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vv221

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Posts posted by vv221

  1. It’s sad to see you go, but not unexpected. No one can bear so many things by themselves for so long. I hope your replacement will be a team instead of an individual, to prevent people getting burnt out.

    Anyway, it’s good to see you have other projects now, I hope we will soon find some time to discuss these with a cold beer ;)

    • Like 5
  2. 2 hours ago, Grapjas said:

    is it possible with current code to use all 3 and just switch background after 10s or so? With a bit of a fadeIn fadeOut nicety. Or everytime when you enter the main menu a different one from array will load in would be nice too.

    I think an automatic slideshow would be a bit distracting. On the other hand I would love to get a random background on each game launch.

    • Like 1
    • Confused 1
  3. 1 hour ago, s0600204 said:

    @Itms with the caveat that as of writing this I haven't completed a full build of spidermonkey on my VM - so there may be failure later in the build - here's the patch:FixInstallScheme.diff Needless to say it's not suitable for applying on Windows systems (as that would, at a guess, use the "nt" scheme).

    Tested on a Debian Bookworm/Sid with Python 3.11, the full mozjs build went smoothly.

  4. 17 hours ago, Stan` said:

    I'm not sure I said it before, but I'd really like to lessen my admin sys workload which is why I proposed to replace Jenkins, Trac, and Phabricator by Gitlab. And hence the reason I want to switch to git.

    This is the main reason I’m all in favour of GitLab, because this is the one I can help with. Including for long term maintenance.

    I think that for equivalent features, volunteers for administration/maintenance is what should drive the choice of tools. So if other people feel ready to dedicate some of their time for the maintenance of the development environment, it might be a good idea to make these intentions known ;)

    • Like 1
  5. On 08/12/2021 at 4:18 PM, wraitii said:

    Phabricator works appropriately but has been somewhat of a pain to maintain, and I think we should exclude any tool that leads to more headaches in that space.

    I think this is should be the focus. We don’t want to "burn" people with the administration of the tools that will be adopted.

    This is the main reason I’m mostly advocating in favour of Gitlab, because as a Gitlab administrator and maintainer myself this is something I could help with both in the short term (helping in the setup and migration) and long term (helping in the maintenance and administration).

    I don’t think it is a perfect solution, I actually have more than a couple issues with Gitlab, but I have been working with it long enough to know of its shortcomings and can help working around them. I would still be willing to help if another solution is chosen, of course, but I would be much less efficient with other tools if I need to learn how to use/maintain them from scratch.

    • Like 1
    • Thanks 1
  6. 17 hours ago, maroder said:

    What does the choice of hosting provider mean for the barrier of entry and the possible pool of contributors.

    This would be the biggest argument for GitHub. It has an extremely large and active community of developers.

    In my experience, GitHub ability to bring valuable contributions is overrated.
    I even took down the GitHub mirrors of the software I maintain a couple months ago, after years with no contributions coming this way (while we still get contributions on our dedicated GitLab instance).

    • Like 3
  7.   About formations:

    On 17/10/2021 at 3:06 PM, alre said:

    any opposing army could just retreat where there is not enough space for a formation to move, and thus be invulnerable to them, until they leave formation. from there in the narrow, they could keep showering projectiles at the formation.

    It seems you see that as a situation to avoid in-game, but this is exactly the kind of thing I would love to encounter in my games: the choice of battlefield having a heavy influence on the battle outcome.

    Forcing the opponent to follow you where they can not maintain the formation that is giving them the advantage sounds like an interesting tactical choice. Not following a fleeing army when you think they can lead you to an ambush is another interesting choice.

    If improving formations support in 0 A.D. can be the source of such choices, I’m all in favour of it ;)

    • Like 2
  8. 20 hours ago, Gurken Khan said:

    If a player can't be bothered to look at the tooltips in a strategy game, how much handholding do you want to do?

    I only play occasional games of 0 A.D., against A.I.

    As with the dozen of other strategy games I play, I tend to assume a lot of things about "standard" buildings and units. The standard here being that you would garrison units in buildings for temporary protection and healing.

    For some special buildings, like temples, I will read the tooltips if I have not played for a while. But for common ones, barracks included, I have preconceived ideas about what they do and might not always check if I’m missing something. (barracks train soldiers, towers shoot arrows, houses increase population limit, etc.)

    I just started a quick game to check, and the experience gain in garrison is obvious from the tooltip. I guess I missed in until then because building a barracks is something I do without really thinking about it, like some other common tasks during early game.

    Sadly I have no good suggestions about places where this information could be shown to ensure it is not missed. Loading screens and their tips could have been a good place, but here loading times are so short that I do not have the time to read in full what they display.

