hyperion
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Posts posted by hyperion
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@wraitii ,
indeed versions are not game changing, however, don't underestimate the importance of it for communication. When bumping the ebuild locally for the rc the first thing I had to do was to come up with a version that can be parsed and sorted properly by the package manager. So assume other packagers have the same issue and so we end up with every other distro having a slightly different version from upstream and from each other for the same release.
Also there are crawlers maintained by distros or third parties checking if new releases are available and automatically inform maintainers or users. So instead of trying to inform all downstreams or get all those crawlers to implement custom parsing rules for wfg using a standard version scheme is much cheaper.
As for the wiki page, much better now.
A25 translated to a version in the most natural way would be 1.0.0_alpha25, while 0.0.25_alpha implies 0.0.25_alpha1. So basically 0ad has a tradition of alpha1 with different patch version.
One important feature of versions numbers is you can sort them, so how does that work if you replace them with names like Kush Archers Pathfinder?
Any version below 1.0.0 already has the connotation of what you expect of alpha above, and even version past 1.0.0 don't prevent new changes either.
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I don't want to nag, just point out few things that might help improve the release process in the future. Take it or leave it.
As you said alpha of alpha is bad, the rc just released going by file name is actually an alpha of an rc and not the rc of an alpha, so rethinking the version scheme should be done before a26.
Looking at the commits after FF you could pretty much do away with it. Just CC would be fine, forcing people to commit early.
The terminology used is rather custom and I wouldn't be surprised if I asked all devs separately I'd get different answers, might be worth it to clean up the terms or cleanly define them.
The timeline given on the release process page is laughable.
As for branches, yes they suck with svn compared to cvs, not even talking about git.
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At a glance It isn't obvious to me what the objective is or what balance and garrison are about, move vs attack etc. A help button popping up some sort of manual would be nice.
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17 hours ago, wraitii said:19 hours ago, hyperion said:
- String freeze means translators can now work without worry of it being invalid the next day. So working on it prior is mostly pointless unless there isn't a somewhat mature translation already. To give translators a fair chance to translate give them 14 days between string freeze and translation freeze.
I largely disagree. While translation freeze means it's completely fair game, the chances that we do major change after feature freeze are low, and as it turned out for A24, translators usually have quite a bit of work to do anyways. And if tweaks are made, they'll usually be small tweaks that Transifex helps with fixing.
Well, string freeze is the moment I'd send an email to translators asking them if they could take out some time out of their schedule. As this may take a few hours giving sufficient time seems a matter of courtesy. Could it be the reason tweaks might be necessary is deciding on a release name late and misspelling it trice?
On 01/06/2021 at 5:28 PM, wraitii said:Packagers, aye, players, maybe, but 'testers', certainly not. After all, people play SVN.
On 01/06/2021 at 5:28 PM, wraitii said:Well, the first few bundles won't be RC but testing bundles, as per the above, so it's logical to not release it 'into the wild' too much.
The test bundles are the same as releases in terms of packaging I presume. So what you call them doesn't really matter for the sake of testing, though giving them a proper label can only help. 0ad version scheme is a bit messed up as rc comes after alpha after all. Using a traditional version scheme the next release should be 0.25.0 instead so you could use the version suffixes more naturally.
What I don't get is why you'd not want as many testers as possible, i.e releasing it into the wild. This doesn't make sense to me whatsoever.
On 01/06/2021 at 5:28 PM, wraitii said:Quote- What is commit freeze when commits obviously are still permitted later?
Commits are actually not permitted later, unless for exceptional circumstances, such as fixing a release blocker issue.
Commit freeze if taken literally is tagging the release. Feature freeze is what I'd expect to be the the border between normal commits and commits to fix release blockers only. If FF means you can still commit anything that isn't strictly a feature like rewriting the engine you are bound to be in a mess. This could well mean content and gameplay changes will be done till the last minute putting a lot of burden on those responsible for communication and media. If indeed CF has that meaning then the release should be at least 2 weeks after, better even later, though you don't have to go as far as the kernel with 8 weeks.
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3 hours ago, mysticjim said:
June 13th at 23.59 CET – Commit and String Freeze. This is the point where all further changes are suspended, and release candidate versions of Alpha 25 are created and distributed for testing in a controlled environment. This is the final opportunity to discover and resolve any release blocking bugs or issues.
- String freeze means translators can now work without worry of it being invalid the next day. So working on it prior is mostly pointless unless there isn't a somewhat mature translation already. To give translators a fair chance to translate give them 14 days between string freeze and translation freeze.
- RC1 is the first time you can reasonably ask people to test, be it players or packagers.
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What's with the controlled environment? The purpose of an RC is to release it into the wild
- What is commit freeze when commits obviously are still permitted later?
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6 hours ago, Freagarach said:
Maybe because they choose the closest to the dropsite? Which may result in going around the dropsite? If not, do you have a specific point in time for that observed behaviour?
You should be well aware
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5 hours ago, wraitii said:
Correct, which is where Armour comes in: it modifies that base HP to make the unit more/less damageable against other types. Which is why negative values make sense.
