badosu

Hi, I just got a Radeon RX 580 gpu and was testing on 0ad. When I enable postprocessing, I see a lot of pixels with weird colors all over the place, like if there was an issue with the cable. Interestingly if I take a screenshot from the desktop it renders ok. I took this one emitted via 0ad. Another issue is some random stutters when moving through the map, the FPS seems really variable, might be an issue with my setup tho. Apart from this, it looks great. I am able to render with almost all settings maxed out (except shader effects which is at 4.00) with 50-70 fps on 4k 4x4 Large continent.

1. Multiple hosts and players with hardware or software monitoring were able to see extremely high loads unrelated to the game itself, happens only when playing 0ad. Most notably one can see on aforementioned Dizaka thread. 2. Regular connection issues 3. Extremely high load when playing 0ad, sometimes shutting off all of the user's networking. 4. Good question, I'd like to see that. The best way is to have hardware monitoring capabilities, though some seem to have been able to track via tcpdump 5. Same as above, still not fully described, but Dizakas insights are relevant here. 6. .. 7 ..

1. That's a good question, it seems attacker sends packets that look like NTPv2 packets so pattern matching on that could help but they can change approach. No extensive (public) investigation on the attack was performed yet AFAIK tho. 2. It can, as I said on short term a tutorial on how to defend yourself is one short term attempt. Unfeasible though for non technical-savvy players.

Rigorously speaking, one could fix this *only for the hosts dropping* by changing the codebase to allow for dedicated hosts: that includes bots commands to set map, civs, teams, etc. and gamesetup and headless mode. *Then* servers would have to be purchased and setup for that. This still would not prevent players being attacked, perhaps would increase surface area for attacker enough to get it mitigated though. To prevent players from being attacked the whole lobby infrastructure would have to be rewritten to be centralized so only the dedicated server knows player IPs. This would be huge, at least months if not years indeed. A tentative mitigation strategy with mods to make the attack as difficult as possible or an investigation on the perpetrator modus operandi with a tutorial on how to prevent being attacked currently seems the only feasible approach in the short term.

.

I feel like one of the obstacles to donating is the lack of direction, it is kinda unknown, one feels uneasy to donate when you don't know exactly how that will be used. Sure, server for bots, site, SSL certs maybe etc. but at least having a defined goal for the future and how that money could help would be nice. This is both a good and bad example, a donation encouraging a change but at the same time that change becoming stale (a much needed one btw): https://code.wildfiregames.com/D1746 If it encouraged the team to make a change to the infrastructure that not only mitigated DoS attacks but promoted the use of dedicated servers, I would certainly feel extremely compelled to donate.

Omg, this looks so cool!!!

Some Terra Magna love:

Wtf, so they're flooding via NTP? Maybe blocking via NTPv2 pattern does it, awesome @aixo!

Well, if that was done by BAR developers, I must say it worked Just sweep servers and ips on lobby. In any manner, attacker always targets specific targets, mostly op team games. 1v1s are spared (didn't hear a case where 1v1 was attacked). It's interesting that you had a case of this in a 1v1, I'd not rush to conclusions that it's the person you mentioned though, but it sure would be nice to find the attacker via clumsiness like here.

Well, it's better to have that and have a player dropping as low percentage of ending game than for certain being dosed.

I'd be up to making a mod to help with this, but I'm not sure I understand your tips.

Is there a way to make some functionality to deregister from lobby after game starts? That could help.

It's every single TG on regular hours on every single day of the week! Really, nobody can play a TG on regular hours anymore. It's not a sporadic issue.

You meant @Dizakaperhaps? Or maybe dakeyras, dakora, darkcity..

As I said, I don't mind a24 being released as soon as possible. I even advocated multiple times for reaching beta status. But we have a player base, that's been dwindling (at least with regard to the competitive scene) with the lack of progress on balance/performance/addressing the dos issues. Making at least one of the above worse does not help. But then, I was not even aware we had blockers for a24, especially given the lack of responses to raised questions about it on the forum (do we have a roadmap?). That said, releasing a24 would do more good than bad for the momentum at the current stage.

