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Decimatarius has AI War 2

Oct 15, 2018 @ 2:33am

Single Player?

Well i was interested in getting it but its listed as being single player on steam. Is this correct?

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Originally posted by x-4000 (Chris McElligott Park):

New TLDR

I expect that multiplayer co-op will be available by the summer. In the big 1.3 release that just went out, something I didn't talk about much in the overall release writeup, but which did come up a number of times in the longer release notes, there were a number of things aimed at multiplayer under the hood.

My expectation on multiplayer is that we'll have some form of rough alpha state within the next two months, probably not suitable for real playing but definitely useful for testing feedback. And then we'll progress from there and get all the remaining kinks out of that system, and all the remaining multiplayer visual interfaces in play, over the course of the few months after that. So I definitely expect with that sort of schedule that we'll have a polished non-beta multiplayer by summer.

Answering Recent Questions About Interface In This Thread

There's a real challenge in terms of trying to budget time for all the things that people would like, plus keeping the boat afloat by working on the first expansion while making all these giant things for the base game.

There's a growing list of interface niceties that would help with QoL, and while we've hit the most severe ones that people mentioned over and over again, there are always more that we can focus on. I'm not sure the ideal timing for that, but sometime in the next few months.

On the subject of multiplayer itself, that also is something that we've been having to balance against improvements to the core game, and stuff for the expansions. I'm the one doing the multiplayer work, and most of the time that I would have spent on that has been put into the core game instead since that seemed more pressing. Most of the expansion work is being done by Badger and Puffin, so it's not impacting multiplayer either way.

TLDR From October 1st 2019

Time for an update, cross-posting from here but with some edited notes for now (Oct 1): https://forums.arcengames.com/ai-war-ii/from-the-dev-notes-on-where-i'm-at-regarding-multiplayer-right-now-(729)/

Essentially, there won't be multiplayer in 1.0 at all. After 1.0 is out, later this month, we'll be working on integrating multiplayer again, for a 2.0 release early next year. The multiplayer will be a free update for everyone, but we'll likely do an expansion pack as paid DLC with some unrelated new content at that same time. Plus other refinements free for everyone.

The game needed more time for refinement prior to 1.0, is the short version, and in our financial position we couldn't do both multiplayer and the refinements at the same time. So we chose to have a solid single player experience first rather than a sub-par single AND multiplayer experience.

Given our staffing levels and so on, the timeframes for having a polished multiplayer experience aren't really even affected by this; but ordering it this way is letting us have a polished solo experience on the way to that.

Original Notes From July

Right, so this one isn't going to be welcome news. It sticks in my own throat, too, so to speak. Essentially: no multiplayer is going to be possible for 1.0.

This post (https://forums.arcengames.com/ai-war-ii/from-the-dev-notes-on-where-i'm-at-on-fleets-techs-and-'1-0'-now-(729)/) explains where I'm at right now in terms of my plans for 1.0, and the financial reasons behind it, but basically there's just not time to do multiplayer well.

I could do a half-baked version of multiplayer, and still have unpolished single-player come 1.0, but I don't think anyone wants that. I can't push 1.0 back. I'm going to get raked over the coals by some people and some reviewers for not having 1.0 come out with multiplayer from the start, and hopefully that doesn't long-term sink anything with the game. I have already delayed all that I can delay, taken out all the loans I can take out, spent all the equity I have, used all the volunteer labor that has been available, and laid off all the staff I had. I'm all that's left.

I can do multiplayer, and in fact the game is still being actively programmed with multiplayer in mind. But I don't have time to implement all the details of it, and certainly not to test and polish it prior to 1.0. Most definitely not while doing all the other things I have planned in the other thread linked above.

So multiplayer will be a 2.0 goal, instead. Hopefully for early next year. The timing would be the same even if I WERE to delay the 1.0 of the game in order to have multiplayer at 1.0 launch, I want to stress that: the only thing that changes is that you have a polished single player game sooner, using my current plan -- and I have a product that can hopefully keep me afloat and independent.

One way or another, I have no intention of breaking any kickstarter promises, in terms of features we had promised. A lot of features got reimagined and the whole project took two years longer than expected, but it's either all there or stuff that we're planning for post-1.0.

I've lost money every year since 2015, personally speaking, and most of those years I have worked "for free," or more accurately put in money as well as my time, in the hopes that I'll eventually earn money back from the game. But Early Access games are kind of in a limbo state, and people are very skeptical of them for a lot of good reasons. A lot of other developers have abused that system.

I can't go on losing money in this way, as I'm kind of bottoming out. So the solution that I see, the only one that's really around, is to make sure that the 1.0 launch is an awesome and polished solo experience that erases the questions of "is this early access, and what will it become long-term" from people's minds. Then multiplayer is a later-added feature, as happened with Stardew Valley, Civilization III, and various other games in the past.

I'm committed to adding that no matter what because of the kickstarter obligations that I have, but my hope is that the solo game is compelling enough that it makes it so that I'm not having to take up some other day job to make that happen in my spare time. That certainly WOULD slow things down.

Sidebar on Technical Things

From a technical standpoint, right now we're using Forge Networking Remastered, which went open source in the two years since we were first using it. It has NAT punchthrough built in, but I need to make some interfaces for dealing with all this from the front-end better. I also need to build in a bit better of a transport layer, although the one that is in there right now is pretty good.

The game already acts as a multiplayer game in terms of how it queues commands and does sub-second "turns" even in solo play, so the bulk of the groundwork is there. But I then need to put in my desync-repair code, which will also include some entity-dying-request code.

I expect that there will be several months of people reporting funky things that cause a lot of extra desync-repair data to be sent (thankfully not halting the entire game like happened with the original), and we need time for all that to play out.

