Our first update of June is crazy huge. It's one of those "touches every player's experience" releases.
First of all, the tooltips have gotten some major upgrades. Here's an example of one that is showing the new smallest-version of information. NR SirLimbo has condensed things, organized things, and in general added a ton of variation and clarity on there. I also made it possible to have ship icons in the tooltips finally, and boy is it nice being able to see the art that way:
Still on the subject of tooltips, and this might seem silly, but essentially in a ton of menus the tooltips are now better at staying out of your way. Having the tooltip adapt to the position of your cursor and what you are mousing over, and be near to your normal line of vision but not actually blocking it is surprisingly challenging. But I'm really glad how that has turned out, and how much easier it makes the lobby and settings experiences:
Oh, and the final thing about tooltips -- they now are more responsive in general. In particular, they go away much faster after you stop mousing over something, which just makes everything feel more smooth. We also added options in the settings window for configuring a tooltip delay before they show if you want that (for units and planets in the main game view, not for UI elements), but it's off by default.
So far all we've talked about is tooltips, but honestly that's one of the more central bits of the game.
Quick diversion, then. There's various new art, including some updated and added shaders, and the new Dark Mirror and Darker Mirror in DLC2 (Zenith Onslaught), among others:
I like them even better in motion.
Oh, wow. Certain things I think "that wasn't already released?" This build has been inwork for a few days.
- Zombie Ping Pong is now harder to play for long periods with the AI, if that means anything to you (if you are a Botnet Golem fan, then it most certainly does).
- You can scale the text size of the contents of the big popup windows, finally.
- You can press F4 to immediately switch between player factions, if there are multiple. This is great if you're playing MP and need to help a friend. It's also great if you want to play multiple factions at once, by yourself, for various reasons we can think of.
- There's a whole new Tips sidebar, and Tips and Journal Entries are now visually differentiated, on separate tabs, clearly marked, etc.
- Specifically, you can press F1 to view the new tips tab, and it even has nice categories for each tip. When these tips are added, it gives you a 3-second center-screen banner to let you know, too (which you can turn off if you prefer, but I actually really like it even though I know how to play; it serves as an early warning system of finding certain enemies in particular).
Turns out there's still quite a bit more to this release. There were a number of balance adjustments, including some buffs to some not-scary-enough AI guardians. There's also now three Cruiser Construction Facilities per galaxy in DLC2, rather than one. More options for cruisers to be relevant earlier rather than later. A lot of the most annoying bugs that folks have reported are also now fixed. The list is long! The Spire Railgun Shop mod also got an update.
[ 2021-06-05 00:29:11 CET ] [ Original post ]
- AI War 2 Linux [1.72 G]
- AI War 2: The Spire Rises
- AI War 2: Zenith Onslaught
- AI War 2: The Neinzul Abyss
You must steal as much technology as you can, and take enough territory to fortify your bases and launch your attacks. But every conquest you make turns the attention of the AI ever more in your direction... so choose your targets with care.
It's "a sequel to [Arcen's] enormo-space RTS AI War, which we called'one of this year's finest strategy games' back in 2009" (Tom Sykes, PC Gamer)
What's New?
We still have a lot of work to do on the game, and we're undergoing some major work with our beta testers before heading to Early Access, but a lot is already awesome:- The game is crazy moddable.
- It's multithreaded to take full use of modern computers.
- The new 3D graphics are working out great.
- The UI has already been dramatically improved by the introduction of a tabbed sidebar in the main view, and streamlining of several other mechanics that felt very difficult in the past. More to come, there.
- We’ve got art for over 130 distinct units (not counting different mark levels), and there's more to come.
- We’ve got over 1500 lines of spoken dialogue from more than 25 actors, focusing primarily on the human side at the moment; we have a few hundred lines of AI-side taunts and chatter, some of which is recorded but just not processed yet.
- There are hundreds of high quality sound effects for a varied battlefield soundscape (with distance attenuation if you’re far away, and positional 3D audio if you’re down in the thick of it), all routed through a tuned mixer setup for optimal listening to all the various parts.
- We have a set of music from Classic that is over four and a half hours long, and the new music from Pablo is partly in, but mostly set to be mastered and integrated within the next week or two.
- There’s also a ton of map types, many of them new, and with a lot of sub-options to make them even more varied.
- And a whole lot more.
Wishlist the game to be notified when it becomes available!
- OS: Ubuntu 12.04+. SteamOS+
- Processor: Dual Core 64bit CPU (2.2+ GHz Dual Core CPU or better)Memory: 4 GB RAM
- Memory: 4 GB RAM
- Graphics: NVIDIA GTX 510+. Radeon HD5900+. or Intel HD4000+
- Storage: 4 GB available space
- Processor: Any Quad Core or 3.0+ GHz Dual Core CPUMemory: 6 GB RAM
- Memory: 6 GB RAM
- Graphics: NVIDIA GTX 660 2GB / AMD HD 7870 2GB
- Storage: 4 GB available space
[ 6144 ]
[ 1449 ]