The AI From Within - Part 1: From 30,000 Feet
over 7 years ago – Fri, Dec 02, 2016 at 07:31:16 PM

Keith here. My favorite thing about AI War is watching players interact with "The AI". It's not a real person, but it often feels and acts like one. So much of what's fun about the game is the story our minds weave to make sense of the stuff on the screen. The more imagination you have, the more fun you have. Add to this the process of building your understanding of what the AI is doing and the knowledge of why it is doing it, and you have an immersive simulation in a sensible and fantastic universe. A universe where your opponent AI might just want to run sandwich-production factories in peace, and everything else it does is defending that noble aim against your unprovoked aggression.

War of the Models!
over 7 years ago – Thu, Dec 01, 2016 at 09:08:17 AM

Hey Guys, Blue here!  

Thought I'd pop in and talk a little about what I'm up to on my side. 

To be frank, Models! Our current progress is focused on creating a work flow for models that are clean but easy on the performance. 

This means I have a few different things I have to keep in mind. Polygon Count and Batching. Polygon Count is how many polygons a given model has, and batching is a procedure in which objects use the same textures and materials for different effects.

First round was something I was pretty happy with, but unfortunately it missed the mark in many different ways. It's poly-count was too high and it's texture is not one capable of batching.

The idea is that these models aren't individual. In most cases, there will be large groups of these, and after a certain extent they can start bogging down the game.

 Here we go. This meets a certain poly-count goal as well as uses a single texture set that can be used for several other models. Apply an emission map aaaaand boom!

You get this in game!

Here's another that follows the same process!

So yes, there's just a small preview of whole modeling process. Hopefully with this workflow, we can pump out lots of models that can fill your game with your very own armada.

-Blue

The Spire: Beam Weapons For Fun And Profit
over 7 years ago – Thu, Dec 01, 2016 at 08:55:42 AM

Keith here. Thanks so very much for funding our base goal and our first stretch goal (new soundtrack by Pablo Vega!). You folks are awesome.

So, what's the next Stretch Goal?

The Spire. (Cue epic soundtrack)

What are the Spire?

One of the key alien races in the AI War universe. They're really awesome.

Why are they awesome?

As in many things, it comes down to size. Human capital ships are pretty big compared to their other ships. But on a galactic scale, Humans are a brand new star-faring species, inexperienced in construction techniques, galactic knowledge, and (probably the worst problem) computer intelligence design. The largest human empires only covered a tiny fraction of the Milky Way galaxy and this is reflected in ship and fleet designs. So even the greatest and largest human capital ships are but a fraction of the size of the ancient Zenith golems. Thus when it comes to fights against the AI's more advanced Guardians (not to mention its Dire Guardians) humans have to rely on numbers rather than individually powerful craft.

The Spire, on the other hand, are an advanced elder race. They can build big ships, and we mean capital BIG. They have the technology, the resources, and the territory to build and maintain these immense platforms. Combined with this size advantage is their more advanced technology in weapons and shielding. Against the larger Spire capital ships even Dire Guardians simply melt.

Now, if you were engaged in a last-ditch guerrilla war against an implacable inhuman foe, wouldn't you want big ships on your side? Sure you would.

There is one catch, however. You know how your survival depends on not attracting too much AI attention? You know how the galaxy crashes down on your head unless you're subtle?

Yeah, the Spire are not subtle.

What could go wrong?

So how do the Spire work (non-spoiler edition)?

You start a new game with a Spire Colony Ship. You do some things. The AI gets mad. And then you get really cool toys (and the AI gets really mad).

So how do the Spire work (spoiler edition)?

Our current plan is that the Spire will work in much the same way as they did in the Fallen Spire campaign in AI War Classic, with a few key differences. It is a little complicated, so I’ll explain this general plan first and then focus on those key differences at the end.

1) When starting a new game you will be able to add a Spire Colony Ship to your initial fleet.

2) This colony ship is a fearsome combatant in its own right, but that is not its purpose. Its purpose is to transform into a Spire Citadel. Choose the time and place carefully, as the AI will sit up and take notice. Nonetheless, careful planning will let you ramp up production and power quite quickly.

3) The Citadel can be expanded with shard reactors, habitation centers, and shipyards. Each Citadel structure mounts incredibly powerful modular and customizable defenses. Devastating beam cannons, massive shield generators, and so on. You will need those defenses, as the AI will respond to your Human-Spire alliance with vicious Exogalactic Strikeforces.

• A habitation center synthesizes large quantities of usable metal for you, and allows the citadel to support more structures.
• A shard reactor provides substantial local power as well as the unique radiation needed by the shipyards.
• A shipyard constructs and supports the real solution to your problems: Spire Capital Ships.

