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alpha123

WFG Retired
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Posts posted by alpha123

  1. If you're using UPnP instead of forwarding a port, I'd guess your router just has a weird UPnP implementation. In addition, our current UPnP usage is more of an experiment than anything. It probably does have some weird issues, sorry. :(

    You could try forwarding UDP port 20595. That was the game won't have to use UPnP and thus can avoid any oddities with 0 A.D. and/or your router.

    Iv'e noticed a couple of times when I have been playing against you while you have hosted, you disconnect during the game. I not sure if its a bug or not but it always happens when I'm winning the game. Also its strange that your ranked 9th seems your games don't get rated. Maybe there's a bug with the game that won't let you lose when hosting!

    He did this against me too (left after some raging), and I assumed it was just a bad internet connection except that he came back on, raged a bit more, and then left again. (I was hosting.) I hate to assume marioxcc is abusing the leave-game-without-resigning thing, but it's beginning to sound a bit like he might.
    • Like 2
  2. We have quite a bit of money from various fundraisers. The problem is spending it. We are trying to find a good programmer to hire, but hiring programmers is hard. Either way, volunteer work has taken us very far, and I don’t expect that to end any time soon.

  3. Was it done to improve performance? If so, did it in fact perform notably better?

    Allegedly, yes, but it is difficult to get accurate performance measurements. I think it’s reasonably safe to say it results in a small performance boost; however, that may not even be noticeable.

    I frankly was opposed to this change (and still am), but IIRC it was done to pave the way for some other changes that would have a larger effect. Since those never really got done I’m in favor of reverting it.

    That’s quite weird that you’re no longer getting it idanwin; I can’t think of a change in the last week that would have fixed that (plus it should also be happening in A15).

  4. Athenians are actually quite good, they just play a little different from a lot of other civs. As Athenians probably the best strategy is to rush to city phase, using slingers to harass and distract the enemy while you boom. Once in City Phase, Athens is easily on par with every other civ, if not better. The Athenian champions are really good.

    Eventually the aim, IIRC, is to have Athens be slightly more tech-focused.

    BTW, do you play in the lobby? You do reasonably well against the AI, I’d like to play you sometime in a duel. (My main civ is Persians, and I occasionally play Athenians.)

    I’ve not heard of the “individual battle stats” thing until now, but I agree that would be pretty cool. Probably not toooo difficult to implement since we do have battle detection working, but not quite trivial and very low priority.

  5. Make wall towers less powerful imo. They're superior to normal towers with way way way more effective HP and the same attack. I would think reducing the attack and or garrison number would be a good place to start as it pushes it more towards a movement inhibiter and separates them from towers more. Alternatively towers could be buffed, but defensive buildings are already on the stronger side so nerfing wall-towers/walls seems more sensible to me.

    That is something we should do something about. The other big advantage of wall towers is that they build very quickly. However, the Crenelations upgrade doesn’t affect wall towers, so in practice they end up firing fewer arrows. Still, they’re a bit too powerful for the cost and build time.

    My plan to solve this is threefold:

    1. To require that a wall tower has at least one length of wall adjacent to it. This means that knocking down walls would be easier, and wall towers couldn’t be abused and built on their own as high-HP defense towers like they can currently.
    2. Change how many arrows each garrisoned soldier adds; you could still garrison 5 units but it would only add another arrow for every two units garrisoned.
    3. Unless the Night’s Watch tech is researched, non-garrisoned wall towers shouldn’t fire any arrows. Thus, they’d be harmless until units are in them.

    The first one compensates for the low cost and short build time but high HP by making large sections of wall easier to take down, and the last two encourage wall towers to have a more defensive use of creating chokepoints and keeping enemy units out of your city.

  6. I really like that idea, however, it would mean we couldn’t do diminishing returns the way we currently do (that is, each additional worker on a farm is less efficient). Perhaps we could do diminishing returns globally? That would also make farming as a food source slightly less viable in the late game (where adding more farms would be next to useless), encouraging dependence on multiple food sources.

    I actually think 2x2 farms with 1 gatherer would look rather cool; we’d have gatherers everywhere instead of just around the edges like we do currently.

  7. In this case I really think it’s a “less is more” type thing. The current background—and this holds true for a lot of current and potential backgrounds—is somewhat distracting at 40x40. So while a flat color would just be ugly, you do need something that barely contrasts itself but strongly contrasts the guy. Maybe a very blurred out (Gaussian blur with a very high radius, I’d guess like 12px), desaturated picture or painting of... something Greek. Although it needn’t even be recognizable, so the Greek requirement could probably be dropped. =P

    • Like 1
  8. That was amazing, I was watching intently the whole thing. Really, really good. The only thing I don’t really like about the portrait is the background, it seems to not have enough contrast with the figure (this seems to be true of a lot of your portraits). I really liked watching the process, I think I’ll go watch some of your other videos. :P

  9. yes, that's a known problem, the AI will go out of sync (at least aegis, don't know about qbot) when the players are on a different OS.

    qBot does it as well IIRC, and it happens regardless of OS I believe. (I've had games with all players on Windows 7 go out of sync in multiplayer games with AIs.)

    Basically, AIs just don't work in multiplayer games currently. :( Sorry 'bout that.

  10. Us Haskellers are slowly becoming more prevalent!

    I admit to snickering a bit while they talked about dangling pointers and whatnot up there.... :D

    This week released a new AI, why did not it? :unknw: :unknw: :unknw:

    Because it's not finished. :P Expect it in the next few weeks/month, I guess. Ideally we'd like to have it in for Alpha 15.

    gameboy, developing an AI this complicated is hard work. I think you underestimate how much effort is involved in something like this, especially since the underlying APIs are still changing while we experiment to try to find something that works well and quickly.

