AI War 1.008 Released (Free DLC & Player Suggestions)

Arcen Games is pleased to announce the release of AI War: Fleet
Command version 1.008. You can download a trial version
of the game, as well as purchase
a license key to unlock the full version. If you already have the
game or demo installed, just hit "Check For Updates" inside the game to
get the latest patch.  



More Free DLC: The primary upgrade in this release is
improvements to the AI and how the players can interact with them.
 Planets on the galaxy map now show up as red (as seen below left) when
the AI is likely to reinforce at them.  This helps the human players
avoid tipping their hand too soon and causing key AI planets to
reinforce too heavily.




Additionally, AI players will now reinforce their wormholes much like
the human players tend to do.  This makes deep raiding much more
difficult and interesting, and requires many new tactics.  In response
to this, the human scouts are now much upgraded -- they all now include
Cloaking, and most also now have a Cloaking Booster ability (as seen
below right) that makes them even more effective in groups.




 

In addition to the above, this release also contains another large batch
of improvements, tweaks, and extensions based on player suggestions.
 Here are some of the highlights:

- Capturable ships now are now only captured after a command station
is finished being built.

- Parasite costs have increased.

- Waypoints can now be queued in conjunction with wormhole-movement
commands.

- Ships can now move between planets in attack-move or free-roaming
defender modes.

- Repair Stations and Mark II Engineers have had a range upgrade.

- Cloaked ships will no longer auto-fire at enemy ships unless in
attack-move/free-roaming mode.  This helps them maintain invisibility on
longer raids.

- New Ship: Wormhole Command Posts are a perma-cloaked ship used by
AIs to reinforce their wormholes. Kill the command station to kill
these.

- Scouts and EyeBots have been heavily upgraded to deal with the
newer wormhole threats; they now all have cloaking, and most have a new
Cloaking Booster ability.

- Control group icons are now included in the planetary summary.

- Mark II Science Labs and Missile Silos are now less expensive.

- The range of all tachyon beam emitters is now higher.

- The way the AI reinforces is now tech-level dependent (higher
techs get fewer reinforcements).

- Lightning Missiles have been made a bit more durable.

- A new "AI Alert Level" is now shown on the galaxy map intel
summaries, showing at which planets the AI is likely to do
reinforcements.

- Fixed several fairly rare bugs, including a multiplayer desync
relating to attacking forcefields.

- Fixed Astro Trains just hanging out at their stations.

- Fixed a bug with AI players getting new ship types at too fast a
rate.

- Fixed a 1.007 bug where too many Advanced Research Stations and
Data Centers were being created on maps 80 planets and up.




The above list is just a sampling, however, so be sure to check out the
full release notes to see everything (attached at the end of this post).
 More free DLC will be heading your way next week. Enjoy!

AI War Soundtrack Now Available Through iTunes!

The soundtrack from AI War has been widely praised, and with good
reason. If you can't get enough of the music while playing the game, or
you love the music but RTS games just aren't your thing, you're in
luck: iTunes is now carrying the original soundtrack (OST) for the
game!




 

In the iTunes store, just do a search for either "Pablo Vega" or "AI
War: Fleet Command." All of the proceeds from iTunes sales go directly
to the composer. He did an awesome job, above and beyond the call of
duty for any contractor, and we're really looking forward to bringing
him on board as a fulltime staff member if AI War sales continue to be
as great as they recently have been. In the meantime, we've left the
rights for OST sales with him so that he can promote his incredible work
beyond just the gaming community -- we're thrilled to see it now
appearing on iTunes.

Weekend Impulse Buy: 25% Off On AI War!

This weekend only, you can get AI War: Fleet Command for 25% off the
regular price at Stardock's Impulse
store. AI War is already an incredible value, but this is a great
chance to get it at an even lower price ($14.99 instead of the usual
$19.99).

Some Puzzle Games

FreeTumble is yet another "destroy adjacent same-color bricks" puzzle game but one of the better-looking and -sounding ones. Three modes of gameplay are provided, they can be seen as variation of the same game for different types of puzzle players or different hardness modes.

