quantumstate

There is a nice set of instructions at http://trac.wildfiregames.com/wiki/TortoiseSVN_Guide .

I have just committed the last set of features before Alpha 8. See http://trac.wildfiregames.com/changeset/10755 for a list of the significant changes. Garrisoning is disabled for now because of the issues it was causing and the defence should generally behave a bit better now, it seemed to have a few quirks before.

Hopefully you have a bit of time off over Christmas and it goes well. I'll look forward to having you back working on qBot .

The rams are animated for Alpha 8. Unfortunately the other siege weapons are not. I don't know whether there are plans to animate them soon.

You can now, unless something drastic happens. I believe that it was last updated yesterday. Feature freeze is on Sunday.

I think the warning is because there is no food on that map, I have added another check for that. When I watch it the movement didn't seem especially strange. It isn't very clever at moving/fighting though, I never really designed it to handle that many troops. One thing which might look slightly strange is that when the formations stops it is actually told to move to its current position, this can lead to some units running back to reform the formation. Edit: I think I have fixed Pureons error, I have been making fairly extensive changes to that section of the code so I can't commit it immediately though.

I can't imagine how you would use either of these devices to control 0ad effectively. I wasn't being serious in irc earlier. Though if anyone has a kinect and a projector then I still think that making atlas work as below would be very awesome.

The deadline has already been pushed back, I think it is worth releasing so that we keep a fairly regular schedule. Otherwise there is always just one more feature waiting to be merged and releases become less frequent. Pathfinding is a big task so if it was put into this release then it would only be partially complete anyway, so it isn't worth delaying too much to have a partially improved solution with an increased chance of bugs in the new code. Attack move isn't going to be completed in the immediate future either. There are some significant features coming as it is.

Thanks, this should now be fixed.

Garrisoning seems to be a tricky problem. I think one of the big problems at the moment is locality, it is currently garrisoning females when enemies get too close (line of sight distance), there seems to be a bug in the garrisoning code which causes them to not look for another building when the first gets full. Troops are just garrisoned when too many enemies get close to the base without any locality check. I will try making garrisoning more of a last resort for now, hopefully I can get females to move away from attackers but keep working. The eventual plan for soldiers will be to have them garrison if the enemy is close to a defensive structure, and ungarrison as soon as the enemy move out of range. To make this effective the soldiers should try not to engage defensively until the enemy is threatening something vital but this is fairly long term. For now I guess removing garrisoning would be best in general. Another thing which should help will be dynamic priorities, then the AI will train more troops if you have lots of troops, so it should be easier to fend off attacks. This will help defence but isn't directly relevant to garrisoning.

I remember finding Rise and Fall's formations difficult to work with, never being quite suer how to put units into or out of formation, or finding much benefit of formations at all. What I imagine Michaels idea to be like would be to have units behaving similarly to AoE but with only a basic block formation type (since nobody ever seemed to use other formations anyway). Then hitting space would toggle to real formation mode which would feel more like total war with carefully organized formations giving bonuses and allowing you to attack flanks with a real effect.

A little while back I wrote https://github.com/quantumstate/qBot/wiki/qBot-Structure-Overview which is a summary of how qBot works. I scanned over it quickly and it all seems to still be accurate although some new parts of the code aren't mentioned. If you are confused by any parts (which is pretty likely, given my documentation) please ask further questions.

It is good to err towards inclusiveness but there has to be a limit somewhere. You seem to be setting it as having contributed code so mjesteger's contribution does not reach this simply because github was used as a communication medium. I ma arguing this point, not because I wish to exclude people, but rather that we should be consistent, otherwise some people will be excluded who are known to have made larger contributions. This is very different from including people because we are unsure about their contribution, who should be given the benefit of the doubt.

qBot has basically had me an infyquest contributing. mjesteger corrected a typo in the description which, while being nice, probably shouldn't lead to being listed in the credits. The only other contributions have been inherited from testBot and a test so that fish aren't gathered which came from JuBot. All other contributions have been helpful comments or bug reports from testers which I could try and list if you want.

