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Stan`

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Posts posted by Stan`

  2. Looking back on the balancing strategy

    in Gameplay Discussion

    Posted

    18 hours ago, smiley said:

    There were efforts to properly communicate actual progress on a monthly basis quite recently as well, but that's a story for another ti

    I could actually make my staff reports public. I sent mails every two months or so with a commit summary and some internal team things usually nothing too private. I don't do it usually cause they might contain private information about members.

    14 hours ago, ChronA said:

    As opposed to receiving an endless stream of complaints about chronic imbalance and irhistoricity? ;)

    Can't get that if they can't run the game ;)

    14 hours ago, ChronA said:

    Curious that graphical interoperability is viewed as a critical priority by the developer community, but game design is sanctimoniously ignored for going on half a decade. Let's not pretend that this is a minor crisis just because it has been playing out for slow motion over years and decades.

    Right because the balancing branch by @scythetwirler after A16 the design document on Phabricator with @Prodigal Son and @Nescio, Balancing between @Itms and @borg- the PM about balancing, and now the balancing forums were nothing?

    14 hours ago, ChronA said:

    We have talked at length about technological, organizational, and philosophical remedies to this quandary. It is time for the guiding hands behind 0AD to make some decisions about what they are going to do...
    and then maybe practice some of that openness (transparency) you guys preach by not asking but telling us what you are planning and doing, so that we can have some confidence that this ship is headed in the right direction, or else make our own informed decisions about whether we want to jump off.

    That's the thing, My goal is just to have a playable game with interesting gameplay. The designer spot has been left vacant as I still have to find someone trusworthy, competent and who is willing to step up. As wraitii said I have no power to force anyone to do anything they do not want. I can give incentives sure, but at the end of the day if everyone leaves having the crown and being alone isn't of any help to anyone.

    6 hours ago, m7600 said:

    you are no longer a project leader, your new role is to make new music for the game. I suggest that you start learning an instrumen

    Good thing I started learning the guitar again :)

     

    • Like 2

  6. Looking back on the balancing strategy

    in Gameplay Discussion

    Posted

    57 minutes ago, Freagarach said:

    I must say you're missing one very important person here: @Langbart, who tests our game very frequently and thouroughly and reports (and bisects) many many bugs.

    Indeed I'm sorry big up for langbart :)

    2 hours ago, Crynux said:

    if I remember correctly from when I was reading yesterday), that seem to indicate there's more work needed.

    Well it does the job. The issue is that the UX isn't perfect as said above, partly for security reasons and because it was not implemented. But the core feature definitely works.

    2 hours ago, Crynux said:

    Hmmm ... I just think it's something that has had too much thought put into it tbh. I'm pretty sure it was a topic of discussion when I last dropped in here 3 years ago. I

    Actually it started 9 years ago. But you don't convince an organization to switch in one day. The problem is that there are some areas where SVN is better. Binary management is one of them simplicity is another, history managment (no huge merge commits cause one forgot to rebase) might be one too. I strongly believe though that in this case the benefits of being more accessible outweighs the cons. Migrating Trac Jenkins and Phabricator (Which is now deprecated) without losing anything when doing so is the tricky part.

    2 hours ago, Crynux said:

    Looked up the link there ... it says it only applies to late projects ... this one is in alpha, but has been going on for years lol idk if it's late or not to be honest!

    20 years :)

    2 hours ago, Crynux said:

    Github has sponsors and stuff built in as well ... people can sponsor a project (100% contributions go to the org/dev/team/whatever if I remember correctly). Also I think there's less restrictions on github for open source stuff ... but idk if it's substantial.

    That kind of funding is probably not accepted by SPI the non profit behind the project. They only have Paypal and Wire.

    2 hours ago, Crynux said:

    t. I hear svn is worse lol.

    Well SVN is centralised so unlike git if you didn't do a shallow clone you don't get twenty years. So it might be slower to get the rev but faster than to get the history.

    2 hours ago, Crynux said:

    that's the case ... then systems supporting balance changes or configuration independent of compiled code changes may be worth looking at (if this already exists, please ignore me lol), or improving.

    Check out all the balancing mods around you can download through the game. That change stats and are cross platform because they don't require compilation :) it's just XML files :)

    • Like 1

  7. Looking back on the balancing strategy

    in Gameplay Discussion

    Posted

    @Crynux you know there is a mod downloader using the mod.io platform directly integrated into the game, right? The public folder is a mod in itself, and you can dowload a few more through the game interface, install them by drag and drop or file association using the .pyromod extension.

    48 minutes ago, Crynux said:

    On a side note, with regard to github resistance ... I honestly don't get what the problem is. So like ... it's an open source project, so they can't really steal the code. In addition ... saying "oh what if they close / delete the repo?" well ... that's what having a proper infrastructure (including backups) helps prevent entirely. If we always have multiple sources of the code ... then we really can't lose it.

    I believe that's the point here, why let them host it when we can host it ourselves (I'd rather not cause it's extra work for me, but I understand where they are coming from)

    48 minutes ago, Crynux said:

    I think the project should just use github and move on; the visibility it'd get from it would be priceless

    I might be wrong but I don't think Beyond All Reason, Supertux, Supertux Kart, Wyrmsum and Warzone 2100 got a huge boost from it. Moving to git can't hurt if done properly though.

    5 hours ago, alre said:

    sually it is implied that the development of something has the goal of obtaining a developed thing.

    but I can see that the dev team has more of a "the trip is the goal" mindset.

    I'd like to put emphasis on the amount of work vs the velocity of what remains of the team. balancing is like 5% of the work of the project.