FreeTumble - I much like that there is a credits screen

Biniax-2 is an original puzzle game in which colors also play a role and which also is stronger on the visual side than your typical open source Tetris clone. It features a turn-based and continuous mode. The latter can be played with two players in a versus-game.

Biniax-2 (no sound)

Simon Tatham's Portable Puzzle Collection will help you if you're bored at the office or similar.

CreepSmash is a java-based multiplayer tower defense game. Have some videos of it too!

26 June 06:09 UTC PS: RubyWeekend #3 with the theme "A Tiny World" started a few hours ago. It's a 3-day open source ruby game programming competition.

AI War 1.007 Released (Free DLC & Player Suggestions)

Arcen Games is pleased to announce the release of AI War: Fleet
Command version 1.007. You can download a trial version
of the game, as well as purchase
a license key to unlock the full version. If you already have the
game or demo installed, just hit "Check For Updates" inside the game to
get the latest patch.  



More Free DLC: A new transport ship (shown below) can now be
unlocked from the DEF tab of your command stations.  This transport is
hugely useful for ferrying your weaker ships past heavy enemy defenses
(across minefields, past ion cannons, etc).  Transports can also be used
for ferrying teleporting ships between planets (very useful, since
teleporting ships were previously locked to their current planet).








In addition to the new ships, this release also contains another large
batch of improvements, tweaks, and extensions based on player
suggestions.  Here are some of the highlights:

- Music streaming has been improved, which speeds up loading
savegames and the game itself.

- Suggested paths between planets are now much better.

- Several AI enhancements.

- Harvester ExoShields have been made more useful.

- Fighters have been rebalanced, making them more useful.

- Several new graph options are now available.

- Overzoom is now an option.

- Efficiency of drawing hundreds or thousands of ship attack ranges
is now much better.

- Multiple constructors can now be managed at once (space docks,
missile silos, etc).

- It is now possible to issue commands to ships still being built
(which they will execute after completion).

- Galaxy maps as small as 10 planets are now supported.

- A new Auto AI Progress option has been added, allowing game pacing
to be greatly adjusted.

- Performance in very active games with more than 80,000 ships has
been greatly improved.

- Trial players can now play with full retail players for the trial
duration (1 hour).

- Waypoints now work better with attack-move mode.




The above list is just a sampling, however, so be sure to check out the
full release notes to see everything (attached at the end of this post).
 More free DLC will be heading your way next week. Enjoy!

Bytten And Out Of Eight Reviews of AI War

Two new reviews of AI War have now come out. Be sure to click the links
to read the full
reviews, if you're interested! We've also now set up a
Press &
Player Reactions page to
aggregate reviews and player reactions all in one place.





I can't recommend it any more highly to strategy fans and fans of
space games in general.
Innovative, absorbing and most importantly a hell of a lot of fun to
play, AI War is the best
indie game I've got my hands on so far in 2009.

- Bytten
Review

 




Challenging and multifaceted AI that increases in difficulty as
you become more powerful,
extremely large battles with lots of varied units that promote
strategic variety, ample
interface designed to handle a large scale.

- Out
Of Eight PC Game Review

Turn up the juice!

Go Ollie

An open source platformer I missed yesterday is Go Ollie. It's easy to overlook, I mean, worms are not exactly a glamorous topic. Whilst I'm not sure about the license (somebody care to check? I'm busy!) the game itself is polished and fun. The controls are different to your typical platformer, where instead of moving and jumping your character directly, you select where he moves to with the mouse. Places that can be reached are highlighted, so it's about picking the right path and having the reflexes to do it quickly enough, which can be tricky on scrolling levels.

It seems to be a gift to the Linux community from game makers Tweeler. The graphics and presentation look professional. It's a great game for kids as well as a fun time waster for adults.

<update> Actually Go Ollie is by Charlie Dog Games, but Tweeler acts as a download host for the Mac/Linux version. Also, it is definitely open source - code is GPLv3 and artwork CC-by-sa with exceptions for logos. </update>

VDrift

There's a new release of VDrift, the open source drift racing game. Version 2009-06-15 is a significant release for the project which sees it re-emerge from a massive refactor as a better game than before the refactoring began. Here's a list of the major changes since the last release, which was after the refactored code stabilized:

• cars collide with each other in Single Race mode now


• AI is capable of much faster driving now, so added a difficulty slider


• off-road tire spin sound support (thanks to slowdan!)