Now I see what you are up to. However this is a marginal improvement as you still need all those values to compare the units and the "hint" might actually be misleading. I don't mind negative armour (room example above), but then I don't mind an elephant building houses either. The real issue with changing HP is screwing over the current healing rates. Tripple HP meant it takes trice as long to get HP back to full. Same for building and repairing. Imagine needing 30 minutes to repair a ram due to current 50 pierce converted to HP.
As for what is shown, well that can be changed
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30 minutes ago, wraitii said:
It actually does not. Compare:
- 200 HP, armour of 10 everywhere > you can take 200 / 0.9^10 => 573 HP of damage before dying
- 573 HP, armour of 0 => 573 HP of damage before dying.
This logic only works if the unit has same resistance for all damage types and if there are no hard counters either.
31 minutes ago, wraitii said:It's much easier to compare units if they all have a base armour of '0' and HP variations than if they have both.
So you could give all units 100 HP for 100% healthy instead.
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2 hours ago, LetswaveaBook said:9 hours ago, ChronA said:
(I don't think negative resistance would intrinsically cause any issues, math-wise, but I can see how someone would worry about it.)
The amount of damage take seems to be 0.9^A, where A is the armor value. If it is indeed that exact formula, then negative values won´t be a problem.
The issue is more of the sort: In a room you have two people, three leave, later two join, now you have a single person in the room ...
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1 hour ago, ChronA said:
I am a subscriber to the logic of Chesterton's fence. As much as I don't like this design choice, I must assume it served some purpose at some point in time. Thus it is imprudent for me to invest resources into developing a new solution until I can account for that original purpose.
It's rare around here that someone actually wants to understand what he is about to change and whether it's a good thing before committing to it. Asking if in doubt is never wrong, though you might not get a decent answer.
Finding the commit might be difficult, renames for aesthetics, commit messages like "fix" or "update", etc. Even if you find the commit you might end up with a link to the discussion returning "sorry, insufficient permission"...
Why not 0? There are possibly technical reasons, like division by 0 or simply 0 having a special meaning like invulnerable. Should be easy to figure out though. Then there are design reasons. If you set resistance to 0 at the start you will only be able to adjust it into one direction unless you want to utterly confuse people by allowing negative resistance. Then if you want to change it now without affecting the "balance", you have to either change hit points or damage values. Hit points are mostly neat values so you might not want to change them. Alternatively you can reduce all resistance values by 1 and adjust damage across all units which might be not that great either. If just setting them to 0 you have to think about if the change affects the gameplay in a desirable or at least acceptable way.
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14 hours ago, Yekaterina said:
Also I noticed there is an additional overlay of stats
It's not new, already in A24, just less visible there. Actually that you only now noticed it means it's an improvement UI wise.
2 hours ago, Freagarach said:An option to toggle would of course be nice to have.
If you want options for gui layout not even 100 would be enough. Better just think of the corresponding xml as the config file.
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2 hours ago, wowgetoffyourcellphone said:
But one way to mitigate it at least somewhat is to double carry capacity
And / or reduce gathering rates. As some people complain EA to be to be to spamy reducing gathering rates is probably better.
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I also thought about it a bit more and while there are cases that aren't that hard to handle they all need additional data beside a type specifier. Even if implementing them one probably still wants a pass par tout boolean to bypass the compat check. checksum_compatible might be a bit of an unlucky name though, checksums are also referred to as hashes. Also a user or first time modder will ask himself what it refers to. Maybe call the boolean skip_mod_compatibility_check instead.
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On 17/05/2021 at 10:32 PM, Yekaterina said:
What types of campaign are you looking for and what difficulty would be appropriate?
The most fitting ones are where you reenact historic military campaigns of the 0ad heros. But if you want to send a centurion with his man on an odyssey to go save the princess from the evil dragon that's fine as well (finally a use for the dragon
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As for difficulty, make it so it's fun for you first and foremost.
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Gather rates are high compared to carry capacity, making shuttling more important in 0ad than most other games I'm aware of. If you want to reduce importance of shuttling you have to make units spend more time gathering instead of walking, not the other way around. I think it was AoE III that does away with shuttling altogether.
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2 hours ago, Ceres said:
Would you like to consider adding a possibility to export (default or user-customised) key bindings as a JSON file?
If you want the json formatted for a specific tool I'd say make it a mod, unless there is just one such tool or one which basically defines a standard. Otherwise the json should be what makes most sense for 0ad. That format could also be used as a replacement for the current ini-style hotkey configuration which might be desirable anyway, so you can map a user facing string to the key value pair for instance. Then a script to convert it to different tools could be added.
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3 hours ago, wraitii said:
I have a revision for this: D3968. I would like to try and merge it before A25
checksum_compatible is probably insufficient. Make it map_pack, campaign, ui, extra_civ. Not saying this list is complete or the naming or even grouping to be good. The point is there should be a tag for each case you might want to handle separately in future instead of an "ignore mod compatibility" flag.