I thought it would be helpful to summarize future priorities for qBot, this is mainly a compilation of suggestions from people posted here (mainly Pureon). Currently I am prioritizing military improvements since the economy is fairly strong (also units look at the distance of a resource from a dropsite now, due to a recent change) relative to the military side. I think that military improvements should make it more fun to play against as well. When defending it's territory, the defending soldiers walk all the way to the enemy base when enemy soldiers retreat. This is a bug in my code since I tried to fix it but it failed.Starting cavalry/early trained cavalry are not used effectively. I plan to put in a form of economy raiding attack (though limited a bit to try and stop it form being annoying) which will use these. Also they could be used for meat gathering longer term. The attacks should be less predictable, maybe sometimes the attacking force can divide into smaller groups, like Jubot does, and attack a number of targets. This has had some improvement with my new random attack directions code, target selection will be made more variable, especially with the new attack types planned. As you may have picked up I am of the opinion that splitting up offensive forces is a risky move that should be carefully considered so in some cases qBot might split its army but not often. The AI should take more territory mid-late game - and push forward with a fortress or a few forward towers. It should aim to control the map and remove the resources available to enemies. This is a fairly big task to do well, consider it a long term goal. Any starting resource treasures (those nearby the CC) should be gathered immediately, It could collect treasures throughout the map - these are an instant boost in resources. Infyquest is looking into this currently. It appears to begin gathering metal and stone at the start, perhaps it should focus on food and wood to build a larger workforce. This is fairly minor, it should be improved but doesn't have too much of an impact currently.Place structures in more suitable positions depending on their role. This is being worked on, I have written most of the enabling code for it. This should also help with multiple starting base maps where placement is pretty poor.Use siege effectively. This would allow the bot to destroy bases much more effectively, will probably be a new attack module. This might help fend off tower rushes as well.

This might be worth having, but the problem that I see with this is that static defenses are primarily designed to kill/slow down an enemy. So if you can get to the rest of the enemy base without being significantly damaged by the defenses then that means the enemy wasted effort/resources on defenses that were useless. Fortresses might be worth attacking because they also train units, the value of them as training facilities needs to be considered. So unless a defense is a threat to something we are trying to do (e.g. blocking the route into a base or encroaching on our own territory (I'm looking at you Pureon )) then we should avoid attacking them since we are wasting time which could be spent attacking more valuable targets. I use eclipse JS Helios (I found the latest version too buggy on linux) it has the best javascript code support of any IDE I have tried . You could use pretty much any editor you want and find most comfortable. I also quite like Geany. Git is the most useful tool, using it with git gui is fairly straightforward and will help you keep up to date with the latest changes.

The game is closest to Age of Empires, It includes a small number of random maps and some real world maps. The mas work like Age of Empires basically. The trade is not merged into the game yet but after merging the trade will be distance based and will probably give a bonus for trading with other players over trading with yourself. You will be able to set routes for the trade. I don't know about plans for wonder/relic victories. Roads aren't planned to be buildable but they may exist on maps an should give a speed increase to units walking on them, the pathfinder will automatically make units use a road if it will be faster. Currently there are treasures which are resource bonuses scattered around some of the maps.

This generally sounds good to me. It seems like it would be fairly realistic as well as helping with the pathfinding. I don't know the process for designing large features like this. Is there a large forum discussion which eventually gets put into a solid proposal or ...?

One thing I am not sure about is whether this is a good thing for the AI to do. Can you explain why you think it would be a good tactical decision? From my point of view there should be several attack modules, one should be a raider which targets economic units sending small groups especially early in the game, another should aim for training facilities to damage their military capacity and there should be an all out base destruction on which tries to flatten everything, aiming for the CC seems sensible for this since destroying it removes the territory, effectively forcing the defender to build a new one or surrender the base.

This is much cleaner, they sound great. I will look forward to having them in game.

I think it is nice to have some kinds of renewable or extremely long lasting resource. It allows people to play more defensive strategies and I always think it is better to allow more strategies for more varied games. A lot of rts games have a system like this, in AOE2 it was food and wood (on most maps) and gold if teamed, AOM and AOE3 had food and gold, C&C generals had an infinite resource generator for each civ. It is key that these methods are all less desirable than expanding and collecting around the map so that there is incentive to expand. I think we need to aim to limit players by gather rate not have an absolute cap, so then you can choose to spend more time gathering lots of resources or more time fighting with your troops to use the resource cost effectively. Having slow infinite resources means that you still have to be careful with the initial fast map resources because if your opponent still has lots of fast resources from that you will be at a big disadvantage.

qBot is now in svn. Unfortunately due to me being rubbish with svn I managed to commit it with no commit message. I will post an update of what features are planned soon.

A few games have development blogs which would contain more information about significant new changes to the game, this would stop the problem of people not wanting to know too much (if they read it then they can assume spoilers will appear). Most significant features end up getting a post in the development & technical discussion forum currently, but this is not very well organised and is often in a rough form because people want feedback while it is being developed. This idea would rely on people taking the time to post things there of course, I don't know how much people would want to do that, it definitely shouldn't be a requirement.

This is looking good, it has a nice clean design. The idea sounds nice as well, I find it very annoying with games where you can't find out decent unit stats so you have to try and guess. One little thing I noticed was that the bullet points are outside of the boxes in the News and Spotlight sections in FF8, changing the padding of the div id="newcontent" to 2px 15px fixes this.

This sounds like a good idea, hopefully it will make things easier for people connecting.