• support for H-gate shifters


• improved performance


• lots of huge bugs fixed, especially car physics bugs

TORCS

In other racing game news, the TORCS Endurance World Championship 2009 was recently held. The full report found on a participants blog. From what I can gather, it's a long distance race (500km) where people enter their own robot drivers to see how they fare.

Base Command is a fully finished OGRE mini-game. It's a straightforward 3D protect-your-base game, where you shoot down incoming planes. What is interesting is the author has provided an analysis of the game code which would help people who are learning how to program.

Scourge map

My favourite Free software game Scourge enjoys continued progress. There's now an artistic map of the large island that is the game world. There's more information to be found in the 28th "Scourge Weekly" that tracks major developers on an almost-weekly basis. They are still looking for contributors.

There's also more juicy updates on PARPG progress. That project is looking very promising and they are working their way towards their first demo release. Given the coordination and generally high activity of that project, I'm optimistic there'll be something solidly playable before the end of the year. Our own Q put together a video showing where they are currently up to:

Other interesting updates are:

• Lips of Suna's second release, version 0.0.2, which introduces destructible voxel terrain. Lips of Suna aims to be an innovative 3D online dungeon crawl.


• The first beta of Leges Motus, a kind of gravityless 2D multiplayer shoot-em-up.


• A new Palomino release, a lovely looking 3D flight simulator - see this Free Gamer article for more flight sims.

There's probably more... feel free to add updates in the comments below!

Plants vs Zombies

Site: http://www.popcap.com/games/pvz

Plants vs Zombies is a tower defense action-strategy game by PopCap Games. This game occupied all my attention for some time - I played few nights and during the daylight I behave just like a zombie. (Brains, brains, coffee)

Gameplay
Plants vs Zombies develops around some hungry zombies and your anti-zombie plants. There are several types of battles - during the day, during the night, on the pool and on the house-roof. Away from the main game course players can enjoy some puzzle zombie games, mini-games, plant night and day gardens to receive money, grow a tree of wisdom.
Plants vs Zombies player faces a lot of humor - starting from game names like "I, zombie", through dancing zombies, fun face expressions and many more.
The game have 49(I think) different plants, each with its own skills. Players can pick out many different strategies. There are also many different zombie types, my favorite is the newspaper zombie - but I won't ruin your game explaining all the details here. From the plants I especially like the Chomper - zombie eating flower with BIG teeth.

Zen Garden seems boring at first glance but it is the place I spent most time. However, I don't know why. I don't water my real plants often.

Plants vs Zombies sure deserves its high ratings all over the net. It is a cool and entertaining game, with cheerful graphics and fun gameplay. My overall rating is 9.0 from 10, one of the best in this genre.

Designing Emergent AI, Part 3: Limitations

ABSTRACT
Continuing the series
of articles about the AI in AI War.  Takes a look at some of the
limitations of emergent-style AI, and how those limitations can be
overcome by combining the techniques proposed here with other styles of
AI.  Explores the heavily hybridized nature of the AI in AI War itself,
and how AI for games in other genres might utilize some of the
hybridized approaches -- but more importantly, where the boundaries of
usefulness are for this approach (it isn't appropriate for racing or
puzzle games, for instance).

Designing Emergent AI, Part 3: Limitations

AI War 1.006 Released (Free DLC & Player Suggestions)

Arcen Games is pleased to announce the release of AI War: Fleet
Command version 1.006. You can download a trial version
of the game, as well as purchase
a license key to unlock the full version. If you already have the
game or demo installed, just hit "Check For Updates" inside the game to
get the latest patch.  



Note:  some people were having some
trouble with the 1.005 installer, but that should be resolved with this
release without the need for any external workarounds.  Thanks to
everyone affected for their patience with that issue.

 



More Free DLC: Four new ships are now available for your use:
Engineer II, and three new kinds of Orbital Command Stations: Mark II,
Mark III, and Warp Jammer.  These four new ship types greatly expand the
economic options for players who want to customize their civilizations
in that direction.  The higher-level command stations provide extra
resources, while the Warp Jammer command station provides a way to
prevent all enemy warps into a few select systems (but at a steep
ongoing resource cost).




