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Chakakhan

WFG Retired
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Everything posted by Chakakhan

  1. This sounds like a great idea... what are the draw backs? Any? Where are all the reply's?
  2. Great news! I will test it when I get back in town.
  3. Not crap, I think it's a great start.
  4. I am in full agreement Sander. Let's get that much working smoothly first. That would be a huge step forward.
  5. The EE example of building conversion looked like cheering to me as well.
  6. The worst virus I ever got was when they put McAfee "Anti-Virus" on my work machine. No virus had such a huge negative impact like McAfee did. Glad you got things going. AimMyHead - try disabling your anti-virus, re downloading and installing again.
  7. I have been on IRC this week, and there are quite a few changes coming in daily. I have been away from the game and a lot has changed in the last few years. It struck me that my time might best be spent on testing some of these changes and organizing others to help with the testing as well. Yea, I like the idea of getting a lobby room up for the SVN version as soon as the pathing code is checked in. I haven't played much and I suck, but all the more reason to play some games and get some experience with the game. How were the multi-player play events setup? Did you have a tournament? Do we have a TeamSpeak server? It would be great to have separate team interaction during the matches and then at the end of the game we could all get together and discuss how things went and what issues people saw. This would also be great for in depth design discussions. Thanks for all the great feedback. Cheers!
  8. I am excited about the type and quantity ot the development changes occurring in this next cycle for release in A19. These change will require extensive QA and we really need people to help make the release as stable as possible. So I am calling for all people interested in testing to contact me and I will be glad to help get you started and help keep the team focused. I know this is a daunting task and I want to help facilitate getting tasks assigned and collecting data that is relevant and will help give the developers the focused feedback that is needed to solve problems as efficiently as possible I will be happy to help with task organization and tracking as needed. If you are interested at forming a real QA team that will make significant impact please sign up here. QA is paramount to having a successful alpha 19. Cheers, Chakakhan
  9. I remember the Saracen Monk rush, very fun strategy.
  10. Ah, so the state is not in the C++ code it is in JS. I need to look at the code to see how the API is implemented. We were talking about putting a lot of the objects back in the C++ side and providing interfaces to JS several years back because of the overhead caused by the AI. I will review the code and read forums to see what came of all of that. Cheers!
  11. It seems to me that game save/load needs to be abstracted from the AI code. It should happen automagically.
  12. I have been away from the game for some time and coming back, I think you were spot on with your evaluation and your recommendations were appropriate as well. Thanks for taking the time to detail them out so completely! The balancing will come, and comments like yours help to put a fine point on what needs to be balanced first. Cheers!
  13. How many of you guys can be on IRC during our regularly scheduled meeting this Saturday (1/31) at 16:30 GMT? That would be a good time for all of us to get together and discuss the best packaging solution for Mac.
  14. Cool, hopefully you can help us figure out the best way to implement this. Cheers
  15. Sebastian, that is awesome! I love it! I have been looking at doing this for years, but never had quite enough cash to invest in a proper kit. Which kit did you use (if you don't mind saying)? It sounds amazing and the tuning is spot on. Does it hold it's tuning well? Is that your real hair? If so, that is awesome as well! Merry Christmas to you as well! Cheers
  16. Yes, that patch works. The fix isn't in an official release, so it is problematic for our OS/X users. Ben - as you, Phillip and I discussed, the best solution is to include all the 3rd party libs in an app bundle so that OS/X users could just download and run the game without worrying about supporting libraries. I think we should try to do this for Alpha 9. It would really make help us in supporting Mac versions going forward and also allow less technical Mac users to play the game. Cheers Yes, the Cocoa calls to set the video mode changed and this caused some issues. The full solution is to add code to detect the desktop resolution and to include the proper patched version of SDL in our release somehow. This will solve the full screen / windowed mode problems. Cheers
  17. Yes, it does a great job at moving around hundreds of units. This is one of many games we are studying. According to an article I read, this is the same basic pathing code that was in AoK (hence AoE3, AoM). There are some configuration options in AoM and AoE3 that allow you to look at some of the pathfinding data dynamically (as a graphical overlay).
  18. Ah, I got ya. You were speaking of the basic behavior ignoring the shortcomings of the current implementation. Then I think we are basically in agreement. I am loading up Rise and Fall to refresh my memory about their implementation of formations.
