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I agree with Mentula that ProGUI gives a serious advantage over a player of the same level, if used well. However he didn't say what is in my opinion the biggest reason why this is the case (at my level that is). The biggest advantage is in the case of continuous fights or harrassments, preferably in p1 or p2, where there are 3 or 4 production buildings per player. In that case, the attacking player can focus near all his actions in microing the fights, making threats, forcing his opponent to react accordingly, and he will still have near perfect production at home. Meanwhile, the other player forced to micro his fights as well will not be able to queue units at the right time and will fall behind because of it. The population deficit will grow until the game is definitely over. I think that it is quite a big advantage. For comparison if used correctly by a good player it would be kind of as if a player is with a game speed of 0.7 while his opponent is at 1.0, normal speed. While both players have the same skills and would make a good decision at a good time, having your game slow down allows you to make more actions that are valuable at a critical time of the game. However, if both players are booming, it makes almost no difference as both players will have the time to do all meaningful actions, and the boom will be the same. It may still boost some players' booming ability, so it may also be unfair for that reason, but i don't really know about that personally. I am saying this based on (maybe a bit limited) experience. There's a certain player that has a similar skill level as me. If I recall correctly I have a slightly higher win ratio against him when he is not using ProGUI. However when he used ProGUI I had 0-3, and it was not even close. He simply made what I think is a perfect use of the mod, forcing fights mid-game and getting a pop advantage I could not recover from. I will give a little more intuition on how this can affect competitive games by giving the example on how macros are viewed in Age of Empires 2. Basically, any kind of macro is banned, and you can see in this video how even the simplest macros are problematic: 0 A.D. is not AoE2 of course but still that shows macros can escalate into a huge advantage. So if powerful macros are found with @Mentula's mod then that gives what i think could be an unfair competitive advantage as well. The same can be said with autociv where building hotkeys give a huge advantage (when used properly, of course). The difference for me is that it is a feature that should so obviously be in the game, that it makes it fine. But anything further than that, I am not so sure. AoE2 also had some grey areas with the building range indicator, and some mods like small trees or age of cubes. I hope you see my point. I personally wouldn't mind too much in team games which are less serious and where we try to balance it before game start, however if I expect the game to be competitive when I really want my level to clash with the opponent, that's gonna be a problem for me. Of course I know that neither @Atrik and @Mentula intend to do any wrong and I respect the openness of your programs, but still that can cause a problem when a powerful feature is released. Personally I would like very much for the AI to have an enhanced training algorithm. Personally a long time ago I modified their queuing algorithm to grow population faster, however it is not worth much as I didn't touch the other parts of the AI to go with it. We can see that in the following screenshot where my AI (red) grew population much faster in the early game than Petra (green), where they both had the same gather rate at a medium difficulty each:

Before entering the merit. This post in not an accusation against the proGUI project: if someone moves critiques against the project or its developer, I will take the proGUI part. As I already said in my first post it is desirable that satellite projects (such as mods) are likewise open. Explicitly (if I haven't said it loudly) this means I support modders, mods and creativity. This thread is about a problem we have. Somebody in the community do not consider this a problem, some others do. The sole fact that a part of the community (not just me) evaluates this as a problem, makes this discussion worth to exist. Further, this thread is not a proposal of decommissioning the proGUI project. To summarize what I said is: 1. I don't have proposals 2. We all should behave according to common sense, which varies (as a consequence, I do not expect others to think like I do). And although I didn't formulate any proposal, I am inviting the community members to find a solution that can accommodate the majority of us. Solutions can be: a) we all use proGUI b) some of us use it, some others don't c) the proGUI queuing system becomes part of 0 A.D. vanilla d) other... I am not supporting any solution in particular. My intent is to face a problem and find a solution, leveraging our rationality at best. Entering the merit: one more time, when I say observe, I mean measure more than notice. Expectations and emotions affect the way we interpret results, so I waited and wrote this post after observing a concrete example of a player who reaches maxpop at minute >17 without proGUI, and reaches maxpop at minute ~14 with proGUI. Since data matter, we can all experiment: we play a number of games with and without proGUI under same conditions, and measure the effect. About the (very unproven) accusation of unfairness @Atrik: please note that the section you quote starts with This is 100% personal opinion. Opinions are, by nature, very unproven. Once again (I quote), I don't want to dive into discussions on levels and skills, which can easily go out of track. Arguments about transforming novices into professional players and the use that top 10 players can do of proGUI are, in my opinion, off-track (besides, nobody is supporting such claims, as far as I can read on the forum). The same I can say about individual strategies to boom. The problem we are discussing is not about natural skills and strategies. But, whatever you guys think it makes sense to give a constructive contribution to the topic, I'm open to hear.

Hello Stev. As a software developer, one thing that people have the misconception is that you can just ask ChatGPT to solve any kind of programming problem. This is not the case. ChatGPT is designed as a language model, this makes it's response very believable. Yet it doesn't actually do any reasoning behind the scenes, it just tries to predict what is your desired response. For most cases this works wonderfully, specially when you are learning a technology and don't want to be going through countless post on how to make an HTTP request or how to search in a binary tree. When you ask it to actually solve a logical problem it falls apart pretty easily: I am using ChatGPT and generative AI for voices for my voice actors mod, but honestly. I try to double check it's results and see if it adjusts to what I can understand from my almost non existing knowledge of other languages than english and spanish ( I do have pretty low standards for the mod since it's an immersion thing I'm doing for myself). If you were to ask chatgpt to help you solve a bug, it might to some extent, but it wouldn't have the context that is needed to actually find a bug. And if you don't have the knowledge working with C++ or Javascript you could end up producing more bugs. Some of these could be extremely troublesome (specially with C++ and it's memory management). There is also this tendency of ChatGPT to just plainly lie about some things, for example I work with the language Elixir, I asked some help with some problems in the past, and ChatGPT basically always responded with a solution, inventing functions that didn't exist in the language. When pointed out, ChatGPT would write a slightly different code and invent a slightly different function (this is another thing dangerous and a sign that there is no reasoning behind ChatGPT, it will never tell you it doesn't know the response, except for the notice of the unavailability of data past 2021 ) That being said as other forum poster said, you can do a lot of things without knowing how to code. Testing mods, bug reporting, content writing, map making, etc. Even mod making doesn't really need programming knowledge in some cases, unless you consider XML programming.

