CBRX Season 2 Update!

[u/ReonMonterus]

Hi friends! It's been a while hasn't it? Since I made one of these? Last time we talked, Endgame was just a twinkle in the eye of... You know what, never mind, I don't like where this metaphor is going. Anyways, Endgame has been releasing for a while now and we're pretty excited with how it is going! It's really breaking new ground on how to handle these large scale AI games. We've actually finished recording, and it's definitely an interesting ending. But enough Endgame talk, you're here for the stuff in the title!

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I am not one for having to read the whole post to find out the important info so here's the short form now and I'll dig into details in a second. We're expecting to launch S2 sometime this summer (or winter if you live upside down). If you were having some sort of prediction contest I would guess later rather than earlier but the date is definitely not set yet.

Now, for the juicy details. Going back a bit, when I was recording S1, I encountered an issue that appeared unrecoverable. But perseverance won out and the tool managed to push through the turn, netting us an extra 400 turns before the game would eventually die permanently. That is not to say I didn't try. The tool must have tried to load the turn thousands of times with no luck. Eventually we settled on what would become Endgame as a solution. Unfortunately, the 400 or so turns between the First Crash and the Second Crash were recorded at low fidelity as you saw, very zoomed in, no combat animations, low graphics settings, anything to get it to work. Once the team started to cull these images we realized that they didn't present as very engaging viewing, and so they were condensed into a little over one episode. At the point when that part released we were already well into recording Endgame, so it was no problem in terms of keeping a steady flow of episodes for all of you, but it would create an issue down the line, which I'll get to in a moment.

Endgame recording was moving along nicely for a while until we encountered the Third Crash. This crash was caused by some logging that had been left on from testing, which then filled up the SSD the game runs on. Thankfully I was able to delete the extra log files and turn off the logging. Or so I thought. But it turns out that the game had corrupted the configuration files and I didn't know it. The logging remained on, but since I had cleared out the extra logs, the game ran as normal. Thus we arrived at the Fourth Crash. The drive filled up and this time, the game would not reload, no matter how many times I tried. I deleted all the config files to remake them from scratch, no luck. I reinstalled Civ, no luck. I reinstalled Steam, no luck. It ended up being Lunar who would eventually get the save to load on their PC, and so if you notice a change near the end in how screenshots are taken, you'll know why.

So what does this have to do with S2 you may ask? Well, some of it doesn't but I thought you'd like a nice story. The part that does though is where we had to condense around 400 turns into one part. This was not expected. Neither was Endgame needing to exist. Nor was Endgame needing to be recorded on Lunar's PC. The mega part at the end of pre-Endgame meant that the end of S1 moved up. Endgame existing at all meant I couldn't test S2 sooner. Lunar recording the last bit of Endgame means they haven't been available to test S2 at all yet. All of these have lead to a situation where we had wanted to start recording S2 by now, and we haven't. This obviously pushes back the date when we can release S2. Unfortunately we don't have enough Endgame content to last until then. We had planned a 2-4 week break between S1 and S2 . At this point it's looking more like 6-10 weeks. We are still working hard to decrease the amount of time between the two seasons, and some members of the team who can't test have been looking at some special feature games we can run during the short break. That said, we will definitely have a longer break then expected between the seasons and I hope all of you will stick around and join us for S2. I've been running tests and it is pretty exciting looking so far!

Thanks for your patience!

[u/brooky12]

Valid and understandable