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RE: New account in FAF
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RE: Why not use STEAM NETWORK to improve connection?
So now every user also needs to create an epic account?
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RE: Why not use STEAM NETWORK to improve connection?
Everybody is free to build a working proof of concept and then we can discuss. Until then I will spend my time otherwise.
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RE: Why not use STEAM NETWORK to improve connection?
- Just because Steam matchmaking works in general, it doesn't mean we are capable of providing a bug-free implementation of it. It also does not guarantee it to be faster than any other implementation. I don't know how they did it with Steam, but I guess they had a team of experts working on it that do this kind of things everyday for many games that were put on Steam.
- Using Steam networking is a massive vendor lockin. As soon as someone decides to remove us from Steam, we are dead.
- Not everybody wants to use Steam for good reasons. Lots of our users have bought it via gog.com. Enforcing the steam/gog linking we already lost a bigger player portion back then. We are dedicated to open source for a reason, and the biggest reason is that anybody can move forward should this project ever been shut down for legal reasons. A simple DMCA takedown request by someone who claims to have copyright violated (which is basically impossible to prove wrong by us as there is no public archive of ownership for such things).
- The licensing issue is real and has a large back history and it didn't work out than, there is very little chance anything has changed.
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RE: Change the handling of Reports - When is a report valid?
@HOSCHMOSCH said in Change the handling of Reports - When is a report valid?:
BTW: die biggest Problem FAF had since years now is the DDOS Attack wich one resulted out of senceless banning
In both cases people were repeatedly warned and had short time bans long before it escalate to infinite bans.
Imagine FAF were a restaurant and customers repeatedly get drunk and start harassing other peoples you must have the ability to throw them out forever. But in the modern world it is possible for the affected customers to burn down the restaurant as a "countermeasure" without fearing consequences. If we resign here and give in we can completely give up all rules and let it become wild west again.
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RE: Provide affinity command line info to game executable
The default values is %s which will be replaced with the whole ForgedAlliance.exe path and arg.
So if you want to wrap it into another app you need to go something like
start /affinity F %s -
RE: Provide affinity command line info to game executable
The settings you described should make it possible. What did you enter there and what was there error message you got?
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RE: Discussing the "rename rule"
Don't confuse lack of opposing opinions as absolute stance for your arguments. The majority of people don't participate in these kind of discussions. I am
completely against changing names because I see no value for the community as a whole. I personally find it is annoying to but be able to recognize people. But I get that some people want it every now and then... but that might be sufficient like one a year in my opinion. -
Map Editor 1.0 Release
These are exiting times! Now that some long-standing missing pieces of the editor are implemented, we are finally able to release version 1.0 of the editor. The most significant additions are
- Fully configurable water and lighting settings.
- Support for the new terrain shaders that are now available in the game.
You can read more about how the new shaders work, along with some pictures, here: https://wiki.faforever.com/Development/Shaders/terrain-shaders
New Features
- Added support for new shaders recently added to the game (#47, #51, #60, #61, #65, #66, #68, #71)
- Removed the TTerrainXp shader toggle in the Texture tab
- Added a text box in the Map tab to input the shader name instead
- Implemented the new shaders introduced in the latest game patch
- Added buttons in
Textures > Toolsto generate the required textures for the new shaders. Under the hood this integrates the Neroxis Tool Suite, a CLI program written in Java. A Java environment is required, but if you have the FAF client installed, you can simply use that one. - Added an option to disable the map info texture in the upper slot (via the
vbutton) - The specular color UI in the light settings now changes based on the selected shader
- Many more UI improvements in the texture layer tab to better support different shaders
- Improved lighting settings (#52, #56, #71)
- Changed sun angle terminology from RA and DA to Azimuth and Elevation Angle
- Added environment texture path (This texture is only visible on reflections of units, not on the map)
- Various other minor UI improvements
- Improved water settings (#52, #56, #71)
- Removed water parameters that had no in-game effect
- Added toggle to copy sun color and angle from light settings to get fitting sun reflections on the water
- Added toggle for advanced water absorption (this will recalculate the light settings in the background)
Advanced absorption behaves more like real-world light absorption, allowing deep water to visibly obscure units and terrain. - Added texture paths for water ramp and skycube
- Added UI controls for ocean waves
- Fixed water coloration bleeding onto shores
- Various other minor UI improvements
- Improved default values when creating a new map (#59)
- Improved Resource Browser UI (#62)
- Added alpha channel preview
- Added mipmap previews at levels 2, 4, and 6
- Display texture resolution
These changes only affect the layer textures. The resource browser is still the same for decals and props.
