[Ranged units prepare time]

11 hours ago, LetswaveaBook said:

Though 0 prepare time might give unrealistic looks from graphics perspective, but close to 0 might be fine. Also if looks are an issue, animations could be adapted.

Remember that with turns being 200ms, values 1-200 are essentially the same.

1 hour ago, BreakfastBurrito_007 said:

I was thinking about mace crossbowmen having to reload before shooting. I feel it would be nice for them to have a super fast prepare time (close to 0). If crossbows are loaded in advance, they only need to release right? I think this would make crossbowmen a more enjoyable and unique champion unit to have.

I like the idea, gonna make the change

 

[Ranged units prepare time]

Yes, I think overall my intent is that archers are just slightly less good at sniping units (particularly jav-cav in hit-and-run mode), and javelineers slightly more useful with their limited range.

I debated giving javs 200ms prepare time instead of 400, not sure if that would make a ton of difference.

[0 A.D. Alpha 25 Feature Freeze Update]

2 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.

Quote

• RC1 is the first time you can reasonably ask people to test, be it players or packagers.

Packagers, aye, players, maybe, but 'testers', certainly not. After all, people play SVN.

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• What's with the controlled environment? The purpose of an RC is to release it into the wild

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.

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• 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.

[Age of Mythology mod A25]

Check out a tutorial online, like this one.

[Ranged units prepare time]

https://code.wildfiregames.com/D4050

The diff above changes unit "Prepare Time", that is the time to the initial attack (≠ from the repeat time, which is the time between two consecutive attacks).

It makes archers weaker, and javelineers easier to micro.

If there is no strong argument against, I'll merge this for A25.

[Age of Mythology mod A25]

Mh, that seems rather weird. I would suggest trying to get a more complete callstack by running in a debugger.

[Siege Engine Balancing]

If there is a specific topic for A25, please start a thread in the balancing discussions subform or make a diff.

[Goals for A25]

I've merged the train time, the turn time, and a large mercenary change this morning.

I will make a diff to grant spear/pike a bonus against elephants, which I believe will come useful.

This mostly concludes the A25 gameplay changes from what I can tell, but we still have a severel days to introduce some changes.

[A25 Feedbacks from testing]

16 minutes ago, Ceres said:

Should they also switch to another resource (e.g. stone), if the previous one (e.g. wood) is depleted? Or should they stick always to the same type of resource? Should they become idle when all of the same kind of resource is depleted, or should they then at least switch to another resource?

Is it possible to tell them not to use one's allies' resources? Or even the foes' resources? (to draw less attraction) What if the currently worked on resources are depleted and they wander into foes' territories? Is there a wish to disable/toggle this behaviour? (just a few thoughts)

I think these are all things that would be "too much", from the unitAI standpoint. Players are still supposed to play the game  

That being said, I think we could have a higher level AI-assistant (that would be an actual AI in coop) for these kind of things in the (probably far) future

["Best for MP" map filter]

I've merged the maps, as written earlier, I intend to check for some easy updates that improve these maps.

The list isn't frozen, feel free to suggest different things, I think some of this can be continued over Feature Freeze too.

[Cannot host or join matchest in the same LAN]

You should be able to play over local MP, but not over the lobby unless you can configure something known as "NAT loopback/hairpinning" in your router.

This should indeed be fixed in the next version.

[Train time and rotation time mod.]

@ValihrAntcould you make a diff with the training times? I think we're missing that on Phabricator and A25 will be closing soon.

Should we merge the 'remove root from fortress' patch as well, in your opinion?

[===[COMPLETED]=== Terrain and Map Overhaul (Milestone: Alpha 25)]

The concrete difference is that you can't edit scenario settings, while you can edit some skirmish settings (mostly the civilisations).

This could be changed if/when we allow 'freezing' the civs in the gameosetup, which wouldn't be too difficult.

Edit -> but we also have "random maps" that are only partly procedural now, with fixed terrain, the the distinction has grown increasingly confusing. I wouldn't be against cleaning all that up sometimes soon, particularly since the whole concept of "map type" is annoying in the code.

