Bellaz89

Hi. I did some tests in the past in porting 0ad to SM68/78 before the support was officially added by the core team. You might remember the following threads The biggest challenges I faced back then were(added to points already raised): Spidermonkey's team policy is not to keep a stable c++ API from version to version. In fact, for that upgrade, the hierarchy of SM classes (roles, responsibilities, meaning) was deeply changed. Since Spidermonkey is the backbone of 0ad, any big change in the former requires rethinking the structure of the latter. And this is particularly difficult when you need to change several thousands lines of code (without introducting bugs at the same time). Spidermonkey is not really meant IMHO to be used as an embedded interpreter by the general public (unlike e.g. Lua). The documentation is lacking at best(at least, this was the situation 2 years ago), and some features can only be discovered by looking at the library headers. TBH some efforts wre done done to change the situation https://github.com/mozilla-spidermonkey/spidermonkey-embedding-examples but still, there is not a complete coverage of the API. On top of that, there is not much consistency between various parts of the API. I would say that even after having spent several hours at looking at SM sources, the meaning of many classes/functions is still very obscure to me. Due to 2. and the fact that SM is a very complex piece of software, you can end up after changing thousands of lines with a project that explodes for inexplicable reasons. Usually this is because the API was used in the wrong way. It might also be a bug in SM. In both cases good luck figuring out the reason For that upgrade, also some Javascript API changed. Some tuning assumptions done on the older versions of the interpreter might not be valid in the newer versions. So further profiling and even more source digging is required. Hopefully future changes will be less dramatic than the huge jump to v68/78 . But I bet it is still not going to be a 'plug-n-play' change. Said that I am very happy that a project like SM (and Firefox) exists these are great piece of software that I use everyday. Also, when looking for a scripting language/VM pair that is both well known by many people, high performance and portable, there is not much choice out there.. (Mono? V8? LuaJIT? JVM?)

Mmm, does it require rewriting the entire engine @Loki1950? What about generating on-the-fly state checkpoints at regular time intervals, like 10-30s, during a replay using a 'regular' simulation (might be done in the main or a separate delayless offscreen thread)? Since a player/observer can reconnect to a multiplayer game after it started, there should already be a way to serialize and deserialize the entire game state and start a new simulation from that state. Couldn't the same approach be used to load an arbitrary game state and implement this feature? Probably this approach wouldn't be the best in terms of user waiting time when scrolling to another checkpoint. Still IMHO way better than the actual situation where you have to close/restart/run the replay until the ROI manually every time you have to 'look in the past'.

I bet that this was already discussed in the past, but what about having scrollable/rewindable replays? Like having a scroll-bar that represents the time in a game, and the user can set an arbitrary position where to start the replay? This would be very helpful particularly in large maps/multiplayer where many things happen at the same time and it is difficult to track everything at later stage of the game without restarting the complete replay. I understand that this might be challenging giving how are done and saved in 0AD (an initial state + a simulation that propagates such state) though. EDIT: see this Starcraft 2 replay for example: On the right ~middle there is a scrollbar that can be dragged to move the game at an arbitrary time. When the replay is unpaused it just moves forward.

I see this thread now . I link this idea I had during these days Basically this would add tags to the games to identify the language register (e.g. safe-language/unsafe-language-VM18). This would help giving the players more information about the game and choose games with the preferred language register. The same concept could be used for other things: like playing style, playing level etc. and filtering functions can be added based on tags (show/order/hide games based on specific tags)

I like the chat monitor idea. However might this be a separated idea/feature that can be enabled even in a non-safe language room? At the end of the day even in non-safe language people might want a chat monitor/moderator. Probably from the programming point of view the two features are orthogonal.

Might be an idea, but all players, including the ones that are not registered in the forum should be aware of that IMHO. Screenshots might be useful but at the same time might be dangerous and be abused since they lack the whole context of the discussion. e.g. Player 1 insulting player 2 Player 2 insulting player 1 back Player 1 taking a screenshot of player 2 in-game discussion. Previous in-game messages of player 2 are not displayed. Now player 2 get all the blame even if player 1 started insulting player 2 + Someone might do fake screenshots So I would be extremely careful in how these screenshots get evaluated. I am not even sure a standalone thread should be public at all wrt. sending the screenshots directly to moderators. Just first naive thoughts about that

You are right. I have to say that players that win such kind of competitions are truly professionals that are highly disciplined with out-of-mind APMs . So, people that waste in-game keystrokes on insults and are not capable of controlling themselves at the very basic level have no chance in said tournaments. Probably they don't even have the chance to be qualified. Therefore I would say I am not much worried by the eventuality.

