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| Kept you waiting, huh? |
Wham. That is all.
Well, not really. The AI is just the glorious tip of the iceberg of all the features we're putting out this update! It's a huge, huge splash of pure wonderfulness. Details to follow:
Update #7: The AI
The single most requested feature we've been asked for has been the single player AI. The second most requested thing has been to fix all those annoying issues with online play. Finally, after long and arduous work, we've managed to deliver and fix both of these issues! Must be some of that holiday spirit magic.
We're so happy to at last be able to add AI bots for the players to use in Single Player mode. Bear in mind, though, that the AI is still in development, even though we release it now to the public. It works pretty nicely, but there are no difficulty levels yet and there's a whole bunch of testing to be done. Looking forward to hearing your feedback!
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| Pretty spiffy. |
With the help of the AI, people with connection difficulties can now also have some Interplanetary fun. Although, they probably could have it anyway now, since we also went and fixed the networking! All the previous connection issues should now be gone and mobile networks (in addition to all kinds of other connection types) are now supported. There's a bit of a downside to this, however, as we had to temporarily disable LAN features due to the new networking structure. LAN will be back, though, so no worries.
To help us with bug hunting and game design, we've added an optional and anonymous Game Analytics data collector. It collects non personally identifiable bug reports, hardware configurations and gameplay data, such as session length and most popular weapons. All this helps us a huge amount at identifying problems in the game. You can choose in-game whether or not you want to participate in this.
As if that's not enough, we've redone a lot of the UI. It's still a work in progress, but things should work more fluidly and look a bit prettier. There are also some bug fixes and minor changes included, but you can check out the full changelog to get a better idea on what's different:
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| Also, lasers got their act together and look nicer too. |
Interplanetary Version 0.7.5394_EAC_7
- Simple Single Player mode with early AI bots added.
- Networking overhauled.
- All previous online connectivity issues should be fixed!
- Mobile broadband connections (and all other kinds of obscure things) now supported.
- LAN multiplayer temporarily disabled due to new network structure.
- Player turn status markers temporarily disabled. Will be back soon.
- UI overhauled.
- Menu UI graphics redone.
- Menus streamlined.
- Main Menu background modified.
- Planet selection added.
- Player avatars added.
- Fixed the turn-processing freezing Laser bug (again!) Should be gone now.
- Laser animation changed to a nicer one.
- Optional game analytics added.
- Loading screens added.
- New music added.
- Minor sound tweaks.
Interplanetary should automatically update once you open Steam. Fun times with the AI! The schedule for the next update is not determined yet, but we have some new features and fixes in store.
Interplanetary is available on Steam Early Access.
Great update, but I ran into a bug with an AI match. I ended my turn and the the AI was taking a 2 minute turn which I thought was odd. I wasn't able to do anything, F7 didn't help. I could still click on both planets, but was not able to select anything. Now this could just be my computer, but i wanted to bring it to your attention just in case anyone else was having this problem, so as to confirm if its my computer or a bug in the game. On a positive note the game looks beautiful everything else is great.
ReplyDeleteThanks a lot for the report! I presume F7 didn't lock the camera either? We had this bug just once and it was yesterday just before releasing the update, but it seemed like a fluke. We'll have to do some testing to see what could cause it. Probably patching it next week, if we can track it soon enough.
DeleteYou are correct it did not. thank you for getting back to me confirming it.
DeleteRan into this issue as well. Normally turns were running pretty quickly, but there was one that just would not process. Eventually, after nearly 5 minutes I gave up and surrendered the match, and low and behold, it decided that was the precise moment to play out the turn. Analytics was setup to report, so hopefully that'll help. I've also got a recording of the entire match I was doing for my YouTube channel, which should go up in about 12 hours or so, if that would help. (Let me know if you want the link to the video, I don't run the channel under my google account directly.)
DeleteOn a side note, the AI is insanely accurate. I saw them miss maybe three times in the entire 20 turn match (which is also when I gave up on waiting).
Thanks a lot for the reports! We're trying to find the cause for these problems and I suppose the video couldn't hurt, if you could send us a link!
DeleteAbout the AI accuracy, we're going to lower it. It was kind of making up for its relatively poor building strategy, but people haven't been a big fan of it. Also we now know the global player accuracy because of the analytics, so we can adjust it accordingly.
So, did you manage to inverse the projectile trajectory equations or how does the AI player aim?
ReplyDeleteThe AI sort of does a whole bunch of practice shots in its head and shoots according to those. It's quite a bit better at predicting planetary movements than we are!
DeleteIt's not 100% accurate, of course, and we'll be patching it a bit to make the complexity of the shot affect the accuracy more.
Interesting. So it must be an iterative (minimizing) algorithm that searches the 2D problem space of shot velocity and firing angle. Of course if you have a very accurate firing solution algorithm, you can just add some (maybe normal distributed) randomness to the result, and the harder shots will be more likely to miss by default.
Delete