One Citadel can only support so many shipyards, which can only support so many of these ships (and only the smaller classes). And constructing additional colony ships is (initially) beyond your capacity.

4) Thankfully, the means to expand are out there. One of your Ark's special Hacking abilities allows it to scan for the remnants of ancient Spire outposts. Scanning will point you in the direction you’ll need to go to find these outposts. Once you've narrowed it down to a specific system, scanning there will reveal and bring the core of the ancient Spire outpost, the artifact, aboard your Ark.

Unfortunately, scanning literally bombards the local planetary systems with strong communication signals. As you might expect, that will attract the AI's attention to your Ark.. But that's nothing compared to what happens once the artifact is aboard. Suffice it to say that you'll want to get back to a Citadel pronto to weather the storm.

With each additional artifact, you can build an another Spire Colony Ship and found an additional Citadel.

5) As you construct more Citadels and shipyards, bigger and more powerful Spire ships and technology become available.

Once you reach a certain critical mass... well, you'll see :)

So what's different from AIW Classic's Fallen Spire?

AIW Classic's Fallen Spire (FS) had two major design objectives:  

• Give the player the option of shifting from guerrilla war to open war.  
• Provide something like a scripted campaign.

FS succeeded wonderfully in its first design objective. Many players play AIW Classic more often with FS than without. Some play it exclusively that way.

But AIW Classic's codebase was not supportive of scripted behavior, so it had to be hardcoded. It was extremely time-consuming to implement. It also took a long time to stamp out the bugs.

So FS only moderately succeeded in the second design objective.

As a result, and given our budget, the main difference in the sequel's implementation of the Spire is that it's only trying to meet the first objective. As is the Arcen-way, we are also going to be implementing and making improvements based on years of user feedback (but you already know that).

We do want to do scripted stuff again someday, but it means creating a solid scenario-building framework (basically a major extension of what's planned for tutorials) to provide the tools to do the job right. That will take a lot of time and money. It's a potential future stretch goal for this project, but it would be for delivery after the currently projected timeline.

Tell me more about these Improvements?

1) We are going to reduce the time it takes to have your first Citadel operational, so you can start getting to the real power that much faster. But you still have the option of sticking with a minor Spire ally (the initial Colony Ship, like FS's outpost and frigates) and expand the Spire side if and when you want to.

2) The process of finding additional artifacts (shards in the FS sense) used to be a "scan on your homeworld, and then we'll tell you exactly which system the thing is in" process. Now it will be much more a "you're getting warmer..." process where you take your Ark and a big fleet and go cruising for a bruising.

3) Because your Ark is actually involved in the recovery, the hunt and chase are both more interesting (and terrifying). Further, this change allows the force that chases you when you recover an artifact to be a finite one-time assault rather than an ongoing spawn that literally forces you to retreat to your homeworld. Now you get to choose where you make your stand, or just keep running.

4) I know graphics aren't the most important thing to most AI War players, but c'mon, huge battles with giant shielded capital ships firing off all those beam weapons... it's gonna look way better now :)

Will the secret alternate victory condition still be there?

Oh yes. Oh yes indeedy.

Subtlety? Hah.

Live long and conquer, 

Keith

(Note: To those in the US: Happy Thanksgiving! We're going to be fairly scarce around here until Monday, so the next video will be next week, but there will probably be another AI-focused update on Friday)

Music goal: Check! On to the Spire stretch goal!
over 7 years ago – Thu, Dec 01, 2016 at 08:01:59 AM

Chris here.  Apologies for three updates in one day, but we hadn't expected to be hitting this particular goal until tomorrow.  In the end, it's a nice problem to have!

A bunch of backers from the first campaign responded to our reminder on that side to check out the re-launch, and so we've had our best day since we hit the first funding goal.

We passed the $65k mark, which means our first stretch goal is in the bag, so here's where we are now:

We're really excited about the music goal that's already been hit, and we're also really excited about bringing back the Spire as a playable race.  That was one of the most popular features of the first campaign, and so having the chance to approach that again is really exciting.

Please do note that the way this is being handled is very different in this campaign compared to the first one.  Keith will have a more detailed post either Friday or Monday on this subject, but basically the idea is to be a little bit less divergent from the main game mode.

I'll break down the line of thinking, here, even though it's not going into all the details that Keith will later:

AI War Classic: Fallen Spire

I guess I'll avoid spoilers here, but basically this was a "scripted campaign within the dynamic campaign" that you could activate.  If you followed that for long enough, then you'd get the ability to have giant Spire ships of your own -- leading you into a Godzilla vs Mothra giant monster fight with the AI.  Very different from the usual guerrilla tactics.