Hello everyone, This is an update on the progress of the Alpha 27 release. After extensive deliberation, the team has decided to abort the release process for the foreseeable future. As some of you know, we've been in a "feature freeze" for the past 3 months. This period, during which we halt all new code merging except for crucial bug fixes, is typically a final step before a release. Unfortunately, progress on the release has been slower than anticipated, and Alpha 27 is still several weeks away. Some of the outstanding issues include: Acquiring the necessary macOS certificates for signing the packages Completing the trailer for the announcement, and finishing the announcement itself More testing is potentially needed, and some important bug fixes are not yet merged. The balance of A27 has not been extensively tested and refined. The time it takes to actually release (uploading packages, informing maintainers, etc.) is potentially more than any of the team can commit to right now. Our current pace on these matters is unsustainable. Following a vote, we have chosen to abort the release and refocus. This decision wasn't made lightly, but we believe it's in the best interest of 0 A.D.'s long-term health. We will use this time to: Merge improvements that have been developed during the feature freeze, such as optimizations and further fixes. Identify and address the issues that have hindered the current release process, as we cannot hope to release in the future without fixing them. We will likely come back to the community with more information on this last point and potentially requests for help. We realize that this news may be disappointing. We thank you for your patience, understanding, and ongoing support. On behalf of everyone at Wildfire Games, Wraitii

Your argument seems to suggest that the mod provides a certain competitive advantage that could be deemed unfair. Please clarify if my interpretation of your previous statement was inaccurate.

I am not a big fan of using ChatGPT for anything. I'm speaking of straight out of a writer perspective it might be slightly different with programming, but the issues could be same. First we have the moral objection of, ChatGPT is trained by using things on the internet without asking permission, so is it stealing or violating copyrights? That Aside, I can usually tell if ChatGPT writes something because in writing it is trained on all the internet and a majority of it isn't good writing. I've run into bad code on the internet so maybe it'd write bad code. Secondly, ChatGPT is inherently programmed to be biased and can also be plain wrong. That has nothing to do with programming, but is a reason why it shouldn't write descriptions and stuff. History is something I wouldn't trust it with because there are a lot of false sources on the internet where it could pull its data from, and I've seen ChatGPT with biases hard coded into it. For example, ask ChatGPT why its parent company is called open AI when they don't have open source stuff, and it gives a horrible, squeamish answer. If you want to help there are plenty of things you can do not related to ChatGPT you can test, report bugs. We're working on an 0 A.D, history encyclopedia that we're open for contributions to, but not with ChatGPT. It is great though that you want to help.

Haha, the math must not have been mathing that day. But yeah, the idea was to add a multiplier for kills in early games based on global population. if the current game pop is 100 and the game population cap is 800, then that military score receives a 8x boost. This way it affects everybody equally. Now, that seemed overkill, so there had to be additional parameters to get a more reasonable multiplier. Then you can make further changes to more heavily affect the low pop scenarios, with higher pop scenarios approaching a multiplier of 1. Basically, the statistic becomes more complicated than the value it is supposed to represent, so plenty of people agreed that its better to just keep simple statistics.

@real_tabasco_sauce I am a little confused. Did you mean "pop is 160/1600 = 10%"? And is the 80% boost an arbitrary number or is it based on the game pop/world pop cap? In a 4v4, a rusher may have better stats than the 1-2 people they rushed for much of the game, but the other 5-6 players likely have better stats for the majority of the gametime. It is a likely scenario that the longer the game goes, the better the score for the non-rushers (at least on the winning team). Can the population percentage boost account for this in a way that we think correctly reflects effectiveness of the rusher? Also, as the losing team's population diminishes, the winning team's kills will become increasingly more valuable in the score relative to when most players have full pop. Such a boost would be beyond what is intended. I apologize if this is all obvious, but I submit that: One of the reasons early kills are effective is because the person that loses a unit loses that unit's economic and military productivity for the rest of the game's duration. So the value of that kill continues to increase the longer the game goes on. (Or to be more precise, until that player reaches their pop cap, or whichever comes first). I don't think that ratings that don't consider time of kill compared with game duration (or time until the affected player's pop cap is reached) can capture the value of rushes. Since this mod is based on averaging scores of different frames, it may not be well suited for this. Is that right @Mentula? Actually, if we consider the value of the kill in terms of the productivity it denies the other player, there may even be a rough way to consider military and economic score as different aspects of a single dimension. Admittedly, this method would not account for the value of rushes which do not kill units but which cause a lot of idle time for the target of the rush.

Makes sense, the RC actually had some prepackaging so going blindly with source built dev version isn't equivalent (beside the few more recent patches since the RC). Thanks for clearing that up ^^ Anyway, it also works on my AMD HD 7950 (GCN 1.0) So hopefully there shouldn't be a bad surprise coming from the firsts Intel and AMD GPUs that had (experimental/incomplete) Vulkan support. I was worried about that.

I am happy to anounce there will be a prize ! The victorious player will have my approval to use the following picture !

A player has to be forced to move to p3 at some point, tho there should be tradeoffs wrt to timing. Having reaching popcap be viable before p3 is also problematic.