    A technology improving the experience gain would of course help in noticing that this is a thing, but this does not sound like enough of a reason to add a new technology.

    • Like 1
  9. On 26/09/2021 at 3:51 PM, LienRag said:

    The flatpak (main option to install it on a Debian stable) still tells me that it can't install

    I won’t be able to help on the Flatpak side of things, but I’m currently building a .deb backport of Alpha 25b for Debian Bullseye (stable), using the source package from Debian Bookworm (testing).

    If everything works as expected, I’ll share detailed build instructions here. Or if you want to give it an early try, I’m using this wrapper around mmdebstrap to handle the backported packages generation: Debian backports builder

    ---

    It might take a bit longer than expected, I stumbled upon some tricky apt bug in the process…

    • Like 1
  10. 39 minutes ago, ValihrAnt said:

    I also don't get from where the notion that the competitive community is pushing for the game to lose civ diversity and how the competitive players are the reason that not enough civ differentiation is done.

    My remarks on this topic are not limited to 0 A.D., it is my experience with all strategy games allowing both single player (or human vs. AI) and multiplayer (mostly human vs. human) that there will be two distinct groups of people with clashing visions on where the focus should be between:

    • balanced choices (civilization choice should not bring an obvious advantage/disadvantage), symmetrical gameplay, fair games based on skill
    • diverse choices (including "easy mode" and "hard mode" ones), asymmetrical gameplay, game results can rely in part on luck

    We obviously can’t have both at the exact same time, this is why I tried to suggest options allowing to switch between one approach and the other.

    Of course I am not saying people are advocating *against* diversity in the civilizations ;) But this lack of diversity is in my understanding a consequence of the push for balance/fairness. Because it is too tedious to balance wild deviations from the civilizations baseline, such deviations will be dropped if we do not think of the more relaxed solo or coop play against AIs.

    ---

    EDIT: Just to avoid confusion, I am talking here about *lack* of diversity compared to what 0 A.D. could be, not *loss* of diversity compared to some older release.

    • Like 1
  11. 53 minutes ago, LetswaveaBook said:

    I saw that in the mod selection menu, there is the option to chose for cute ponies with ponies ascendant or for the mod delenda est. Especially Delenda est seems good if you want diversity.

    This is an option of course, but not a good one in my opinion: I played 0 A.D. for more than 10 years, but learned only recently about the ability to download mods.

    Keeping in mind that I am what you could call a "technical" user, so I’m at ease with downloading/enabling mods. But more casual players will often be stuck with the vanilla game, with its focus on balance tailored for fair multiplayer games.

    My case is that the multiplayer players are usually the ones who have the best knowledge of the game and its options, so if there is a switch to flip between diverse/casual and balanced/hardcore it would be in my opinion a good move to set the default to what would be more fun for the casual players.

    • Like 2
  12. 2 hours ago, Yekaterina said:

    Imbalance will inevitably arise from diversity.

    That’s right, and points out at the core issue: some players favour balance, other favour diversity.
    I for one would play much more often if there was more diversity between the civilizations, but I understand that other players want (almost) perfect balance.

    Since we can not have both at the same time, I think there is roughly three choices:

    • (easy choice) Focus on balance, at the cost of diversity
    • (easy choice) Focus on diversity, at the cost of balance
    • (hard choice) Provide both experiences, and allow the player to chose one

    I am of course all in favour of the hard one, but if I were to chose between the easy ones I would without any hesitation advise cutting the balance in favour of fun original gameplay (I guess you would disagree on this one ;)). A perfectly balanced game means that I have very low incentive to try multiple civilizations, so it reduces a lot the time I’m willing to spend playing 0 A.D. before switching to something else.

    • Like 2
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  13. I agree that the civilizations lack a distinct feel outside of graphics. I guess this is because of multiplayer balance that you do not go with more original concepts?

    I remember that Age of Empires Ⅱ (sorry, not the best example of civilizations diversity outside of a couple exceptions) provided an option for that: by default all civilizations would use their own technology tree, but you could enforce a default tech tree for all players if you wanted to play a very balanced game.

    Another option would be to provide civilization "sets", a bit like what Battle for Wesnoth proposed through "eras": you can chose to play with a core/balanced set, perfect for multiplayer, or with a full/extended set, including civilizations with more interesting gameplay quirks.

    I guess what is important to remember is that there are players who have much more fun with imbalanced gameplay. Playing human against AI is imbalanced anyway, and can not be balanced by playing very similar civilizations, so in my opinion the game could be much more engaging in such modes by embracing the imbalance instead of trying to level it.

    • Like 1
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