In addition to the
new ships, this release also contains even more dozens of improvements,
tweaks, and extensions based on player suggestions. This week's offering
exceeds even last week's, we think.  Thanks again to everyone who took
the time to offer feedback -- and as a reminder for everyone whose
suggestion made it onto the official to-be-done-in-DLC list, but didn't
make it into this release, you should be seeing your ideas in play over
the coming weeks.




Here are some of the highlights:

- New graphs in the scores display shows player progress on a number
of metrics over time.

- The online mini strategy guide has become a more comprehensive
wiki.

- Various improvements to the score screen display.

- Tooltips for starting ship types in the lobby, and other minor
lobby enhancements.

- Even more galaxy map display modes, filters, and control options.

- Holding the I key now shows the Hit Percent and Damage for all
selected ships.

- Savegame performance improved 5x for large games (60,000+ ships)
in particular.

- AI Progress now uses a scale 10x higher than it was previously,
and Astro Train Station and Special Forces Command Post destruction now
has a minor increase to AI Progress.

- Several AI behaviorlets have been added for making it more
intelligent in a few specific cases.

- Several improvements have been made to make the game more friendly
to Turn-Based Strategy (TBS) players.

- Dozens more smaller improvements, tweaks, and extensions suggested
by players.  See full release notes for details.




The above list is just a sampling, however, so be sure to check out the
full release notes to see everything (attached at the end of this post).
 More free DLC will be heading your way next week. Enjoy!

Choosing a DirectX Platform In C#

ABSTRACT
Discusses the
developer's experiences in MDX, XNA, and SlimDX, and why SlimDX was
ultimately picked over the other options for AI War and all other
planned Arcen Games titles.

Choosing a DirectX Platform In C#

Designing Emergent AI, Part 2: Queries and Code

ABSTRACT
Continuing the series
of articles about the AI in AI War.  Takes a look at some of the actual
LINQ queries used by the game, and addresses a few common criticisms
that came up to the first article.  This article is intended more for
programmers or AI enthusiasts, whereas the first article was
multi-audience.

Designing Emergent AI, Part 2: Queries and Code

Platformer roundup

I thought I'd check out how Super Tux development is going. I grabbed the lastest svn, compiled, and performance was so abominable that it took me a minute just to quit. It didn't help that it was placed half-off the screen (probably because I have a dual screen setup) Super Tux used to run fine. I'll hold my hands up and say I'm using an nvidia chipset and the open source driver without any significant OpenGL Acceleration, but it's a 2D game. I hope they work on some kind of OpenGL-less fallback.

Mole Invasion

One little-known but very promising platformer is Mole Invasion. The website is mainly in French, but there is a dedicated English page. The game language defaults to English. The current release is version 0.4, and the first thing you notice is the Mario-like logo; obviously the inspiration for the gameplay. The second thing you notice is the performance - it runs great. It's really smooth, the animations are good, the characters move well, and there's plenty of variation. A lot of the levels are obviously made with testing in mind, and some of the graphics are still a bit raw, but otherwise it was a fun experience.

Mole Invasion feels like it is headed in the direction that Super Tux should have been. I can't help but feel that Super Tux development has significantly lost it's way. The first few post-GotM releases of Super Tux were very promising, and very well received. That was now several years ago, and little has changed for the better, some questionable decisions (move to OpenGL), and new milestones seem on the other end of a development void.

The Legend of Edgar

There's a new Parallel Realities game out. The Legend of Edgar is a platform game with a fantasy setting. I had a go with 0.1, which is playable with a single player storyline. For me, it suffers from the same issues I have with Blob Wars: Metal Blob Solid - the movement is just way too slow. It takes many minutes to navigate levels to the point that exploring a level is just tedious as you wait for your character to amble his way around.

Remember Frogatto is a old-style platformer starring an anthropomorphic frog, championed by the lead developer of Battle for Wesnoth? It celebrates pixels and thrives on cute blocky graphics. There are updated Frogatto builds for Windows and Mac from the weekend, although pious Linux users must compile from source. I couldn't compile it. I had previously, and it was looking promising! Anybody else managed to compile it on Fedora?