I also expect that there are some things in the game loop that I'll have to rejigger in some fashion, since certain forms of desyncs could cause cascades of correction-required data to be sent. Originally when we were coding this game (like all our prior ones), we assumed that programmers would handle things properly and maintain sync. And in general that's still the expectation. But with hopefully more and more modders entering the scene, the reality is that modders will do things that break sync and that the game needs to recover from as gracefully as possible.

There's also the whole thing with people who can't get NAT punchthrough to work for whatever reason. In many games that are out there, those move over to using relay servers, but those cost money to the developers on a monthly basis. When the developer can't afford those anymore, then the servers get shut off. I already make negative money off the game, personally speaking, and relay servers tend to be super slow anyway even in the best cases. So in our case, looking into all the technologies that make relay servers required as infrequently as possible is definitely desired, and/or making it so that new alternatives can be plugged in as mods as they are invented in the future. We had one volunteer two years ago, Doug, who implemented some very interesting things, but a lot of new technology has come out since then that we can potentially take advantage of.

Volunteers Welcome, As Always

On the off chance that there's someone who wants to tackle a bunch of the networking stuff prior to 1.0, with limited help from me, that's certainly not something I'm going to block. There's only so much help I can give during the run-up to 1.0, and I'd see that as having a good chance of only being beta-worthy in terms of status at 1.0, but if someone or multiple someones want to work on it, then I can set those folks up with svn access.

I'm not expecting that, but I guess I ought to go ahead and throw that out there.

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Showing 1-15 of 66 comments

HeartHunter has AI War 2

Oct 15, 2018 @ 2:49am

Sure, "Multiplayer is temporarily disabled, but still being implemented."

Major.Pain has AI War 2

Oct 15, 2018 @ 5:02am

The first one(no reason to believe this sequel is different in this regard) you could have multiple human players in coop against numerous AI types.

themouthofsauron has AI War 2

Oct 15, 2018 @ 5:14am

Multiplayer is definitely going to happen during EA. Just not at launch.

BLISS Oct 15, 2018 @ 6:23am

yeah but it's humans vs ai right ? not human vs human

la_nague

Oct 15, 2018 @ 6:38am

yes its a single player game not pvp

x-4000 (Chris McElligott Park) [developer] Oct 15, 2018 @ 6:59am

Great question! At the moment, the game is single player only, because during the last two years of development we kept changing game rules and code in ways that were constantly breaking multiplayer.

We DID have multiplayer, for a while, but trying to keep that in full functioning form while also doing the sort of R&D we were doing on the game mechanics themselves was really time consuming and kind of a waste. For a good year and a half, the game was in a state that I would call "come to test, but not really to play." It's only in the last half year that it's come out of that state.

Please don't get me wrong, the R&D process was absolutely needed and the game is far better for it. But during that period we didn't have people coming in to test multiplayer, because they were just testing solo here and there and not playing real campaigns or anything.

Since disabling multiplayer, we've been continuing to code in a multiplayer-safe fashion. However, inevitably mistakes have been made that will lead to many painful desyncs. We also have not fully implemented a ui for the multiplayer pieces. It was all very test-bed-ish before. We did get NAT punchthrough working using UPNP, but it hasn't been widely tested yet.

With all those items still to deal with, I judged it was better to hold off on the multiplayer until the single player game was fully stabilized and mature. At this point, I don't really want to start on that big of a project right before the holidays, and right as we get a lot of people coming in and undoubtedly reporting bugs and things they'd like to see changed. So I want to focus on the feedback of testers first, and add new cool stuff while we're at it, and then circle back around to multiplayer in January. That way that will have plenty of time for testing (it will need it!) prior to 1.0 in Q2 of next year.

As folks have noted, this will be purely PvE, multiple humans versus AIs and other factions.

Decimatarius has AI War 2

Oct 15, 2018 @ 8:28am

Ok knowing that Multiplay is planned makes me feel much better and i fully understand the reasons behind it. Thankyou

x-4000 (Chris McElligott Park) [developer] Oct 15, 2018 @ 8:34am

Sure thing! And thanks for understanding. :)

Zoya Oct 15, 2018 @ 4:31pm

glad to know that it will eventually be multiplayer but I really can't in good conscience buy the game until it gets to that point, as the MP was the only reason we ever played the first AI war -- a bit disappointing because my friends were somewhat hype about this becoming available, but oh well

x-4000 (Chris McElligott Park) [developer] Oct 15, 2018 @ 6:05pm

Originally posted by zₒₑy:
glad to know that it will eventually be multiplayer but I really can't in good conscience buy the game until it gets to that point, as the MP was the only reason we ever played the first AI war -- a bit disappointing because my friends were somewhat hype about this becoming available, but oh well

I 1000% respect that. We'll still be here when you're ready -- when the game has proper multiplayer. I wish that I could have done all the things in advance of early access, but it's just such a massive game.

#10

Sounds

Oct 16, 2018 @ 6:21am

FWIW coop multiplayer in the original version is a blast.

Looking forward to this happening for this version too. Misery loves company

#11

x-4000 (Chris McElligott Park) [developer] Oct 16, 2018 @ 10:33am

Oh yeah, that was my jam, too. I was playing 4-player co-op every Friday and Saturday night, and it was part of why I started the series.

#12

Horoai

Oct 16, 2018 @ 11:14am

Interesting. Well thanks for the heads up!

Just like the first game I wasn't planning on ever playing this one alone. Co-op strategy games are rare and AI Wars has been #1 on my list. Perfect for spending a weekend with your brother and a box of nerdy snacks.

I'll be around for testing the multiplayer release. o/

#13