Pros:

• The scripted campaign itself was fun and added some structure that a certain segment of players appreciated.
• The payoff at the end was super fun.

Cons:

• The scripted campaign is the same every time, kinda-sorta.  It's layered into the procedural campaign and so the details differ a lot each time, but scripted by nature means that it's more hand-crafted than usual.
• You don't get that big payoff until the very end, and it's not a guarantee you'll live to that point.

First Kickstarter Plan (Mine)

Cinth had the idea of playable races, and then it was off to the races pretty fast with that.  My goal was basically to take the Fallen Spire endgame and let you start there and play a whole game in that fashion (cutting out the scripted campaign in the middle).  

You'd have all-Spire stuff, play very differently from normal, and it would be giant monsters all the way down.

This was exciting, and we were planning on the Zenith being playable in that fashion, too.  However, it does lead into some problems where it quickly becomes two different games.

In Classic, there was a major feature called Defender Mode that I was implementing at the same time that Keith was implementing Fallen Spire.  Defender Mode was a completely separate game mode, and it was something people had asked for for ages... and then we couldn't hardly get anyone to do serious playtesting on it, let alone play it long term.

Fallen Spire, meanwhile, being more integrated into the main game, went on to glory and riches and is something a lot of people loved.

As one aside: I wasn't ignoring the past here, but basically in The Last Federation we had had success introducing Betrayal Mode and Invasion Mode in its first expansion, and the overlap in those was high enough with the main game mode that people were able to happily bounce between the modes.  So I figured the Spire and Zenith races as separate factions would fall into that territory, basically.

Whether that is true or not is debatable -- I'm honestly not sure at this point, but we'd set aside adequate budget to explore it thoroughly, and had some fallback positions we could try if the more audacious design didn't work out.

This Kickstarter's Plan (Keith's)

Giant Flashing Red Disclaimer!

I'm not the lead designer on this feature, and it's possible I'm about to say something that is accidentally outright false. I'm attempting to show you the thought process we used in order to get here, and then Keith will come through Friday or Monday and actually explain what this is in better detail.

Nothing I write below this point in this specific section should be taken as any sort of promise, since I don't want to accidentally commit Keith to something he didn't intend. I know what he has planned is very cool, and we've discussed it on numerous occasions, but I have not yet read the very latest iterations of his design on it.  

Normally I try to be as accurate as possible in my posts, but in this case I want to give you a bit of an idea of what is in the ballpark direction coming up, and then let Keith present his work when he's finished writing up all the bits for you in the manner that he's confident in.

Okay, On With It ;)

We knew that the ability to play as the Spire was a marquee feature that people were excited about, but there were a variety of dubious things about my proposed implementation.  Given that we're having to do this on a lower budget with a smaller staff, that also made for less margin for error.

The general approach Keith decided on was to make it so that you keep the basics of your human faction in place, but also get the Spire stuff added into it.  That gets at the core goal of "be like the endgame of Fallen Spire, but more from the start of the game," but without being so divergent in style that it's Defender-Mode levels of different.

The worry being that people wouldn't play the latter nearly as much... and that even if they did, there would have to be double work on most balancing and content additions in the future.  So it could make further expansion to the game a lot more sluggish since we'd have to give the Spire enough to keep parity with the humans.

The benefits of Keith's approach are many, anyhow, and they basically make it so that we can hone directly in on the core cool factor of the Spire as a playable race without the problems noted above.  He's spoken in the comments in a few places about other specific things with this, but as I said -- more on this will be coming Friday or Monday.

Art Style

As to the art style for the Spire, I can speak to that with some authority.  Blue and I have been working on various improvements for the art style in general, which you may have noticed in the videos we've posted thus far.  But there's even more goodies than we've been able to show just yet.

When it comes to the Spire, I created the original style for them in AI War Classic using ZBrush, and ultimately I'm really unhappy with how that has aged.  Cath helped to reinvigorate them in a major way in Stars Beyond Reach, but we had some enormous troubles with them just being too white and glowy and thus hard to differentiate.

During the first campaign, I had experimented around with a red and glowy style, and was able to get a lot more range out of it.  I'm still not really loving how that came out, though.  So in terms of art style, I think we have some more work to do for these guys, and we likely won't know exactly what they look like until sometime early next year.  

But if you've been enjoying the evolution of the graphics in this game thus far from the start of the first kickstarter to now, I think you'll only continue to be pleased. :)  And in terms of the just absolutely titanic scale... yeah, that's going to stay, haha.

Okay -- that's enough.  Goodnight!

Chris