    I'd say the current AI works well enough though, at least for the time being. I haven't encountered any particularly weird issues with it in Alpha 14 (although I don't play the AI much any more).

  11. Out of curiosity, what civilization is the AI best at using would anyone say?

    Wraitii mentioned once that it likes Persians, which seems to be fairly true in my experience. I imagine it's pretty good as Macedonians as well, although I don't play it very often any more.

    It's typically pretty bad as anything without battering rams, since it doesn't handle catapults or elephants well at all.

  12. It's not just you. I've noticed this as well. If I can figure out a reliable way to reproduce it I'll see if I can fix it somehow. All ranged units do have an "accuracy" attribute that controls how wide their shots can go from the target, but I've seen bolt shooters shoot straight up or otherwise completely astray. This is what you're referring to, right?

  13. Would you recommend using a separate program that comes with 0 A.D., a bit like Atlas? The Nexus Mod Manager also comes to mind (for Skyrim).

    That's how I'd do it. It could just be a simple GUI to choose which mods to load, which could either write a start.bat|sh file which would launch pyrogenesis with those mods, or write to a special file which pyrogenesis could read on startup.

    This has the advantage that a menu item could just spawn the mod selection program, which avoids the "the selected mod doesn't have the mod selection GUI" problem.

    Since we support hotloading of almost everything, I don't think we'd actually have to restart pyrogenesis.

    • Like 1
  14. I like the look of the buttons but the color is rather poor as wraitii and Enrique outlined.

    Perhaps just switch it to a gold texture, or some kind of marble as wraitii mentioned.

    Quick mockup of the marble type (these are probably a little big, I think we'd want to scale them down) (not to mention loaded with issues, but you get the idea I'm going for, right?):

    hlDOjYi.png

    • Like 1
  15. Looks AMAZING. I want to this so badly... unfortunately I have a lot of other things to implement first.... :(

    Hm, I like the position of the hotkey on the third tooltip, but I also like the decorative edges from the first two....

    Comments on the game setup mockup:

    For single player I suggest putting the map description where the chatbox would be in multiplayer. Makes that space look less empty and allows displaying the full map description without scrolling.

    I would put the number of players dropdown near the other dropdowns. It looks a little out of place where it is, plus it would mean we could tie it to map size (i.e. you select 3 players, the map size goes to medium -- but not vice-versa) without confusing people too much (I think it would be strange if we did that with the number of players dropdown in its current location).

    The buttons look too much like the current UI and look too different from the rest of the new UI, IMO.

  16. It would be more realistic if mines didn't suddenly run out, but the labor to extract increased as you had to dig deeper, improved technology is required as well. Metal would become more expensive as surface outcroppings were exhausted.

    Don't know if this would be worth doing, but I can imagine how it could be implemented - mines could progress from surface mines to tunnel mines, maybe a deep mine phase after that.

    That would actually be pretty cool, and not too hard. Hm. I'll have to think about this a bit. There would be a fair amount of new art required though, and the art team is pretty busy.

  17. Team that my point XD . Thats why im to favor of respawn Minerals

    I strongly dislike that idea. It's good to have resources be worth different amounts. I like that metal is more difficult to obtain than food, because it helps balance more powerful units which typically cost metal.

    Also, we want 1v1 games to last about 20-30 minutes on average. In that time frame respawning minerals (which doesn't make sense from a realism perspective anyway) wouldn't serve much purpose, other than cheapen the value of metal considerably.

  18. but food with infinite farm is easy. for me of course. i have 4 farms workings, for me the food is not a big deal.

    4 farms is going to get you about nowhere as Mauryans. I typically do 8-12 farms as non-Mauryan civs....

    It's true that food isn't as big a problem as metal, since food is much easier to produce, it still hinders Mauryans slightly that all their units require food.

    • Like 1
  19. Is it possible that the greek hoplites have a slightly longer spear than other spearmen ? Or are all the spears the same length ?

    I think Macedonian ones have possibly slightly longer range, but the Athenian and Spartan ones are the same as other spearmen, I think.

    I agree, in fact I didn't think much about the late game in my criticism. In the late game I generally don't worry, as my economy is stable, my civ centres are numerous, and my main city is fortified, I'm not too much under pressure for raising an army (I play against the AI for now). But in the beginning of the game, both have the advantage of cheap, powerful and rapidly trained base citizen-soldiers (archers).

    Note two things about the Mauryans late-game warfare though :

    ...

    While both of those are true, it's not enough to counteract their lack of regular siege, since a large number of ranged units, particularly skirmishers, will take down any elephants including Chandragupta Maurya pretty easily. If you're going to talk about balance, you need to be playing multiplayer. Balancing the game by playing against the AI just doesn't work too well. :P

    Mauryan is a faction that needs a tons of gold to be effective, all best units can train with gold.

    As an aside, all Mauryan units require food. They have no non-food units, and as Lion says above their top-tier units require a lot of metal. So basically Mauryan late-game economy is almost totally food and metal-centric, which turns out very odd and given the limited amount of metal on most maps, typically doesn't work so well for them.

  20. Please check this one again. I think the expression in ENSURE will only be evaluated in debug mode, but it also has to wait for the semaphore in release mode.

    EDIT: I've tested it. The expression is also evaluated in release mode.

    Somehow I assumed it wouldn't because that's how most implementaitons of ASSERT work.

    According to lib/debug.h it runs in both, although the comments are rather ambiguous about its intended usage. Thanks for testing though, as I wasn't totally sure.

    We actually have both ENSURE and ASSERT. lib/debug.h is very clear that ASSERT only runs in debug builds, although not so clear about ENSURE. Otherwise I think their usages are identical.

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