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wraitii

WFG Programming Team
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Posts posted by wraitii

  1. Just now, hyperion said:

    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.

    Yes that's essentially my conclusion as well.

    Just now, hyperion said:

    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.

    I was actually struggling with the name quite a bit, skip_mod_compatibility_check seems a good proposition to me, thanks :) 

    • Like 1
  2. 17 hours ago, hyperion said:

    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.

    I thought of that a bit and think those would be 'tags' for the users to look at, not really for the engine. Sure, this would help narrow down the compatibility, but at the end of the day I don't think we'd ever have a perfect system, and it seems like it would mostly complicate things. Which is why I went  with this boolean "this does [not] change checksums".

    And yeah obviously we'd need to check the mods that we approve for signing, but that's not the only way people share mods.

    • Like 2
  3. 17 hours ago, ChronA said:

    Personally I would like it if <default><Clearance> in simulation/data/pathfinder.xml was bumped up to 1.5 from its current value of 0.8. Right now there are an awful lot of units clipping through each other in melee fights. Increasing the unit separation would make fights more readable, increase the importance of concavity, and would make the range differences of the melee unit types much more apparent and significant.

    Anything above 1 would make the units take "2 pathfinding tiles", and would likely make the pathfinding feel completely broken, unfortunately.

    In A25 I can try to increase the pushing range (since atm that makes the problem worse).

    • Like 1
  4. 5 hours ago, sil-vous-plait said:

    There are two things happening: one is whether or not you think it's an issue that needs solving—which I have yet to see explicitly stated by anyone, if anything the opposite—and another is (and the transparency is appreciated) whether or not it is feasible for the team to do.

    Alright, I'm going to cut down your complaints by 50%: this is an issue that should be solved. There should not be racist slurs in the lobby. There should also not be cheaters, leavers, and a bunch of other things in the lobby.

    Am I going to do anything about it? No.

  5. 45 minutes 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.

    Can't say I disagree. Maybe not 75%, but we could certainly use a 'Maps in need of work' category where we put the garbage.

    I think 'random' is more easily understood than 'procedural', so I'd rather keep it, but I'm probably OK with splitting the maps in more category for the time being, particularly removing some of the more special maps (arena, the one with no wood, ...) from the general random pool.

    • Like 1
  6. My belief is that making it so that it takes time to switch from gathering to attacking mode for soldiers would help with balancing citizen-soldiers considerably. Because then each 'variant' can be considered sort-of-in-vacuum.

    I'm not sure 'hardcoding' strategies is the way to go, but maybe, you know.

    That being said, don't expect this to get in A25. I think the target for A25 will be to fix the most egregious issues with A24, so players are happier with the current state of the game, before running into an experiment that tweaks a core concept like this.

    • Like 2
  7. 4 hours ago, sil-vous-plait said:

    at the end of the day my question is still: is this not a concern of WFG? if so what plans are there to address it? I do agree with what's said via mods etc etc but it still strikes me as odd that this is getting treated as something extra, as if it's not a foundational concern of the game/multiplayer experience

    [Usual disclaimer that 'WFG' is not a thing and this is just a bunch of people giving some of their free time]

    We don't have particular plans to address this, mostly because the people currently active are mostly devs who work on other things.

    That being said, we are stretched rather thin in terms of lobby moderators. It would make sense to have more, but as usual things aren't so simple, because giving moderator power to people implies trusting them, which implies knowing them somewhat.

    • Like 1
  8. I must say I find it odd how most civs have no siege option in Phase 2, when you do get some turtling options (towers, etc.) That being said, I suppose it's still mostly eco growth at that point in theory and so making the fights about eco makes some sense.

    I agree with the notion that fights in 0 A.D. tend to disadvantage the attacker more than in say Age, since the attacker loses more eco. Increased loot might work to counter that.

    I think turn times are a bit of a decoy problem. I think if there were no archers in P1, you wouldn't notice it nearly as much. That being said, not against bumping them.

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    Still, I agree that late-game gets static easily, because defences are hard to break down. Personally, I think part of the problem is that garrisoning counters capturing much too strongly, making defensive buildings OP. I don't think we've addressed that yet.

