made a discord for competitive 0ad matchmaking/finding people to play with https://discord.gg/2q9mj9Bue2

[Stan`]

What's really disheartening is that all the focus as been put on MP gameplay and the MP people ended up hating it.I'm still very surprised there isn't a A23 stats mod.

[chrstgtr]

1 hour ago, Stan` said:

What's really disheartening is that all the focus as been put on MP gameplay and the MP people ended up hating it.I'm still very surprised there isn't a A23 stats mod.

Some alphas are good. Some are less good. I don’t think anyone responsible for the less good alphas thought they were putting out a bad product. Also while a24 may have been heavily  influenced by individual MPs, the changes largely did not address things that the MP community thought were problems. When those “problems” were “fixed” unintended side effects were introduced.

to be honest, I don’t think there is or should be a dichotomy between SP and MP. Their priorities are just different with MP just wanting something balanced and SP tending to just want something that looks and feels great with cool features. Those two aren’t sets of preferences mutually exclusive. 

Mods are notoriously difficult to get people to adopt. When you need to get 8 people to simultaneously adopt one then it becomes basically impossible. This is why SPs tend to play with more mods than MPs. 

[Yekaterina]

4 hours ago, Stan` said:

I hope A25 will be good enough to keep people around until A26.

From what I have observed, A25 will perform better than A24 in terms of lag.

The reasoning is this: when we get to late game there will constantly be hundreds of units fighting each other, and to keep all players in sync, the computer has to calculate what happens in each frame, then move onto the next frame. This means 1 second on Mainland might equal to 3 seconds in real life, therefore a game which 0ad claims to have lasted 40 minutes might have lasted for 2 hours in real life. In A25 the game is faster-paced, so more things happen in each 0ad second, and therefore the lags and freezes will be less obvious and the players will always be entertained instead of waiting  in vain for their units to do something. 

In terms of DDOS, I am experiencing a lot less of that now. In March and April DDOS was a rampant threat to team games. A24 had almost the same frequency of DDOS at that point. However, I have only experienced 1 DDOS attack in the past 2 months, June and July. And that DDOS was targeting the server instead  of clients. The explanation could be that the hackers are bored. In my test games in A25 there was obviously no DDOS. Overall A25 is more stable than A24 because when both players had the right setup we never experienced any errors at all. However in A24 I sometimes get OOS, timerError or the time counter just crashes randomly. The most ridiculous errors in A24 even included 'Can't de-interlace' or 'can't de-serialise'. Fortunately none of these actually ruined a team game.

Also, is there a more moderate way to deal with out of ram? In both A24 or A25 the game just crashes when ram usage is high. 

 

 

[Stan`]

The reason A25 is faster is not because of this. It's because of pathfinder threading and graphics optimizations. The threading absorbs the pathfinder lag spikes in the late game and instead dispatches them on all your cores.

Mp turns are reduced to 200 ms which means the game don't take half a second to process commands but instead a fifth like it's always been the case in SP.

The DDOs issue might have been reduced by the lack of players however we made it much harder to get an IP without joining a match in A24. Maybe the script kiddie was only on the lobby server and did not join individual matches.

3 hours ago, Yekaterina said:

Also, is there a more moderate way to deal with out of ram? In both A24 or A25 the game just crashes when ram usage is high. 

Currently, no. Unless you use linux or mac.

[sarcoma]

Does game use a malloc that returns RAM to OS? Has anybody tried the env flag?

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2215259/will-malloc-implementations-return-free-ed-memory-back-to-the-system

[Stan`]

17 minutes ago, sarcoma said:

Does game use a malloc that returns RAM to OS? Has anybody tried the env flag?

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2215259/will-malloc-implementations-return-free-ed-memory-back-to-the-system

Very much likely no. Having that behavior be consistent on all platform is probably a bit tricky. The problem is not there though. If the game allocates 4GB at start it's free to use it as it pleases. The problem comes if there is a leak somewhere and memory is no longer recognized to be usable or too fragmented.