through the floor.
Unfortunately this means we didn't get anything else done today, but this evening hopefully I'll have time to get a little more done. As well as fix any new bugs that might crop up if you guys find something.
More to come soon. Enjoy!
This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have 0.500 or later. When you launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found if you're connected to the Internet at the time. If you don't have 0.500 or later, you can download that here.
AVWW Beta 0.919 "But I LIKE Referencing Nulls" Released!
This one is our third release of the day, which is never a good sign.
Two releases can be good or bad: yay we had a batch of content and stuff leftover from prior days that we released mid-day, and then yay we did even more and released that at the end of the day; or yay we released a new version, and then oops we released a followup to fix something in the version we just released.
Three releases... there's no way there's not an oops in at least one of those three releases. Today has been a day with two oops-fixing releases out of three, although two out of the three releases also had new content of significance.
Sigh. It's been one of those days, I guess; hopefully tomorrow will go substantially more smoothly! But things seem to be in good enough shape for now, and so I'm heading for some sleep.
More to come soon. Enjoy!
This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have 0.500 or later. When you launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found if you're connected to the Internet at the time. If you don't have 0.500 or later, you can download that here.
Two releases can be good or bad: yay we had a batch of content and stuff leftover from prior days that we released mid-day, and then yay we did even more and released that at the end of the day; or yay we released a new version, and then oops we released a followup to fix something in the version we just released.
Three releases... there's no way there's not an oops in at least one of those three releases. Today has been a day with two oops-fixing releases out of three, although two out of the three releases also had new content of significance.
Sigh. It's been one of those days, I guess; hopefully tomorrow will go substantially more smoothly! But things seem to be in good enough shape for now, and so I'm heading for some sleep.
More to come soon. Enjoy!
This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have 0.500 or later. When you launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found if you're connected to the Internet at the time. If you don't have 0.500 or later, you can download that here.
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