I wouldn't mind relaxing the criteria for releasing a24, however I'd rather have unmerged gameplay patches in the release than a worse balance than a23.

Not too difficult to make. I made the monitor mod modular, so you can just take the productionmode + adapt getplayersproduction to not return techs + replicate research_progress.xml and adapt it to your will. https://github.com/badosu/prodmod/blob/master/gui/session/ProductionMode.js https://github.com/0ad/0ad/blob/master/binaries/data/mods/public/gui/session/ResearchProgress.xml https://github.com/badosu/prodmod/blob/master/simulation/components/GuiInterface~prodmod.js#L168 Now if you're taking about adding to vanilla, that's a different story. I think it detracts a bit from the interface, especially (in my experience with monitor mod) on big queues, could be useful as an option for beginners though.

Gorgeous!

The people have spoken @mysticjim

Perhaps we agree in general terms

As long as we can also address the issue with formation and pathfinding with strangler trees/obstacles, I agree

Just my 2 cents, unless something dramatically changes more differentiation won't bring much improvement to both gameplay and historicity, in my humble opinion. AoE2 has a wide variety of counters, well defined rocks-paper-scissor, and I feel it's kinda boring/spammy/mechanical. Focusing on mechanics, I wouldn't say an extreme change - maybe flanking, ranged recharge, trampling, melee focus could both make it more interesting from a tactical pov and historically. Lake trasimene, cannae, Alexanders numerous hammer and anvil with wedge cav formation all could be easily recreated (not that it should be the end-goal but would be awesome nonetheless).

I think a flanking mechanic like this could work: - Set a distance threshold, slightly higher than melee range (e.g. 3-4 tiles) - Find an enemy melee unit inside that threshold - Define quadrants where that unit is in 45 degree of the first quadrant - For each other quadrant that has at least another enemy melee unit inside it nerf -1 armor This could be doable on an experiment mod, I would expect performance to be incredibly poor. Another issue is defining the start quadrant, I'm not sure it's well defined (nerfs are the same regardless the initial unit). Nevertheless could be a good attempt.

Counter to heavy infantry is making flanking work as it's supposed to, e.g. a frontal cav charge won't break a compact infantry formation but cav is mobile enough to surround it (anvil and hammer tactic). If enemy does not have cav to counter, they can't avoid formation to be surrounded. Also skirmishers for kiting/hit-and-run. That's why cav should be a counter to infantry, but not in a simple manner. Also trampling mechanic (for spear cav) could break and induce more flanking nerfs to formation. I'm not sure how to make it work, the simplest manner would be to nerf armor if a unit is surrounded, but that's too simplistic since one needs to take into account the area (otherwise it will be hardly effective). Another way would be to, when units on formation they receive a buff. When they have formation broken they lose the buff, when they are flanked in an area (e.g. more than one quadrant in a x-tile distance has enemy units) they receive a severe nerf. What would be nice about this is that the way we take the engagements would matter much more than currently, and would also reward strategy instead of spamming/micro. When considering counter, think not only on the stats and simple engagements but the role these units perform. Instead of a game where one spam a simple OP unit and a few counters to the opponents counters, prioritizing a well thought army composition and tactics should be rewarded. It's extremely ambitious and I'm not saying you need to do that at the moment, but an ideal to pursue perhaps. If we were to be really picky about it, an additional morale mechanic would come into play, but that's nearly impossible to do in a fairly competitive manner. With regard to training (historically), spearmen were definitely the most easy to recruit. Both archers and slingers required extensive training, especially slingers. A slinger without training does not make any sense, they would never catch a target on the battlefied, these are specialized skirmish units. To counter the extensive training required for archers/slingers, javelineers and melee receive better buffs with experience but are terrible at start (also rewards better tactics, can also be changed with techs e.g. start at lvl, champs, etc). Keep in mind that training with regard to melee was more about discipline/keeping formation/holding the line than actual combat prowess. With this idea in mind, experience buff could be not only increasing stats (e.g. armour/health) but decreasing the threshold of a unit to be flanked. There is nothing that experience helps you with being hit with a javelin if you think about it, but it definitely helps with making the whole formation fight better against another melee formation/holding a cav charge.