This plus the fact that we are not even playing an ultra-competitive game like Starcraft-I/II / LOL / DOTA or else with hundreds thousands (100.000s) active users and a lot of paid competitions (and I would bet this player would be pretty mediocre totally a noob wrt. the strongest professional players of these games since , said player, is not even at the top of the 0ad ranking). We are talking about a game, mainly driven by hobbyists, with a rather small community(1-max-2 hundreds active players?), that might have something else to do instead of playing day/night 7/7 and training micro/macro. Because, you know, there are other things in life as @leopard said like: job, studies, other hobbies, friends to meet, a family to take care etc. etc.. Maybe they should win an SCII DreamHack or a GSL competition. In that case I might admire or respect them for their superior game ability LOL²

I suggest you to ignore them @leopard. It is clear that they are provoking other users to react and start a flame..

@Stan` @Norse_Harold @user1 I am not sure giving Shyft_Sierra the possibility to spread toxicity and lies in the forum was a good idea.. Clearly they will find all kind of excuses to justify themselves and avoid any responsibility even if they were reported by many people. I feel that this will make the players that had a bad experience with Shyft_Sierra in the past unhappier rather than solving anything. I won't write to Shyft_Sierra anymore, not in game, nor in the forum, and me and (most probably) my friends will continue our policy of excluding them, might their ban be lifted, from our games as anyone else that acts so childishly. Not that I was expecting something different..

Please. Cut it. That's embarassing. Last game we played together you insulted me, my nationality and my family for 3 minutes, flooding the chat with insults, without giving to me ANY "precious" advice before or after. How this could help me improving?? AND I DIDN'T HAVE ANY CONVERSATION WITH YOU BEFOREHAND!! You are equating criticism with verbal aggression my dude. But even if I or others are "guilty" of ruining one of your games, does this allow you to act like a toxic racist? And even with that, if you think some players are too weak for a certain game, you can just exclude them from playing or improve the balance of the TG. This happens all the time and you are well aware of this. EDIT: I played many games with @leopard @Ginnungagap and @wang_wei without having the same experience I had with you. Strangely enough, you are the only one that assaulted me verbally in one of the few games we played together(probably I could count them on the fingers of a single hand). Isn't it funny?

@Pemulisa already gave already an explanation why politeness does not equal hypocrisy and why being direct does not equal being violent. Also I sense a lot of anger in your post. If it is the case, sorry for that, whatever it is the reason. I would also add the following from my side: 0. I stress that there is a BIG difference between being direct (honest?), being unpolite and doing a verbal aggression. The first is appreciable, the second might even be funny and useful to bound until a certain level. The third assumes a conflict and is at a whole different level wrt. the first two. As @Pemuliss said arbitrarly mixing the meaning of different words and expressions to prove a point is just plain wrong and leads to confusion. 1. We are not talking about people that use verbal aggression to fight abusive parents, employers, state officers or society and put themselves at risk doing so. We are talking about individuals, hiding behind anonymous profiles, that enjoy verbally assaulting people they don't know, knowing that, the only consequence of their action, rather light and ininfluential, is a ban from the game. Which almost never happen in the 0ad community btw. Such a ban doesn't have ANY monetary or social impact IRL and can be even circumvented. You call this "honesty", but I would rather call this "cowardice" and "childish behaviour". I bet that most of these coward people wouldn't raise a word against their parents/employers/state representatives IRL. I also found that many abusive people IRL do the same when they know there are no consequences for their actions and, at the same time, they are often the worst bootlickers towards authority. I luckily know many people that do not enjoy hurting others even if they would have the power to do that. 2. Judging the goodness of a person by just looking to the very limited interaction such a person has on 0ad is, to the very best, being superficial (even if e.g. racism IMHO gives at least an hint) 3. Even if you would have been true, and you are not, that {good => unpolite, bad => polite} I DON'T REALLY GIVE A darn WHEN I AM PLAYING 0AD. 0AD is not a place I joined to evaluate how "good" or "bad" people are (and I would say nobody should) but instead because I like playing the game and programming. I don't like these "honest-but-abusive" people so this is a good enough reason for me to avoid them. Does this make me and others bad in your extremely subjective world's view? Maybe, but again, I am sorry, I couldn't care less about that.

Why? I think this goes exactly in the opposite direction. If you want to use a register that is more "honest and free" you still can without having any moderator judging your in-game conversation. The idea is *just* to give more information about the game and not criminalize players if they want to use a more aggressive register. I have an opposite view here. I don't feel entitled to convince anyone to change themselves on this. And I don't want to run behind people/waste time either trying to convince them of something. But I respect your opinion. EDIT: I have opposite experience about this. But this would be even better for you: if you like to play with these 'honest' people, you would have an indication where to find them.