Widelands

The next version of Widelands - based on the classic RTS gameplay of Settlers II - is fast approaching. "Build 14" will come with GGZ support, making it much easier to find multiplayer opponents. Map auto-generation, lots of other small enhancements, more campaigns and a better beta testing phase should make this the Widelands release well worth playing.

AI War 1.005 Released (Free DLC & Player Suggestions)

Arcen Games is pleased to announce the release of AI War: Fleet
Command version 1.005. You can download a trial version
of the game, as well as purchase
a license key to unlock the full version. If you already have the
game or demo installed, just hit "Check For Updates" inside the game to
get the latest patch.







More
Free DLC: Three new ships are now available for your use:  Science
Lab II, Mobile Repair Stations, and Counter-Negative-Energy Turrets.
 Each provides interesting new strategic capabilities.  As helpful as
these new ships are, however, they almost pale in comparison to the vast
number of other updates and enhancements in this release.  This release
contains dozens of improvements, tweaks, and extensions based on
suggestions from over ten players.  Thanks to everyone who took the time
to offer feedback so far -- and for everyone whose suggestion made it
onto the official to-be-done-in-DLC list, but didn't make it into this
release, you should be seeing your ideas in play over the coming weeks.







Here are some of the highlights:

- The game now supports smaller galaxy maps in addition to the
existing sizes.

- Enhancements to zoom.

- Many new settings options, including better support for windowed
modes.

- Many, many new display modes available in galaxy view.

- Ship borders now flash in far zoom when they take damage.

- Minimap enhancements, including minimap display modes.

- Icons for important enemy ships are now shown in the Intel Summary
of the galaxy map.

- Minor planetary summary (the palette on the right side of the
screen) improvements.

- Ship autotargeting is now much improved.  Overkill is a thing of
the past.

- The AI now acts a little bit smarter at guard posts, retreating
more often when needed.




The above list is just a sampling, however, so be sure to check out the
full release notes to see everything (attached at the end of this post).
 More free DLC will be heading your way next week. Enjoy!

AI War on Co-Optimus.

From the post:

I checked out the demo last week and came away
surprised just how deep this game is.  The game isn't for the faint of
heart when it comes to strategy.  Thankfully there's a full tutorial
available to walk you through the game.  The cooperative mode feels very
robust, but you'll definitely want to use some sort of voice chat
software because there's so much stuff to communicate.

Head
over to Co-Optimus
for the full post.

AI War Comes To GameTrove!

AI War is now on GameTrove, an indie-focused game site!

What planet are you on?

Wesnoth Knight

Battle for Wesnoth continues to get stupendously good art contributions such as this series of Loyalist portraits.

Hot on the heels of Extreme Tux Racer 0.5beta, contributor and original Tux Racer developer Erin has introduced his rewrite to the world. Tentatively named Bunny Hill, the rewrite has a better design resulting in better performance, nicer graphics (in some ways, lesser in others) and more features. It looks like it will probably become ETR 0.6 once the dust has settled.

PARPG Weapons

PARPG is back from the dead. 3 weeks not blogging being 'dead' apparently. The project itself is thriving, with plenty of graphical creativeness whilst the coders assess their options for developing the game.

Unknown Horizons will have a new release very soon!

Widelands is getting randomly generated maps.

Simutrans Subways

It looks like Simutrans is getting subways, at least pak96.comic is anyway. Subterranean!

There'll be loads more updates to your favourite Free games but I don't have my finger on the pulse as much as I used to, so...

...so...

...post them in the comments!

Update: the FreeOrion project released version 0.3.13 and it has a huge changelog.

Designing Emergent AI, Part 1: An Introduction

ABSTRACT
Takes a look at the
design philosophy behind the AI in AI War, and looks at ways in which
emergent behavior and other modern AI techniques can be used instead of
traditional decision trees.  If you're wondering how we made such an
intelligent AI, this provides a good overview.

