wraitii

I believe the holdup is that the maintainer lacks time. I'm not entirely if someone else can provide an update.

There is a bias, in that just because _you_ didn't see announcements doesn't mean there weren't. We posted some things on Facebook and Instagram - admittedly, if I recall, quite shortly before the release. The 'name thread' was closed a couple weeks earlier. On the forums there were also posts about 'release candidates', quite regularly. We didn't share those on social media, I believe, because we feared users might think they are the actual alpha, and then run into bugs, and drop off the map. So there were a few things. There wasn't an "announcement", so to speak, but we can't possibly reach everyone - even with the official announcement. Consider also that we pushed the release a lot in the latest days, because we discovered new bugs. Any date we picked might be pushed back. To feel safe about the release, we could only announce it at _most_ 3-4 days in advance, which just isn't enough time. If we announced a date 15 days in the future, we'd have to stall development even further, after already a solid month where not much happened. It gets annoying. For A25, we strive to maintain Alpha25 on the wiki up to date, too, which is probably more relevant.

Hey Gameboy, thanks for the report, I'll look into it (probably not before tomorrow though)

Is this on Alpha 24? Also as gameboy said, can you upload the save?

I think we can do some better work on our modding documentation. Here are some things that ought be done IMO: Improve the wiki. This is a major thing and where I think the community (y'all) can help out most. We have some resources, but it's not very up-to-date or exhaustive, unfortunately. Modding_Guide is the main page: I think the tutorials aren't very obvious, the rest of the content seems quite good, but perhaps some should be split off since it's the main 'modding hub' page. Review Mod_Layout GUI_-_Scripting_Reference < this is still somewhat relevant, but should be renamed & updated & simplified. CreatingNewUnits < This should be really useful, but it's fairly outdated & starts with the command line, which is no longer necessary ModdingGuiAndSimulation < these are, in fact, two rather different topics. It'd be good to expand & create a simple tutorial on how to create a new component Edit: in fact there is https://docs.wildfiregames.com/pyrogenesis/writing-components.html We need a "How to debug your mod" page. There is no information on how to create your own messages. Edit: in fact there is https://docs.wildfiregames.com/pyrogenesis/writing-components.html I think the high-level overview of the project & its ECS is also somewhat outdated. Better C++/JS interface documentation: Some of it can be on the wiki: How to use the range manager? How to use the Modifiers manager? & all other system/C++ components. Some of it should probably go into improving docs.wildfiregames.com Maybe we ought to auto-generate a list of 'Engine.XX' functions, too. Or at least document what exists now. We could definitely use a list of messages somewhere. Some of this only developers will be able to do. Some of this you can help with (mostly the Wiki). I think it'd be great if people added their own frustration to this list, so that we can have a good idea what ought to be added.

'Micro' in competitive setting is just economics. When you implement a feature, and a 'low-APM' variant of that feature, either the latter is more efficient and then why have the high-APM variant, or it's not and then competitive players must not use it or they'll lose the game. It's extremely hard to make it mostly equivalent. Bataillions run a high chance of ending up on either side, they could be OP and then why control individual units, or they could be worse and competitive play will rarely use them, introducing a 'glass ceiling' for newer players. This can creep up to some unexpected features - in Age 2 for example, 'waypoint scouting' is shunned by the pros because scouting manually is slightly faster. The difference is honestly not big, but this QoL feature is just not used in the early game because the advantage, even if small, is enough. Conversely; they introduced 'auto scouting', and someone like TheViper uses AutoScout in the late game relatively often, even though you might expect pros to never use it. Fundamentally, on a game where individual units can be controlled & that's desirable gameplay, such as 0 A.D., high APM competitive play will be a thing, unless the unit AI will always make the best possible decision (but then it's not a game anymore, is it)

The unlogged time in general has always been UnitAI, which has almost always been the slowest JS code, even going back several alphas. I think this time around attack-walk was particularly slow - I'm not sure if it was a new thing or not. You _are_ correct that the networking code is a bit old & could use improvements however. I've started some for A25 (namely, I restored the turn lengths to be the same in SP and MP). Then we need to make sure observers don't cause lag. Then we need to actually work on improving the responsiveness (the game has a built-in lag of 800ms in MP). I think @wow's idea to modify the release planning is good. I'm not sure on the details, but certainly seems like it could work.