[0 AD EMPIRES AT WAR , historical base scenario, UPDATE INFO with preview.]

You might need a few changes, as some templates were renamed (things like the elephant stable), but overall A24 and A25 maps should be compatible I believe.

["Best for MP" map filter]

I've updated the diff with the following list:

• african_plains: somewhat crowded map
• ardennes_forest: very crowded map, tons of wood, replacing 'deep forest' & schwarzwald
• cantabrian_highlands: acropolis-start is different
• continent: it's continent
• corinthian_isthmus: I expect A25 to be less turtly, so should be good again
• gulf_of_bothnia: different layout
• hyrcanian_shores: picked over Kerala/pheonician levant
• lake: different layout
• mainland: it's mainland.
• neareastern_badlands: Gonna add a little wood, but it seemed like an interesting gimmick to have a map with less wood but the oasis in the middle
• persian_highlands: 'gold rush' layout
• pyrenean_sierra: interesting layout as well
• rivers: picked over guadalquivir river (which I find ugly)

My intention was to:

• avoid redundant maps
• Keep playable & somewhat balanced maps

I'll go over these to make sure they are actually playable, potentially add Biome support to a few, I'll see.

["Best for MP" map filter]

It would, but:

• I don't think I'll have time for A25 and the current situation still seems suboptimal
• There is something to be said for "sane defaults". Users making custom filters is not as easy, there are possible issues with sharing the filters efficiently, and so on. It seems good to have a basic option.

Hence the effort here. It will also promote good maps / focus efforts on balancing those maps, ideally.

I agree with the concerns over variety & will review the map list, and might take a look at tweaking a few settings on these maps for balance (such as maybe adding more metal?)

["Best for MP" map filter]

I have began work on a filter that would remove the weird RM maps from the 'random' pool: D4012

Please comment what I have missed or failed to note.

[Why does nothing have 0 armor?]

15 minutes ago, hyperion said:

This logic only works if the unit has same resistance for all damage types and if there are no hard counters either.

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.

15 minutes ago, hyperion said:

So you could give all units 100 HP for 100% healthy instead.

Yes, but that seems less obvious because we show HP and not armour.

[Why does nothing have 0 armor?]

1 hour ago, Player of 0AD said:

It does makes sense. Champs have better gear. So they have more armor.

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.

It's much easier to compare units if they all have a base armour of '0' and HP variations than if they have both.

 

["Pulling the plug"]

Agreed, it's a reasonable take.

However, the current way ratings work waits for a message from all players until it actually rates the game (to avoid one user cheating, obviously). This means it can't rate a game where one user disconnects.

Changing that without making it possible to cheat is not so easy.

[A25 Feedbacks from testing]

large-address-aware is used by default in releases and in the auto build, but not when compiling on your own.

It's a flag to enable using more RAM than the default 32-bit limit on Windows, which iIrc is 2GB ?

[Why does nothing have 0 armor?]

I fear the reason is a lot more human than you think: there was no "0 armour" anywhere, and so when standardising (mostly @Nescio's work) we still didn't use 0.
I actually commented that somewhere on some diff, and I think it's agreed that we should probably use 0 armour.

It's basically a series of unfortunate mistakes. Armour is an 'HP modifier', and to make things simple we should have a base HP and then sometimes positive/negative armour on top, but that's not really the system we have (e.g. champions have more armour than Citizen soldier, but that doesn't make sense, they should have more HP instead).

 

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edit: I'll point out that 0 A.D.'s used of 'exponential armour' is unique as far as I know. It is indeed very convenient: there is really no 'start' point, so you can have -10 or 30 armour and it works the same: 1 point difference is worth about 10% more/less HP.
This property _is_ what makes it possible to use HP efficiently, but we still didn't

[Make multiplayer compatible mods]

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  

[Goals for A25]

I have merged the outpost change.

[How do I create a campaign]

I have some project for a tutorial campaign (see that thread), but so far haven't uploaded anything actually concrete.

I can make it available on GitHub if you'd like.

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As for campaigns itself, yes you just make a Json like the tutorial 'campaign' and then load scenarios. You don't necessarily need to bother much with triggers.