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    As for game start, perhaps an option would be to make Citizen Soldiers take longer to train at the CC than at the barracks?

    • Like 1
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  9. Current plan is to revert to A23, as part of D3898.

    However, because of how turrets/visible garrisoning has been split from regular garrisoning, the visibly-garrisoned units no longer recover Capture Points. Which means the outpost will go neutral even if garrisoned.

    IMO, the solution is to remove the 'decay' feature of outposts, and barring changes that's likely what I'll do.

    • Like 3
  10. 34 minutes ago, maroder said:

    Is that not only a matter of taking one of the shrub actors and increase the obstruction size or am I missing something?

    Well, sorta. I think they'd be pretty ugly just scaled up, ideally we'd have moss-covered stones, more dead/rotting trees, more vine-looking stuff. For tropical environments we need completely different setups, too. And for perf reasons it'd be good if these meshes weren't hundreds of props, so we need some dedicated stuff.

    • Like 1
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  11. 31 minutes ago, wowgetoffyourcellphone said:

    I just bring up the problem, because I don't think it's been discussed. How do we want forests to work? 

    I do believe you could find some discussion on this, but you'd probably have to dig a fair bit.
    Fact is we also don't have 'impassable terrain texture', and a few other things that make 0 A.D. quite liberal in where you can walk. 0 A.D. isn't too dissimilar from Age 3 in my experience in how forests feel, though maybe trees didn't have obstructions in that game? Don't recall. Anyways, it's not completely unrealistic, and I don't think removing obstruction entirely would be necessary.

    I don't think most forests being passable is actually an issue, overall. However, I think we should have an easy option to make impassable forests, and that (to me) means undergrowth/old growth meshes to take up space and become impassable. I agree that it's annoying that we don't have that.

    ----

    With that being said, and as I've stated before, I think our forests are pretty bad, particularly on random maps, since the trees are kind of all over the place, leaving too little room for construction and making dropside placement awkward. This ties in with forests being passable/impassable - impassable forests need meshes, and passable forests could probably be sparser (overall reduction in # of trees), but have more wood per trees.

    Fixing all this isn't trivial nor my priority of the moment, unfortunately.

    • Like 1
  12. I disagree somewhat. I think the correct solution is to have impassable undergrowth entities, that are much bigger but still gatherable (though generating less wood). A wild forest isn't impassable because of the trees. Alternatively, having more low-trees that block movement naturally would also work.

    • Like 5
  13. Answering as a "team member", I'll say that the notion of "plan" for 0 A.D. is murky at best. We don't really have a well defined end-goal for the gameplay at the moment.

    The general notion was to have formations be a larger part of combat than in the Age of Empires series, though probably not as involved as Total War.

    ----

    My personal opinion is that they're somewhat unlikely to be more than Age-of-Empires like, that is, a movement/micro helper. The current gameplay doesn't really benefit from formation, nor would they really work compared to not using them.

  14. TBH I think we went a bit too far on A23 with regards to anti-dancing. But I also don't think microing against javelineers or archers is a particularly good gameplay mechanic.
    That being said, a simpler variant of Hyperion's idea would be randomly changing to target other units close by. That might be enough to make hero-dancing less interesting.

    ----

    On the topic at hand, I don't really mind lowering train rates a bit. My problem with 0 A.D. is mostly that economy grows exponentially, which makes it real tricky after the 15th minute, but well, it's a high skill ceiling.

    I would also be OK with higher turn rates, since I had originally proposed those anyways.

    If the player feedback is good, this seems like a go for A25.

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    I'm OK with reducing archer speed compared to jab for balance, but I think at some point we'll need to rethink these entirely. We haven't been able to _really_ balance archer (inf or cav) ever, and we probably need to give most civs a long-range and short-range option (or at least a long-range one). The advantage is just too high.

    I also really dislike how little damage spearmen deal to spearmen, and how tanky spearmen are in general, but that's another debate.

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    Edit -> Somewhat on topic, but I'm wondering if 0 A.D. standard starts shouldn't have _more_ units/buildings, kind of like the AOE2DE "Empire wars" mode. Since we're fast-paced anyways, maybe we should just cut the crap entirely.

    • Like 1
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