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Jip

@Deribus said in SUGGESTION: AEON T2 Shield Generator Fix:

Personally I don't like the 4 "petal" T2 shield generator model. Would it be possible to have an additional set of petals come out of the first?

Other structures (looking at you, factories) hide 'additional' mesh information for the upgrade underground. You can't do that here for things that are up in the sky.

The current shield generator:

The new shield generator, next to its upgraded counterpart.

I feel like it having two 'petals' at the top is important for the silhouette (looking at hq rework discussions, I learned). But based on how animations work, you can't scale them into existence or something like that. All you have is rotation and translation.

Top petals

Direction 1

About the top petals. Move the top petals on top of each other. Then hide the bones Arm_03 and Arm_01 recursively. That way it looks like the original model:

Then the first thing you do when you start upgrading is unhide the petals and move them to the right position. This way the time it 'overlaps' is minimal. And the original base model looks the same.

Now, this type of upgrade animation where we 'duplicate' the mesh is unusual. I don't think any other structure does this. It may feel out of place because of it.

Direction 2

This is based on how the animation of the Seraphim shields work. We could create a 'puddle' at the core of the base of the shield to create the new shield. Somehow, seraphim units manage to apply the build shader to only the upgraded parts. I'm not sure how that happens, but if we can reproduce that then we can re-use the build shader for the Aeon unit to scale the new 'top part' from small to large. Just like we do with regular structures.

This direction requires additional investigation.

Bottom petals

Move the bottom petals underground. During the animation you can make them move up from the ground. And as they do that, they start pushing the structure 'up' as they get into position. Hiding mesh below the ground is applied by a lot of animations of structures. The benefit is that the base of the model is then essentially unchanged to the original model, until you start upgrading of course.

With all of that said, thank you for your time on this. You took the extra step. Not only did you make the animation, you also took the time and effort to make it compatible with AIs.

Brutus5000

nope. I joined faf development 2015, gw was long gone by then. probably 2013-2014 last season

Jip

@Caliber said in Add the Tombstones from the 2025 April Fool's Update as a Permanent Feature:

Its just a UI feature so people can choose if they want them or not in an in game setting

This is not a UI feature.

Jip

@CM_Nicholas said in Another Novax conversation:

Maybe something could be done about the damage, but if your nerfing damage you have to give it something else, someone mentioned more aoe, but then would that give it shield spill at that point which would arguably be even better than it is now, or then you have to think "oh shit, they can hit two pgens at the same time" which will kill your grid faster, makes targeting engies much more worth, etc, etc...

Shield spill is applied to all damage against a shield, of any kind. The only exception that I can think of is the tech 3 mobile shield buster of Aeon - I'm not sure if that spills.

@CM_Nicholas said in Another Novax conversation:

I think novaxes are relatively fine as they are, Maybe a slight balance change, but you have to remember a novax is 36k mass iirc, 2 of them costing about the same price of a t3 arty +/- 2k mass, but the damage output is nowhere near t3 arty, yeh arty doesn't have the precision of a novax, but a novax doesn't have the damage of an arty, it takes 2-3 artys of novaxes to be able to penetrate anything heavily shielded, and at that point you could have a Game Ender up.

In my point of view, the current 'goal' of a novax is not to bust a shield. It's either to grab all the unprotected but high value targets. Or to assist a Mavor to destroy the shields when they are depleted.

It also highly depends on what map you play. A Novax has little to no value on a map such as Dual Gap. It's much stronger on a map like Seton's Clutch where resources are more scattered.

Sheikah

You can also just edit the prefs file directly

Jip

@Dorset There's a lot possible in this game. Of course, not everything. But if as long as you don't draw outside the lines then all of this wouldn't even be much work.

Jip

@Dorset said in Another Novax conversation:

I agree with you something dramatic needs to be changed not just cost changes.

I've discussed this idea last year over voice, and I'll post it here. It has three parts. The goal is to actually utilize the satellite layer. This layer exists in the game, but there's not much going on there. Ideally these satellites become part of armies, like any other mobile unit. To support the Fatboy - from above!

Not a ground station, but a factory

At the moment you need an additional ground station for each satellite. This is a little bit cumbersome. Both from a programmers perspective (the satellite is not shared when your defeated - it is rebuilt at the station). As I think it thematically lacks a bit.

Proposal: turn it into a factory. Allow it to pump satellites, like a regular factory.

