Autociv mod 0ad enhancer

[Lenhes]

23 minutes ago, Stan` said:

What kind of keyboard do you have? You might need to remap them.

@Stan` Well its a normal QWERTY keyboard but I dont think that its the problem because in the vanilla the idle units options work well and with the autociv mod all the hotkeys work but the idle ones.

Edited August 5, 2020 by Lenhes

[Stan`]

Oh my bad, I thought that was the normal forum T_T

[nani]

On 8/5/2020 at 6:41 PM, Lenhes said:

Hi, the idleonly, idleunit, idlewarrior and idleworker hotkeys doesnt work for me, I tried with different keys and I even tried uninstalling the mod but it doesnt work. I only use fgod and balanced-maps mods.

Edit: Now its working I only had to clear the selection.nowondedonly and without that hotkey everything was perfect.

Yep, added an overlapping hotkey without noticing in an older version but the newer version should work fine (fixed)

[nani]

On 7/30/2020 at 2:24 AM, Jake L said:

How difficult would it be to add hotkey support for the order of keys pressed? For example, the combination Z+X does something different than pressing X+Z.

Secondly, would it be practical/possible to assign duplicate hotkey combinations to some kind of array? For instance, a user could assign the placement of all civ-economy buildings to B+N, all military buildings to B+M, and all other buildings to B+L.

  In the game, pressing B+N once, when a worker is selected, brings up a house to place. If the building remains selected, but the foundation has not been placed yet, pressing B+N again, switches the building to be placed from the house to the storehouse, then; Farmstead, Field, Stables, and Dock, (assuming all were assigned the same hotkey combo), until the building is placed or action canceled.

The change would make the hotkey mod more "Accessibility" friendly. I'm not severely limited, but have chronic damaged postural back muscles from suv vs bike at highway speeds, circa 2014.

Ideally, for me, all key combinations I need would be within reach of the left hand 'F index' position. There are 24 standard keys (123456qwertyasdfghzxcvbn) I can reach easily, along with shift, control, alt, and space. If just the six keys of the left bottom row (zxcvbn (US english)) were fully available to any 2, 3, or 4 (finger) key combination, there are 50 possible combinations. I imagine that is more hotkeys than most people regularly use. If there were also array like assignments to a single key combination, every hotkey feature would be possible with just 6 keys.

 Regardless, thanks for the ability to modify the hotkeys. It really helps.

-Jake

0ad engine doesn't distinguish between Z+X and X+Z, never the less, making modal hotkeys like in AOE (like you said) is possible but won't do it for this mod. cheers

Edited August 9, 2020 by nani

[Loki1950]

It would need a change in the way key presses are are handled at the C++ level so it really is beyond what a mod can do with JavaScript.

Enjoy the Choice

[nani]

3 hours ago, mysticjim said:

First mini-episode covering 0AD mods

Gone for an established classic this time, will be working through similar common mods first, then branching out into the more leftfield ones after.

 

Very nice, I see you really liked the auto-assign, auto-train ones xd. As for APM I know is not very useful but i didn't find anyother way to measure the actions or what should be an action that can be measured with current code ...

BTW, I don't know if you know but all the features are listed here:

https://wildfiregames.com/forum/index.php?/topic/24649-autociv-mod-0ad-enhancer/

 

 

[mysticjim]

49 minutes ago, nani said:

Very nice, I see you really liked the auto-assign, auto-train ones xd. As for APM I know is not very useful but i didn't find anyother way to measure the actions or what should be an action that can be measured with current code ...

BTW, I don't know if you know but all the features are listed here:

https://wildfiregames.com/forum/index.php?/topic/24649-autociv-mod-0ad-enhancer/

 

 

Hi nani,

Yes, I really only targeted the most obvious features - it's pretty impressive just how many things you've crammed into the mod. It's a piece of work for sure  

One thing that has come up in the comments on Youtube - the autotrain feature - honestly, is it cheating? I've been testing it, and I'm producing at a far higher rate than I could ever manage using my own limited 0AD playing skills!!!!! I just crushed an opponent through sheer weight of numbers where otherwise it would have been a very close game. 

I feel if everyone had access to it within the core game it would be fair enough. But If I know my opponent doesn't use it, am I willingly giving myself an unfair advantage? And if I choose not to use it on principle, I know I'm going to get wiped out by an opponent who does.

It calls into question how many games I've lost against players because of this feature? I'm not a great player, make absolutely no mistake, but looking back at replays where I've been dumbfounded about far behind I've fallen in unit production really quickly, it makes me wonder!  

[wowgetoffyourcellphone]

Auto train would indeed be cheating if only 1 player had access to it. 