4 hours ago, wraitii said:However, it will likely rely on trust.
That's obvious and nothing wrong with it at all. Though giving it a cursory glance whether the modder got it right or not when approving the mod for mod.io wouldn't hurt.
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11 hours ago, Lopess said:
Yes, the biggest of national metal, in my teens I heard a lot, today I like calmer and more epic things.
I already forgotten Sepultura, but the mention and your remark made me remember one of my favourite albums 20+ years ago
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1 minute ago, BreakfastBurrito_007 said:
People have said that to make rush a more viable tactic that has equal chance of overall success as booming, we need to remove citizen soldiers from the game and make them all professional.
Those people have forgotten that there were releases where rushing was far to strong. Then everyone cried nerf rushing. After plenty assorted changes without touching the CS concept we are now at a point were people complain about the reverse.
Also unit pushing which I think is part of A25 will have a major impact on the balance of this, so any discussion based on A24 I consider pointless. Basically if balance is completely outside reason after feature freeze do a hot fix adjusting the parameters that were used in the past to nerf rushing, else just leave it as is for now.
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1 minute ago, Stan` said:10 minutes ago, kgwedi said:
Does anybody know of a way to stop night time in scenarios?
You can edit the map.
Guess he just wants a map filter so random selection can be used (inferred from "when it happens I quit")
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2 hours ago, smiley said:
Just nuke around 75% of the RMS folder. There are a few well made ones and the rest were made with a quantity over quality approach. Even with new graphics, they would still look pretty bad.
While the quality varies there aren't that many dupes in terms of gameplay. The least desirable is to just have a dozen good looking mainlands. Or in other words an awful looking but unique map shouldn't be dropped but marked as in need of work.
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13 hours ago, sil-vous-plait said:
yeah even a blocking feature would maybe be better than arriving at a blacklist of words, although I think without too much debate there is a small list of words (which frequently appear as usernames and/or in the lobby chat) that could easily be blocked. anyone opposed to that is either sympathetic or fronting for something (if only wanting to be edgy)
A blacklist is fine as long as it's from an authoritative source, like a government recommendation or a media company like bbc's to *beep* list. Then there are no discussions as to what should be on the list or not. Such a black list like any other won't solve the issue but shows attitude.
On 11/05/2021 at 3:48 AM, sil-vous-plait said:maybe give the ability of a few trusted players to mute for this stuff/kick people
Finding "trusted" and motivated people is very hard. Even if you have a couple such people to agree and enforce a consistent policy is tough due to different backgrounds and a huge grey area. This is a common problem and it's far from only wfg not being able to solve it for good. That it's probably out of reach to police it server-side doesn't mean there can't be client side tools like an ignore list.
Both a blacklist with external source(s) and an /ignore <nick> chat command are one-time efforts to implement and I consider them suitable for wfg.
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9 hours ago, maroder said:
To me this looks not like poor discoverability. It uses the same aura concept and visualization as heroes, healers, temples and the old rotary mill, therefore it is not "invisible" as the diminishing returns. So I can't really follow your argumentation. I would be happy if you try the mods and tell me in more detail how the the communication to the player could be improved.
This is indeed looks like a rebranded rotary mill, vastly different from farmland in DE as in one of the poll options. If you'd called it building wells with an irrigation aura I wouldn't have been confused. The issues I raised are with the farmland concept which is vastly different from what you did.
"Farmlands" is basically attaching a fertility value to terrain (per tile for instance). This doesn't only allow farmlands but could also be used to reduce yield in deserts or on top of rock. Wow had to settle with a hack in DE because proper support for this feature is lacking. Reverse importing this hack is something I'm strictly against. On the other hand the concept sounds interesting and can give map makers another tool to create unique content but needs quite a bit work design and implementation wise.
On 10/05/2021 at 8:54 AM, maroder said:Why can I not just use my houses as dropsites? why can I not build champions in P1? why can I not build 20 wonders?
Having prerequisites and restrictions are different, requiring a phase or tech like gunpowder to build cannons is fine. Restrictions on unique entities in history like hero or wonder aren't an issue either.
Making houses dropsites or CC not being a dropsite are fine from a discoverability point of view. Whether people will like it is an other question.
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1 hour ago, maroder said:
How does the visuals of the CC relate to its functions
That you can drop food at the CC you have to try once (well, the units will even demonstrate it for you), then you know how it works -> very easy to discover
1 hour ago, maroder said:A solution like the proposed farmlands on the other hand, clearly communicate: "this land is good for farming"
Clearly communicate as in a code comment, a forum post or some press release? -> awful discoverability
About farmland itself: Where are the boundaries of farmland? What happens when the field is partially on farmland? What are the exact effects and how to present them in-game?
Building a 64-bit pyrogenesis (and deps) for Windows
in Game Development & Technical Discussion
Posted
Offer a 64bit build? AFAIK Microsoft stopped shipping 32 bit versions of Windows.
Moderation: Thread split out from https://wildfiregames.com/forum/topic/45178-a25-svn-version-25810-not-playable