Multiple type of satellites

Instead of just having one satellite, there will be three:

1. A scout satellite. Relatively cheap and provides various types of intel. Enables the UEF to have Omni intel on-site to counter stealth and cloak, for example.
1. A missile-based satellite. This would be the 'default' satellite, at the same costs of the current satellite. It fires a salvo of missiles. And those missiles can of course be intercepted by TMD. The missiles do not track, just like regular missiles. They will have some AOE though. And of course, you don't want to use this against Cybran missile deflectors . By being missile-based, the satellite is easier to counter:
- It makes the satellite worse against mobile armies. Just like mobile missile launchers.
- It makes the satellite unusable against naval armies, as they are usually packed with mobile TMD.
- You don't need to built shields everywhere, likely just 2 TMDs at each location.
1. A laser-based satellite. This would be similar to the current satellite, except that it's designed to bust shields. The beam is continuous. For its costs, it will deal relatively low damage to non-shielded units (think 1/4th). And it will deal about half the amount of damage against shields as the current Novax does. But then of course continuous.

All satellites will have an energy upkeep. The rational of @Nomander that upkeep is unusual for mobile units is correct. But given that these are the only units on the satellite layer, they can be their own niche. They are essentially flying buildings anyway. All weapons of the satellites also have upkeep to fire, just like for example stationary artillery and the Ravager do.

When a player runs out of power the satellites simply stop firing because of the weapon upkeep. When a player loses the last Novax center all satellites become uncontrollable and unelectable. They start losing health (and visually: orbit). When their health drops to 0, they crash to the ground.

Allow SMDs to intercept satellites (manually)

This idea is not new. It's used in LOUD. I like it thematically. It provides the player with an option to immediately counter a satellite if the player thinks it's necessary. For example, countering the laser-based satellite would be a no brainer if you are also being shelled by artillery.

Now, I don't talk about costs here because that's all too soon to discuss. It's the idea - the theme and the experience of it, is what this proposal is about. And of course the positioning of the units in the roster, what are their purpose and how do they remain balanced mechanically?

Brutus5000

After nearly a decade of relentless pursuit—researching, begging, bribing, schmoozing, annoying, plotting, and exchanging more favors than we care to admit—we’ve finally done it. The impossible has become reality: We have the source code for Supreme Commander: Forged Alliance.

Not only that, but we’ve already cleaned it up and made it compatible with modern systems, running smoothly on Windows 10+ and (of course) Linux.

Starting today, the code is publicly available on GitHub:
https://github.com/FAForever/SCFA_source

Of course, as expected, this comes with a few caveats. We do not have copyright permissions for the game assets, nor do we have official authorization to use the brand. However, this breakthrough still unlocks unprecedented opportunities: we can now fix engine-level bugs, expand the game’s capabilities beyond anything we’ve ever imagined, and push FAF into a new era.

This is more than we ever hoped for. The future of FAF has never looked brighter.

Brutus5000

A long time ago in a galaxy of endless connectivity struggles

It is a dark time for the
FAForever project. Although the attacks
on the main server have been circumvented,
DDoS troops have driven the
DevOps forces from their hidden
mains server and pursued them across
the coturn galaxy.

Evading the dreaded bot network,
a group of developers led by Brutus5000
have established a new secret
project aiming to the remote ice world
of Cloudflare.

Entering the stage: The FAF pioneer.

The FAF pioneer is a completely new approach on the ice adapter.
We ditched our existing java implementation based on the ice4j library as we found several bugs we were unable to resolve. Instead we jumped on the Golang train and use the pion WebRTC library which seems in a much better state.

Generally speaking, WebRTC is a set of protocols most audio and video conferencing work with. The existing ICE protocol we were using is also used by WebRTC, but WebRTC goes beyond that and tries to solve other problems. Relevent for us in particular are reconnect features, packet completeness guarantees and stable packet order.

Our project reached a huge milestone 2 days ago with a first MVP release that will be the basis for future testing. Unfortunately testing is only possible with special FAF clients, so it is not out in the open for testing. Since it is incompatible with the existing ice adapter, there will be a need for the big bang migration.

The biggest goal is eventually to be able to use Cloudflare as a low-latency and low-cust TURN server battery. Unfortunately the current ice adapter bugs prevent us from using Cloudflare entirely.

If you are interested, check out the code at https://github.com/FAForever/faf-pioneer

Jip

From a different perspective: what if interceptors are easier to produce, perhaps faster (yes, strategic bomber I am on to you) and higher fuel capacity to allow them to be more capable against tech 2 units?

The opponent can of course do the same and make additional interceptors too.

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