I've been around for 11 years at this point, and I'm not even the 'oldest member' in this thread. I remember a time where the game didn't have walls or technologies or trade. I certainly remember a time where it didn't have an active multiplayer lobby ---- I won't go too much in the Alpha debate, but what I think is: The game certainly wouldn't be releasable as a paying, finished product tomorrow. Mostly because of the lag, also because of the very limited SP. That makes calling it an 'alpha' fairly logical. Conversely, it's also very playable (e.g. in 1v1 MP), and it's largely feature complete - or at least there are enough features. That makes the 'alpha' moniker weird, particularly if you compare with e.g. alpha 10 - now that wasn't playable whatsoever. The 'disconnect' I see is that we have a user base, in MP, that nowadays has expectations about the game - expectations we didn't expect having to meet. The dev team can call this an alpha all it wants, it has a player base that treats it like a released game. This is really the reason why I would drop the 'alpha' from the name. There is also a 'historical' reason, which most of you won't necessarily know. The idea, for a very long time, has been to actually release a "Version 1" of the game at some point - a finished product. This was the idea from the start, including after the open-sourcing in 2009. And for the early years of the 2010's, it was still the idea - there was a fundraiser in 2013 hoping to 'finish the game', and more talk of leaving alpha than I'd care to recall. In that context, we're still in 'alpha' or 'beta' at best. However, I think those were a bit fool's hopes, looking back on it. I think we are (and perhaps always were) in a 'perpetual beta / seasons' release model. The game won't ever be 'finished', because the distinction makes no sense -> we already have players, so in that respect it's already finished. I wouldn't even call it early access, which also implies a 'finished' product. No, we're just releasing incrementally more complete versions of the game, but there won't ever be a point where we can say 'now it's done'. You might be right, but in truth we always would get some of these comments. People have strong opinions about their video games, and there is basically no chance that we'd get 100% approval from our players.

Pretty cool mod that @azayrahmad You can listen for OnOwnershipChanged or onDestroy messages. ---- Modifiers apply to entities, and there is no way to pass an array of entities (for now anyways). However, a modifier applied to a "Player entity" is also applied to all the entities it owns, so that might be where you got confused. ---- Stackability is actually not implemented in the modifiers manager for now (see L11: // - support stacking modifiers (MultiKeyMap handles it but not this manager).) You can work around it by giving unique identifiers to your modifier, e.g.: cmpModifiersManager.AddModifiers( "MoraleAllies_" + ent, { "Morale/RegenRate": [{ "affects": ["Unit"], "add": this.GetMoraleLevel() }], }, ent ); That way each modifier is unique and it stacks in practice.

That is true and false. 0 A.D. is the product of over 20 years of work, and has the advantage that it won't die when the maker company drops support, since there's no maker company. Our 'budget' to make the game is theoretically infinite, and in 100 years hopefully it'll become the absolute best game of all time, no questions asked. But it also means our priorities aren't quite the same as most other games. Short term marketing has little value when we'll still be here in 5 years and players might have moved on. That doesn't mean we don't want it, but time is limited and priorities shift. ---- Anyways, I agree. I do think we could make better use of our social media, and I think we could communicate with content creators etc. better (and I am hearing you-as-a-content-creator specifically). Truthfully, 0 A.D. having an actual 'community' is not that old a thing, and A23 has definitely been on a different level than before with the mod support and all. It sounds a bit weird, but we kinda weren't ready for it. Having a list of content creators to reach out to about releases would be great, and I think it's something that ought to be looked at for the A25 release, which hopefully will be more orderly. The social media itself is trickier. It's not so easy to do since you need to be fairly involved in the community / dev possibly, and it takes time. I don't think we have had too many candidates in the past, but perhaps we've also not been asking all too well.

I think those are general mere upgrades, not specific units, so putting them under the units might arguably be more confusing.

I don't really mind, but we don't really have upgrade techs like that in the public mod It's not too difficult to do, but we'd have to take potential token modifications into account. I might actually prefer a special mode where the tech icon is below the production. I do agree that we'd probably not want more than 10 units to produce. That being said, I don't see myself working on this for quite some time, unfortunately.