[nani]

1 hour ago, mysticjim said:

Hi nani,

Yes, I really only targeted the most obvious features - it's pretty impressive just how many things you've crammed into the mod. It's a piece of work for sure  

One thing that has come up in the comments on Youtube - the autotrain feature - honestly, is it cheating? I've been testing it, and I'm producing at a far higher rate than I could ever manage using my own limited 0AD playing skills!!!!! I just crushed an opponent through sheer weight of numbers where otherwise it would have been a very close game. 

I feel if everyone had access to it within the core game it would be fair enough. But If I know my opponent doesn't use it, am I willingly giving myself an unfair advantage? And if I choose not to use it on principle, I know I'm going to get wiped out by an opponent who does.

It calls into question how many games I've lost against players because of this feature? I'm not a great player, make absolutely no mistake, but looking back at replays where I've been dumbfounded about far behind I've fallen in unit production really quickly, it makes me wonder!  

Wont deny it can be considered a cheat but I can assure you no pro player uses autotrain to win a fight, quite the contrary, having autotrain doesn't let you micromanage your resources precisely hence you eco will suffer from it. One thing they will do however is use it for the late game spamming and the very useful specific case: corrals, in fact I did add this feature because I wanted automatic corral production :P

[mysticjim]

9 minutes ago, wowgetoffyourcellphone said:

Auto train would indeed be cheating if only 1 player had access to it. 

But being a mod, you could argue any player has the 'right' to access it if they choose. Also being a mod, there isn't a way to disable it in a game setup to ensure no one player benefits from it. It opens a contentious can of worms I'd not previously considered.  It relies on player honesty. Thats never a good thing! 

9 minutes ago, nani said:

Wont deny it can be considered a cheat but I can assure you no pro player uses autotrain to win a fight, quite the contrary, having autotrain doesn't let you micromanage your resources precisely hence you eco will suffer from it. One thing they will do however is use it for the late game spamming and the very useful specific case: corrals, in fact I did add this feature because I wanted automatic corral production

Strangely, I've found it totally helped my eco - certainly in the areas of the game where I struggle - which seems to be negotiating phase 2 into 3.  

I may be an edge case, but I found it transformed my strategic play - in so much that I was able to devote more attention to the bigger picture, rather than having to monitor the fact that I was producing units or not. I knew I was by default unless I purposefully stopped it. 0AD feels, to me at least, almost like a different game when I play using it. And I find it strangely hard now when I try and match that performance without it, knowing that with autotrain I'd be a good 20-30 units up on what I can do manually. 

[odalman]

24 minutes ago, mysticjim said:

Also being a mod, there isn't a way to disable it in a game setup to ensure no one player benefits from it. It opens a contentious can of worms I'd not previously considered.  It relies on player honesty. Thats never a good thing!

Rules only enforced by honesty have certainly been considered previously. For example players not looking at (and listening to) things that should be hidden from them in Widelands was discussed back in 2003-2004. It is trivial to modify such a game to see and hear everything. In just an evening, someone familiar with C++ but not with the 0 A.D. code can check out SVN, figure out which dependencies are needed and install them, get it all built, look around the code and find the places that need to be modified, change and test until it works. (Some things in the game might be hidden from the user by code written in JavaScript and would need some extra effort to modify.)

The linked wiki page discusses how this could be solved by a client-server architecture, like FreeCiv has, and how much bandwidth might be needed. An idea not mentioned there is a hybrid approach, where a set of trusted servers run the simulation in parallel like 0 A.D. does now, and each can act as a server for clients nearby on the network. That could for example keep intercontinental network traffic low, while using more bandwidth on the shorter routes to the users, enforcing incomplete knowledge of the game state.

Another approach that was not considered back in those years, was streaming the game (video and audio to the client, input back to the server). That would use immense amounts of bandwidth, which is actually available in many places nowadays, while enforcing incomplete knowledge and preventing many kinds of client-side game automation (like autotrain or logic to make units do something useful when they become idle), which some might consider to be cheats.

[mysticjim]

1 hour ago, odalman said:

Rules only enforced by honesty have certainly been considered previously. For example players not looking at (and listening to) things that should be hidden from them in Widelands was discussed back in 2003-2004. It is trivial to modify such a game to see and hear everything. In just an evening, someone familiar with C++ but not with the 0 A.D. code can check out SVN, figure out which dependencies are needed and install them, get it all built, look around the code and find the places that need to be modified, change and test until it works. (Some things in the game might be hidden from the user by code written in JavaScript and would need some extra effort to modify.)