Designing Emergent AI, Part 1: An Introduction

UKGamer Review of AI War

From the review:

Since you specify the parameters
of the Universe you play in, there are a lot of replay opportunities and
the degrees of AI difficulty and play style will also further add to
that, so you're getting a lot of indie-fuelled strategic play for your
$20. But you are also encouraged to become part of the AI War community,
and participate in its future evolution and development. With DLC
already being rolled out regularly, and a planned expansion in the
works, you too could be a part of its emergence.

Head over to
UKGamer for the
full review.

AI War 1.004 Released (Free DLC & Several Fixes)

Arcen Games is pleased to announce the release of AI War: Fleet Command version 1.004. You can download a trial version of the game, as well as purchase a license key to unlock the full version. If you already have the game or demo installed, just hit "Check For Updates" inside the game to get the latest patch.



More Free DLC: Two new ships are now out in the galaxy for you to encounter.  Both of these ships are quite challenging to deal with, so only show up on the advanced difficulty levels.  Next week's DLC will have ships for everyone, never fear -- but other major features for everyone in this week's DLC include a variety of control enhancements, and a new "No Enemy Waves" AI Modifier.






There are also a couple of bugfixes: if you were having trouble loading savegames in the trial version of the game, or if you had a larger screen resolution and game fonts looked chunky or fuzzy, this version fixes those issues.



The first new unit, shown right, is PermaMines.  These mines work like regular mines, except that they cannot be destroyed by being shot or by being collided-with (though they will kill that which collides with them).  These mines also don't have cloaking, and you will only occasionally run into these on the higher difficulties on AI planets.  These mines create some interesting strategic challenges , as you can only get past them with EMPs, luck (sometimes ships don't set off mines they pass -- the smaller and faster the ship, the more likely it is to slip past), ships with Mine Avoidance (builders, engineers, raiders, etc), or by going around the PermaMined wormhole.



The second new ship is the Core Starship, a terrifying haunt of some core and home AI planets on the "HARDER" AI styles (so, regardless of what AI difficulty you play on, AIs like Technologist Homeworlders and Backdoor Hackers will have a chance of having Core Starships.  These starships have a lot more health than any other starships, and a powerful primary attack.  The best strategy with them is perhaps avoidance -- you can set up decoys and distractions to keep them busy while you complete your real objectives.  Of course, you could opt for a full-on assault against them, too, but just be prepared for a long and difficult battle unless you bring along something like Mobile Force Field Generators to protect your units.  There are other strategies that work, too -- experiment and see what fits for you!



There are three key control/interface enhancements included in this week's release, all suggested by canny player Maxim Kuschpel.  They are: group move, free-roaming defender mode, and the ability to press the L key and divide your selected forces in half (by numbers of selected ship types).  You can read more on these new features in the controls document -- press escape and then hit View Controls from the in-game menu while you are playing.



In a nutshell, Group Move lets you move a batch of selected ships which may have differing speeds all at the same speed (the slowest speed).  This is great for having fighters, bombers, and cruisers all reach an attack target at once, or for having faster ships guard a smaller, weaker, ship such as a Science Lab or Colony Ship that is on the move. To put ships into this mode, either hold the G key while giving them movement orders, or use the new button at the bottom of the HUD (Lone vs Group movement style toggle).  They will show up with a turquoise border in far zoom while in this mode.



Free-Roaming Defender Mode lets you easily defend your planets.  In past versions, if a couple of small ships got past your wormhole defenses, you'd have no choice but to hunt those down manually, which required more micromanagement than was always pleasant (that really emphasized wormhole defense, but perfection is not always possible).  By holding V and right-clicking anywhere, you can put your ships into the new Free-Roaming Defender mode, which gives them a pink border in far zoom, and makes them chase and attack any enemy ships on the current planet.  Setting some of your ships in this mode is great for letting them take care of any stragglers that slip through your defenses, without you having to manage it.



More free DLC will be heading your way next week. Enjoy!

Optimizing 30,000+ Ships In Realtime In C#

ABSTRACT

Primarily a technical
article, discusses the methods by which such huge unit counts and such
intensive AI were achieved.  Especially notable since the game is coded
in C#, rather than C++.



Optimizing 30,000+ Ships In Realtime In C#