Please write there (or vote in the pool) what do you think about this idea.

Since the thread I opened on toxicity raised a lot of discussions (maybe even too much) I feel that one problem is that there isn't much information about the language register that is used in a particular game displayed in the lobby. I would propose adding a 'safe language' tag to the 0ad games. This tag will be shown next to the game name or similar. The hosts can decide whether to put such a tag or not on their games to make the players aware, what is the tone of the conversation to expect. So, e.g., a player like me that doesn't like in-game toxicity can skip non-safe-language games, while other people that don't care or want to be free to express themselves more aggressively can choose these games. So when a player hosts a match, a popup will ask which language register to use (e.g., see attached image). Two additional points are to be added to this idea. I thought about this feature as non-binding. Meaning that this relies on the good faith of the hosts and players. This is to avoid using it to raise too much controversy about the subjectiveness of the definition of "safe-language." Also this doesn't mean either that an host of a non-safe-language-game cannot kick someone if they think that such a player went too far. This is not a free-for-all card. Even without the 'safe language' tag, Wildfire Games team can (obviously) act when dangerous situations may arise in extreme cases.

I saw reza-math and Shyft_Sierra as observer sonce in a game and they both wrote to me. I would say that, unless they have multiple personalities, the way reza-math behaves is diffrent from Shyft_Sierra's one. So I would say IMHO they are not the same person.

Why many VPN services? They just need one. Their IP is renewed (chosen from the VPN provider IP pool) every time they connect to the VPN. Some internet providers even out-of-the-box do NAT or give you a random IP from their pool every time you connect to save money. Or maybe I am missing something..

The problem about banning IPs is that this can be easily circumvented by using a VPN. Sure, it makes it harder for someone to create a double account. But it doesn't prevent it for someone with motivation. Even if this is wanted (banning a physical person from playing 0ad, even if very toxic), I don't see any technical solution that can reasonably fix this. This is hard for commercial games with a lot of manpower and money. For 0ad IMHO it is impossible.

(quite obvious tip but whatever) .. also don't try to answer back to Shyft_Sierra in ANY situation. This kind of people do this to get attention/hurt others and they are just better than you in being toxic. If they see some reaction they will attack you harder. If you ignore them they will just lose interest at certain point.

Yeah, and be aware that they often do their verbal assault behind the curtains in Observers private chat so the host of the game cannot see what's going on. I wouldn't be surprised if they join a match after it started solely for this reason. So, if you care about this, ban them from your game even if they are observer.

Thank you @Sevda. I linked this thread in your thread too.

Another account for Shaved_below

Thanks for the advices, but I really don't want to pay back them (although at a certain point in that game I just ordered all my units to circle around their CC.. which triggered them even more and that was funny ). The kind of offences they use are something like a middle-school bully could say. So nothing that could honestly hurt me at my age My problems with being insulted the whole game are: If I am constantly pinged with insults I lose focus on the game and I play worse. Even if I do not feel offended, the game experience becomes unpleasant. Again, I usually play 0ad to relax after work. So playing in this condition is just a waste of time for me. I don't want to spend my free time with socially incapable kids. So, sorry, if it happens that I am playing one of your TG and one player start to talk to me with such level of aggression, I would just either quit the game before the end or start playing not seriously. I try always to play at my best and not quit in advance because I respect other players and their time regardless of their skill level. But thrash talking is one exception to this rule. There are people that are fine or don't care playing with players that lack even the minimum amount of social skill. I cannot. And I think there are other players like me that would prefer to avoid playing with them. Therefore, as @Norse_Harold has said, I think this thread could be useful to ban harmony/Shyft_sierra from non-toxic games and have decentralized moderation. So if this decentralized ban is applied I (and hopefully the majority of other players) could enjoy 0ad game more. The only reason I can think this person should be stopped is that new or sensitive players could quit playing 0ad. But this is more a problem of the whole (developers, moderators and players) community than mine.

As said, believe or not, I do not care. They just ruined one game (only curious why these people act like this). And I usually play with a group of friends. So our solution is to just blacklist these people from our TGs.

Today I had a very unpleasant experience in a game. A player named harmony insulted me for the whole game just because I played bad. They went as far as stating they have had a *** intercourse with my mother and other racist offences (really?? only because we were losing a non-competitive game on a free-to-play videogame run by volunteers?). Now, I don't really care about this kind of childish attitude. I usually play to relax after work. But I thought that reporting such toxic behavior would help other players avoid wasting their time with this frustrated person. PS: so far I didn't have had (luckly!) many experiences like this on 0ad. I think that overall players like the one above are a minority in our community. Which is full of passionate and fair people . Update: Added the different account names of player harmony to the title