The linked wiki page discusses how this could be solved by a client-server architecture, like FreeCiv has, and how much bandwidth might be needed. An idea not mentioned there is a hybrid approach, where a set of trusted servers run the simulation in parallel like 0 A.D. does now, and each can act as a server for clients nearby on the network. That could for example keep intercontinental network traffic low, while using more bandwidth on the shorter routes to the users, enforcing incomplete knowledge of the game state.

Another approach that was not considered back in those years, was streaming the game (video and audio to the client, input back to the server). That would use immense amounts of bandwidth, which is actually available in many places nowadays, while enforcing incomplete knowledge and preventing many kinds of client-side game automation (like autotrain or logic to make units do something useful when they become idle), which some might consider to be cheats.

In a real, here and now sense, where does this leave us? 

In reality what is the etiquette when I join a multiplayer game? Should I willingly advise I have the mod and know full well how to use autotrain? How many other people actually use it? nani suggested that no pro player uses it to win a fight, but at the same time suggested that they do use it in some capacity.

 

Edited September 4, 2020 by mysticjim
clicked wrong button!

[wowgetoffyourcellphone]

Quite frankly, WFG needs to address this. I had no notion that the auto mod would have made it possible to use auto train 8n multi-player 

[smiley]

Someone wanting to cheat has access to various bugs in vanilla to make it possible without an additional mod. You can literally enable full vision in multiplayer, build stacked walls, stacked units, and at one point, get infinite resources using the barter system IIRC. Which are arguably much more game breaking "cheats". Seems arbitrary to draw the line at a feature that's irrelevant for any "pro" player. Hotkeys and control groups mean this feature is rather useless for most of them from what I can tell.

Some dude back in early 2019 was writing a mod / AI to handle economic micro management for him. With no concept of anti cheat, central authority, or trust mechanisms, such things are rather easy. I mean anyone could release a "cheats_mod.zip" right after A24 is released that is invisible in the compatibility detection sense. (I will do it for money $$$. That's a joke....unless?...).

"cheats_mod" user playing against another user with the mod is no problem. But the other way is a problem.

For a start, fix the flaw in mod compatibility detection. Having a security feature mods can literally mod out is rather useless. A somewhat easy way is to integrate checksums into the check which will also add an additional layer of security. mod.json declares checksum, modloader verifies it and pass through a function which gives a final hash which is whats compared between people to ensure their game is the same. Thats a scuffed solution but even that is better that whats already done.

[odalman]

2 hours ago, smiley said:

full vision in multiplayer

Fixable with a client/server architecture (a lot of work to implement and somewhat more bandwidth use) or streaming (some work to implement, huge bandwidth use, need for advanced graphic hardware and power to run it for each player on the server side, probably lower graphic quality due to some lossy compression, and some lag).

For now, just play with full vision to make it equal for all players.

2 hours ago, smiley said:

build stacked walls

I assume that you mean many wall sections built from a turret. Easily fixable by requiring a minimum angle between them.

2 hours ago, smiley said:

stacked units

I assume that you mean for example the "lethal deathboat" with 17 catapults. Could probably be fixed with some effort.

2 hours ago, smiley said:

get infinite resources using the barter system IIRC

I assume that you mean infinite food from corrals or fields combined with bartering in the market. This gives infinite resources, limited by the time the market needs for the barter rate to regenerate between barters. Seems like a feature. If it can somehow be done instantly it is a bug and probably fixable.

 

Another issue on the list is unit dancing to avoid projectiles. That should be fixed with a more realistic unit motion model involving acceleration and direction change. This requires quite a lot of work and should probably have the highest priority among the major fixes.

For now, someone could implement a user-interface mod that spreads out attacks in time. For example, if a user selects 20 archers with attack rate of 1 Hz and clicks to attack a nearby enemy unit, his user interface could send an attack command for each of them with 50 ms between them. That should make it harder to avoid projectiles.

 

2 hours ago, smiley said:

Some dude back in early 2019 was writing a mod / AI to handle economic micro management for him.

Seems like a feature that lets the player focus more on higher level strategic issues and makes the game less of a clicking contest. Of course, those who want a clicking contest should play against each other and not the rest of the players.

Edited September 5, 2020 by odalman

[Nescio]

Players interested in competitive multiplayer are a tiny minority. 0 A.D. has been downloaded over a million times from SourceForge alone (source) – and I guess most people nowadays got it directly from play0ad.com, a Linux distribution package, or even the svn version or a git mirror – so the vast majority does not go beyond single-player.

I'm not saying bugs should be ignored, but there will practically always be other ways to exploit a game and gain an advantage. And if someone makes a modification to make playing easier, then I don't see why that is a problem; isn't that the whole point of open source?