    You have sysadmin work done by me @implodedok @user1 @Dunedan you have art that's done by me and @wackyserious you've got sound done by @Samulis and @OmriLahav you've got the simulation work done by @wraitii @bb_ and @Freagarach you've got random map work done by @maroder and @smiley you have other maps to maintain, writing the announcement, doing the trailers, answering the community, being at events, you've got the AI which is done by now retired @Silier and by hopefully @JCWasmx86 in the future. You've got the reinforcement learning interface done by @irishninja You also get all the graphic features improvements, fixes and cleanups, and maybe sometime soon Vulkan support done by @vladislavbelov then you have to update maintain fix, patch all the libraries on BSD, macOS, Windows and all the crazy amount of Linux flavour, when they get deprecated or lost to make sure you can still run the game which goes will all the work on the lowlevel part of the engine. You've got the tests to ensure we're breaking everything, you've got mod technical support which I try to do with @Lopess @The Undying Nephalim @wowgetoffyourcellphone  etc. Probably forgot to mention Networking with getting the game to work on most configurations all the Devops scripts to automate building, all the python script for various tasks such as updating mods checking for dependencies getting Translations, all the work done in all those languages and the code behind it. And making sure they don't crash the game when they are wrong. When I say there are many full time jobs, I'm not kidding. And some of us only have one hour per week Which can be spent catching up, writing long posts or actually working on the game. So sure for certain people it's just a fun toy. But for others it's much more than this. It's an opportunity, to learn to do better, to give back, to provide fun.

    7 hours ago, alre said:

    I think you should try to accelerate the development of the game, and that the best way to do that is to have more people contribute to and test the gameplay trough a faster release cycle.

    Some linuxes are still stuck with A23, we do not and cannot control the release cycles there. Adding more people simply doesn't cut it.  See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brooks's_law

    We've got 28 balancing advisors, do you feel balancing has made much progress compared to A25 and A24 and A23 ?

    • Like 2
    • Thanks 2

  8. [Document] The core problems of 0AD and mitigation solutions

    in General Discussion

    Posted

    3 hours ago, Sevda said:

     

    @Stan` do you think that it's possible for all guest players to use the mods and features from the host player? For example, if I am hosting and I change archer attack to 10 pierce, is it possible for 0ad to synchronise this value across all players in-game, so that everyone's archers in my host have 10 pierce without OOS? After they quit my host, their value is restored to the original 6.5? This would reduce a lot of hassle as the host can change the balancing of units and civs in the game, without bothering the forum or the developers.

    It's not sadly unless the map specifies it, which requires all players to have the modified map. All users compute the game

  9. Looking back on the balancing strategy

    in Gameplay Discussion

    Posted

    4 minutes ago, ChronA said:

    Maybe there are some valid cybersecurity arguments why one would not want to support a feature like that, but this might be a case this requires soberly considering a tradeoff. 0AD is niche entertainment software with an active user base of a few thousands maybe, it's not exactly a prime target for black hats to exploit. Maybe at worst someone with a grudge might think use this nefariously against specific objects of their ire.

    In general I would agree, but the DDOSers have lived to tell a different story. You also wouldn't know what you download. e.g. a modified small balancing mod could contain nasty JS code that does things it shouldn't. This is actually why we have mod signatures on mod.io. It's not fool proof, but we check all the mods submitted there. I believe it's the reason other than "Nobody coded it" why we don't have automatic download.

     

    • Like 3

  16. Looking back on the balancing strategy

    in Gameplay Discussion

    Posted

    1 hour ago, alre said:

    if you really want that, start by creating a dialogue between the dev team and those who would become part of the new team, empower them and give responsibility to them. I stand by my proposal of having a faster release cycle for the balancing part of the game.

    I feel like that is the point of that discussion... I mean I listed there all I tried... Maybe I'm missing the point ?

    29 minutes ago, Freagarach said:

    Sorry, but it sounds hard. Changes to the pathfinder made cavalry very strong, so engine changes would affect both mods. Also, we'd need to maintain both mods, two times the work and duplication.

    How about having custom techs that get applied on match start ?

    1 hour ago, alre said:

    I stand by my proposal of having a faster release cycle for the balancing part of the game.

    That doesn't really scale on cross platform. Some Debian and Ubuntu still have Alpha23 0ad packaging badges - Repology

    Plus as you pointed out nobody wants to use mods, so even if we had an experimental empires ascendant mod on mod.io decoupled from the game nobody would use it. Not to mention some changes like C++ ones cannot be decoupled.

    I don't see a perfect solution. The autoupdated thing is usually frowned upon in the linux world too,  with the exception of some distros.

    @vv221 @Locynaeh 

     

    • Like 1

  20. Looking back on the balancing strategy

    in Gameplay Discussion

    Posted

    5 hours ago, Lion.Kanzen said:

    the majority (of the base, multiplayer) want to remain stagnant. we can not do that.

    Delenda Est is ahead.I think even mirror could get ahead of us and there are mods already using units for example arsonists.

    The main project is stalling.

    Use DE as the main game and I can assure you that people will yell. Just see what happened with a simple cursor, custom colors or player names for maps... etc

    6 hours ago, alre said:

    also @wraitii, thank you for the insight, but 'incremental changes' is how all software development is made nowadays, it doesn't preclude anything really. you want to get out the deadlock? set the rules and start a decision process. what's the manager doing about this?

    There is no balancing manager really. I would be really happy to have a balancing team with a decision process but I'm not exactly sure how it can work when every single little change is argued until everyone gives up on the project, and when there is no right answer as to what the game should be. My only goal is to make the game fun to play and to keep the project alive.

    • Like 2
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