  19. I disagree. It currently doesn't work very well at all. Pathing is not very good and it is slow and eats up way too much CPU. Also, units don't do smart things (unit AI is not very good / not complete). If we had movement / pathing as good as AoEo it would be a much more fun game to play. I would go so far as to say I think pathing / movement / unit AI is the most broken part of the game. I totally agree with adding elements to make game play unique, but I think we need to handle the basics really well first. Not trying to stifle the creativity, just when people start saying AoE is just one way to do it... I think, well... it is a pretty darn good way to do it and most RTS games try to emulate it at a certain degree and it is still the baseline that all RTS games get compared to. EDIT: I didn't mean for that to sound like a rant, but it kinda sorta does
  20. I think that the AoE style unit control (especially as implemented in AoEo) is still the best out there in the RTS realm. The units do reasonable things in most situations, so you can send units to fight and go back to your town to manage your economy, or you can manage a battle on multiple fronts, or start a new town center, or build a forward base. It allows you to multitask and have mostly reasonable behavior. In AoEo (and AoM) the units feel very responsive and controlling them is straight forward and simple and units tend to do reasonable things in most cases. These should be main concerns. Without this, formations are irrelevant because no one is going to play the game if the basic unit control doesn't work well. So I like the idea of having a basic unit control mode similar to the AoE stuff and something entirely different for formations that you can use if you want to micro manage a battle, but you don't have to use them if you have too much other stuff going on. So I totally agree with this Android!
  21. Hi Martin, I remember that game! It looked fantastic at the time and I loved the way the camera view was zoomed so that you had a great overview of the battlefield. Most games kept the camera zoomed in pretty close in those days. I think It ended up dying because there was a multi-player exploit that ruined online play. They took some obvious liberties to simplify their algorithm, such as units can pass through almost anything - including enemy units. I really didn't like it at first, but I did get used to it after a while. The units always ended up where I wanted them, even if they went through a forest to get there . I actually liked the way the game worked in the end. The question is would this method of pathfinding with all its short cuts been acceptable to the masses? Hard to tell because it died off so quickly. I did like the ability to hide units in the trees so that you could ambush troops walking by. That was also useful to hide some lone archers until the melee troops arrived. I guess we have decided to implement the AoE style pathfinding in the game as it seems to be the one that irritates people the least. I think I prefer it to most, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't consider/discuss alternatives.
  22. The way AoEo handles this when attack moving is as follows: when a unit/building(s) come in their line of site they break out of formation (basic group movement formation) and attack them. If they are not in attack move then they will respond if attacked as well.
  23. Hi Philip, I did a little research on how formations work in AoM and AoEo (which are almost identical in the way they handle formations by the way). I am not suggesting this is the correct way, just want to bring it up for possible discussion seeing as these games both do some nice pathing stuff that feels right. So the following list indicates how both of these games handle formations: 1. Anytime you move one or more units they are automatically in formation. The melee up front, then ranged, with the squishies (healers, etc) in the middle. 2. Units in formation can pass through one another while they are getting into position in the formation. 3. Units do not wait until they are in formation to begin moving towards the destination. All units start heading towards the destination and gradually move into formation as they go. 4. There is no "wheeling" of the formation. The units re-position themselves when they make a 180 degree turn. They do NOT swap ends when they turn in place like our formation currently does (they simply turn around). 5. They break formation when they are in range of an enemy when on attack move. The melee engage with the ranged hanging back at their max range and firing from a distance. 6. Otherwise, they stop in formation when they reach the destination. 7. Formations are generally less wide when moving (they narrow down to several columns wide), thickening back up as they reach the location (this is more true in AoEo than AoM). 8. They break formation to path through locations that are too small for formation. Looks like the units individually path in this situation and can pass through each other while doing so. 9. Formations are somewhat malleable. If the formation moves up next to an obstacle the end of the formation "smashes" inward so that the formation can move by as intact as possible. In the case on the units on the oasis map, where they are between the trees and the water, both ends would shrink up to fit in between the trees and the water. In really tight situations see #8 above. An improvement that AoEo makes on their formations is that units are some percentage (30-40%) smaller so the formations look tighter and take up a little less space. This ends up making them look and act a little better in most situations. Also AoEo recognizes a tight path sooner and starts thinning out the formation earlier than AoM, so there is a lot less thrashing in really tight spots. Hope that is helpful, Cheers!
  24. Hey Omri, nice funky groove! I like that. That would go over well here in Memphis on Beale Street. In case you are interested here is a link to one of the bands I am in: http://clubofthesons.bandcamp.com/ Some newer songs: http://charlieblacksmoke.bandcamp.com/releases This is a crazy art rock band, kinda funky, electronic meets progressive... ah well, give it a listen and come up with your own label! ;-)
  25. Philip this is fantastic! This will really help facilitate algorithm changes and other incremental performance improvements. I have been hesitant to make some changes because there was no way to accurately measure the change in performance. I am amazed at the quality of work you produce in such a short period of time.
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