[mysticjim]

Very interesting points. For the record, I observed two good games last night (the 2nd one will feature on the channel as this weeks game, btw) - and I observed closely if any of the players appeared to be autotraining. I'm somewhat pleased to say I don't think any of them did, and yet they matched what I could achieve in terms of rapid unit production with autotrain just by their own skill. That motivated me to practice a bit without autotrain in Single player - and using the insight I got from using autotrain, I was able to elevate my unit production. Not as good as with it, but it showed there are still lots of techniques that I simply haven't sussed. I feel much better knowing that. 

It's a strange place to be in. I'll be honest, I actually really enjoy using both techniques, and it takes a slightly different skillset to develop your army each, and certainly adds an element to the game. As an experiment, maybe even a future episode on my channel, I might find an opponent willing to test out playing me using each method and see how differently the games pan out.

However, in multiplayer generally, I'm going to trust that most players either aren't aware the option is there, or like me are willing not to use it as per the spirit of fair competition. I'll certainly know what to look for in the replays, though, if I come up against some training with near robotic abundance! I guess you're all right, there are always methods to circumvent the code and the spirit of any game, and 0AD is kind of set up for those exploits to be opened up if someone is so disposed. And we all know about those games that let players pay money to have what is clearly an unfair advantage. But 0AD is free and I hope that the vast majority of players do feel a greater sense of achievement through hard work and practice of the base game, rather than something that artificially supplements them in their areas of weakness. 

And I feel really bad for the poor, unfortunate noob I toasted yesterday using autotrain! But I won't mention it if you guys don't!  

[wowgetoffyourcellphone]

Whether or not there are other gameplay exploits does not make auto-train any less of a cheat if only one player has it and the other does not. That's just a logical fact. We can address all the other exploits and cheats, but this discussion was about auto-train. I'm not saying the game shouldn't have it. I wouldn't mind it as a standard feature in match setup (I wouldn't use it, but it's a popular enough feature, and "high level" players can always turn it off). But again, that's if it was a standard feature available to all, not just those who happen to download a mod. 

[Stan`]

cc @Itms (for the cheating part if you have any ideas)

[Silier]

(someone should split this, it is going out of topic) 

[Itms]

I agree it's going out of topic. In the staff forums we have been saying that I will stop signing mods that change the mod detection code. For instance autociv "hides itself" from the list of enabled mods, specifically in multiplayer. I can't "unsign" it, but all mods will need a new signature for A24, at which point autociv and others will have to remove this hiding feature in order to appear on mod.io.

As odalman mentions, this is not going to fix the underlying problem. Players can install non-signed mods manually, they can even modify the engine code if they have the skills. Out of sync errors will prevent players from directly modifying the simulation to their advantage, but they can always tweak the UI, implement auto-train and other things...

The change to signing is mainly made in order to be fair and more open to players using mod.io who might be unaware of autociv's (and others) internals. I'm not sure we can do more without resorting to complex measures like using servers.

[nani]

5 hours ago, Itms said:

I agree it's going out of topic. In the staff forums we have been saying that I will stop signing mods that change the mod detection code. For instance autociv "hides itself" from the list of enabled mods, specifically in multiplayer. I can't "unsign" it, but all mods will need a new signature for A24, at which point autociv and others will have to remove this hiding feature in order to appear on mod.io.

As odalman mentions, this is not going to fix the underlying problem. Players can install non-signed mods manually, they can even modify the engine code if they have the skills. Out of sync errors will prevent players from directly modifying the simulation to their advantage, but they can always tweak the UI, implement auto-train and other things...

The change to signing is mainly made in order to be fair and more open to players using mod.io who might be unaware of autociv's (and others) internals. I'm not sure we can do more without resorting to complex measures like using servers.

I'm on board with disabling some "questionable helpers" for competitive rated games but I wont cripple the mod so we all have the same lower bottom minimum 0ad experience when these features could/should be in the game rather than as a mod. Just stating that these mods are trying to improve the playability not cheat.

[Itms]

14 minutes ago, nani said:

I'm on board with disabling some "questionable helpers" for competitive rated games but I wont cripple the mod so we all have the same lower bottom minimum 0ad experience when these features could/should be in the game rather than as a mod. Just stating that these mods are trying to improve the playability not cheat.

Completely agree. The only questionable thing we find in a few mods is the code that removes the mod itself from the list of enabled mods. Players should be aware that their opponent is using autociv or any other mod (in theory: as I said, they can't know if their opponent changed the code locally).

[hyperion]

Isn't the reason for "hiding" the mod not about wanting to get an "unfair" advantage but because of the "broken" mod compatibility check? Will a24 address this issue with a finer grained mod compatibility model?

[Stan`]

Can you elaborate ?