There's basically three reasons: we don't have the time. Remember that nobody is doing this full time, nor is making any money off it. none of us particularly want to do it ('cause we're mostly developers) to call the A24 chaotic is a massive understatement. The release was nothing short of a miracle. I don't think we actually wanted to communicate too much, in case it ended up being completely buggy or unbalanced for some reason. Yes, communication could have been better with some more planning, and we certainly could use more help. But I think you're mistaken if you think 0 A.D. has even a remote chance to stand against the Age of Empires PR machine. Even Age 2 is much, much bigger than 0 A.D. is. We benefit because more people play RTS games, but we lose some because people prefer those games. 0 A.D. is also still quite laggy, and needs a fair few improvements before I think it's ready for a more mainstream audience. I would push towards dropping the 'alpha' from the name, but that doesn't mean it's quite ready.

Thanks for the replay, this does looks like a fairly 'regular' motion issue. With the replay I should be able to investigate what's going on.

Negative, I don't have access to the wordpress blog. I think you'll have to talk to @Stan`when he gets back from holidays

Hey, I assume you're playing A24 ? Maybe you ought to try and delete the matchsettings.json files, see https://trac.wildfiregames.com/wiki/GameDataPaths for where they're located. Could also be a bad replay.

Not going to disagree - this would be nice. I don't think it's easy to implement though, from my past experience with highlighting decaying buildings.

@Angen has the right of it: non-locked gates are "open" to the Long-Range pathfinder, which means units try going through. Because of that they get stuck, and then get into their "recovery" UnitMotion code, which uses the Short-Range pathfinder (which does see the gate as closed) to get around. The units should be able to unstuck themselves after a while (though in MP that could be several seconds), however if you keep clicking to order them to move, you'll actually make the problem worse since the "recovery" logic resets. This is something I failed to anticipate and ought to try and fix. I'm also not entirely sure that there isn't some bad cases where units do move a bit, which resets the logic also. All in all, this gate business is quite annoying :/ Another problem is that making the initial search range larger can lead to crippling lag. ---- All in all, this is a known issue but has no easy fix at the moment - Pathfinder threading & Unit Pushing would both reduce the load on the short-range pathfinder, allowing larger search ranges from the start (reducing the issue), & we could do some more unitAI work too.

I've sen that one before. I think the problem is rams target the tower. Then they fail to reach it. So they look for a new target... Which happens to be the same tower. Endless loop I'm not entirely sure if the loop is in UnitAI or the real AI or both though.

Yeah I loved it too. Then again, I was young I think we could do something similar -> a civilisation arriving in a new unknown land (perhaps after being chased by a more powerful foe?), then rebuilding, then finding locals that are unfriendly, and chasing them (kinda bookending then campaign)

Lol You could maybe have a bit of respect & understanding for literally more than twenty years of work by literally hundreds of people. Yes, multiple parts of the game & the engine are imperfect, flawed, or need improvement. I'd be hard pressed to find an area that could not use improvement, in fact - thus is the nature of these projects. I am getting annoyed by your antics. You do something, ask for feedback, and then when you actually get feedback, you react as if you were persecuted by a shadowy cabal of fake open source people or 'the powers that be' as you wrote. The way I see it, you're not being productive, you're just wasting everybody's time and energy.

Yes, anytime a unit cannot path somewhere (typically > runs into units) it'll take some turns to find a workaround path, in which it might not move. For A25 it should be less long as the turn length will be reduced in MP. It will also be improved if I end up merging Unit Pushing. Edit -> that being said, I don't know if that's the problem here.

This is something I think we should do first. It has consequences for citizen soldiers as a concept though. IMO this is one area where we could differentiate civilisations.

Not a bad idea. We could also assume that if a player drops for long enough, you've won, but that requires code. Long-term, I think we'll need several lobby rooms with 'confidence ratings' for players, and once you've proven you're not a cheater you can enter. Need to make sure new players don't have too bad an experience though.

I think if you put something like "0% 100%-256 256 100%" it'll do what you want