quantumstate

I'm afraid I find it find it pretty hard to understand what you are saying in that sample. Your pronunciation is very unusual, this would not be suitable for the videos. Perhaps you could do a Spanish version, I can't comment on that though as I don't speak Spanish.

I am in favour on exponential armour. It means that techs are evenly weighted across units, so that already strong units don't get even stronger (relatively) with upgrades. It can be displayed as a percentage to players and the effect of technologies should be easy to describe, so players can understand what is going on.

One thing to consider with unit portraits is that no portraits is better than 75% portraits for consistency so unless all the units get portraits made you may find a lot of work is unused.

I am not just randomly guessing. I am aware of competitive RTS gaming with AoE2, AoM and Starcraft. I have never come across a ranked multiplayer game with an AI. I don't think I have even come across a multiplayer game between people who didn't know each other in real life with an AI. Looking at database sharing later is fine but I don't think this should be discouraged at all for this reason. You would need a hefty server since it needs to run the whole simulation for every AI it provides. Letting a player host the AI seems more realistic.

Welcome to the forum. It should be fine with the replay system since it will just be the same as a normal player, so the commands should be stored in the replay. Saving could be more difficult, I think it would only be possible for the host to load the saved game, or perhaps other players could load the game and just have the AI play differently (like how saved games and AI work now). Regarding the database PostgreSQL sounds like a very large dependency if you have it local. SQLite sounds like a better option. Requiring a central server doesn't sound ideal, though having one available might be nice. Edit: With regards to the host cheating with local AI. I doubt anyone is going to play serious competitive games with AI so there is little incentive to cheat. I don't think this is worth much consideration.

You can easily select units of one type by drag selecting them all an then clicking the unit portrait to select only that type. Idles only isn't possible as far as I know.

The components for an entity are determined by the xml template files (public/simulation/templates).

Buildings hotkeys should be direct. So just hit f to build a farm. This is how much modern games do it, we should have enough keys. Don't worry too much about which key to use. They are very easy to remap once implemented.

I think it should become default. It would be good to add some simple resource handicap for new players though. Also we should do lots of testing .

Pressing h resets the view to the default.

Welcome Malcom, I look forward to seeing what you do .

There is no need to stick with integers or we can switch to a 0.95 base to provide more granularity. I think we should just show the percentage in the UI. No, the return remains constant. With 99% armour you take 10 ties less damage than with 90% armour. Each armour point reduces the damage taken by a fixed multiplier. Level 50 would be silly levels of armour strength so enemies would need to deal 200 damage for every hit point reduction. level 9000 armour is absolutely ridiculous needing 10^409 damage for every hit point reduction. Unless by essentially the same you meant it basically becomes impenetrable beyond a certain point.

You automatically gain a small amount of resources (loot) for every building destroyed and every unit killed, we know this is not at all obvious. Adding manual gathering is unlikely to happen since we want to avoid too many extra little things for players to do and this doesn't seem to give any interesting game play effects.

With exponential armour each armour point decreases damage by a fixed multiplier. So for example if we have a 0.9 based exponential system then we can look at some upgrades. Initially we have units A and B which have armour values of 2 (19%) and 5 (41%). Now we add a tech for 1 armour point (10%). This means that units A and B both take 10% less damage than they took before the tech was researched. Now lets look at the percentage armour. A and B again have 19% and 41% armour. Lets try adding 10% armour to get 29% and 51%. Now Unit A takes 12% less damage and Unit B takes 17% less damage. So the armour techs give more benefit to units which had more armour before. The disadvantage is that the numbers are less pretty and players may find it harder to understand, though hopefully by describing techs as a reduction in the damage taken it will actually be quite clear. Once you get the concept it is actually easier to deal with since like the change from additive (existing) to multiplicative (percentage) it makes the effects uniform across all units. The advantage is that upgrades act uniformly on the damage rate for all units.

I am leaning towards exponential armour at the moment. It works more cleanly with anything that modifies armour values, making the modification apply evenly across units. We could easily display a percentage in the GUI. Being too slow isn't a problem since it can very easily be cached as a multiplier if it is really too slow (this seems unlikely anyway).

I don't think that the PSA files can be loaded into any software currently (except for the game itself).

Main thread is at http://www.wildfiregames.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=17113

As a point of curiosity the topic about trading gains was the extra straw that pushed me to start the discussion that eventually lead to the Design Committee being set up. So it only seems fair that the Committee shall now look at this issue. Here is the original thread sharing gains with trading (patch included). Basically the proposal is to have some portion of the trade profit go to the owner of the market instead of the owner of the trade unit. So when trading with an allies market your ally will receive some income. A notable percentage is 50% which happens to be the same as the international trading bonus. This means that if you trade with an ally instead of yourself you don't get any bonus for the international trade but your ally gets income instead. Discussion topic is at http://www.wildfiregames.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=17114

Good to see the open source nature being useful. Looking good so far.

Slow as usual, but here we are. Time to make a decision about this. http://www.wildfiregames.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=16985entry264049 Also I moved the other discussion over to http://www.wildfiregames.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=17112

Three possible systems have emerged from the discussion. Current system: Damage = Attack - Armour Percentage armour: Damage = Attack * (100 - Armour) / 100 Exponential armour: Damage = Attack * 0.9^Armour Summary of Discussion Current system - It is what we have now, the issues are known. - Real armour tends to stop a certain amount of damage. More powerful missiles don't get stopped much by armour. Percentage Armour - Makes reasoning about changes more independent. Adding 10% attack will increase attack by 10% vs every unit in the game. - Percentage can represent the percentage of body coverage. Exponential Armour - Techs have the same effect on each unit. So a 10% armour tech will decrease damage by 10% for every unit. - Basically works the same as percentage armour except for techs. - Players may find the concept difficult if they have not studied higher level maths.

Yes.

You definitely are weaker than 2 separate players, since the only benefit is better multitasking control.

First make sure you placed the entity, not the actor. Actors are purely visual. Then it should just work (use the normal movement commands) once you start running the game (either by saving the map or using the play button in atlas).

The message has frequently occurred in multiplayer games for me. No other errors or crashes though .