- You can now import stratum masks in PNG format (#63)
- Made FAF directory configurable (#45)
Previously, the editor assumed the FAF data directory was at a fixed location. It now supports custom paths, as configured in the FAF client.
Bugfixes
- Fixed the slope overlay (#54)
- Improved behaviour of input fields (#55)
Basically all input fields were configured in a way that you had to press enter to assign the value. Confusingly, they did not actually assign the value when clicking away, but didn't discard the edits you made in the field either. So it was very hard to understand what was going on. Now all fields assign the value on pressing enter or when clicking elsewhere. - Textures in the resource browser and the layer tab are not upside down anymore (#56, #62)
- Fixed multiline map description text breaking the scenario file (#67)
- Fixed issues with the linear brush option and rename it to
Scale target to 0.5 to 1 range(#67) - Fixed mipmap rendering (#71)
When using textures of different resolutions in the Layers tab, they have to be all scaled to the same size internally because they are stored in an array texture. This scaling would lead to a recalculation of mipmaps, so the blurred mipmaps would not be visible anymore, leading to a different look than in the game. Mipmaps are now preserved properly.
Other
- Slider values are no longer clamped. You can now input any value in the text box above a slider. (#47)
- Default maximum of texture scale sliders is now 20 to make the sliders feasible to use (#51)
- Order textures alphabetically before creating the texture buttons for the resource browser (contributed by sting) (#49)
- Removed normal map check (#57)
The "Can't assign albedo as normal map" check when assigning texture channelssometimes produced false positives and blocked adding special textures for advanced shaders. - Remove the two buttons that you could use to generate a random heightmap. (#60)
The used Neroxis version was way outdated and we don't allow uploading maps based on the map generator to the FAF map vault anyway. - Improved version check behavior (#70)
- Terrain now retains more details when zoomed out, making it more consistent with the in-game view (#71)
- The editor should now pause rendering when it is in the background, reducing resource usage (#71)
You can download the editor here: https://github.com/FAForever/FAForeverMapEditor/releases/tag/v1.0
As there have been extensive changes, it is likely that some new bugs have surfaced. Please report them on the FAF forum or open an issue here in github.With gratitude to all those who took the time to report issues with the release candidates, and a special thank you to kent-sole who showed me around in the Unity editor and answered my questions. Without him all this work would not have been possible.
Happy mapmaking!
BlackYps
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RE: Connection instabillity
If we hadn't addressed issues fast you wouldn't be able to post your issues in this forum. Also you are throwing a lot of things together that need to be separated.
When the first DDoS wave in November 2023 hit us we had to restructure lots of things in a very short time to make FAF work at all. We are talking about changing that would haven taken months in regular companies that we did within 2 weeks. Still then we had plenty of issues going especially with connectivity due to our Coturn servers being killed by DDoS. For that we found a partial solution too with the Global coturn.
When the more sophisticated 2nd DDoS wave hit us this year we had to restructure even more things. Hence we rushed a few things and even pushed out a broken client update (2025.5.1) that was only available for a few hours. Then it was replaced with a fixed version 2025.5.2. If this isn't fast then I don't know what you expect. Then over time we fixed more and more things like the Newshub again.
This is client and infrastructure. Then there is game patches. A different team with different problems (less of a manpower problem, more of a difficult-to-test problem). There things went very chaotic on the last patch day (but game patch day always has been a meme in FAF for the last decade).
The last part is connectivity with in particular ICE adapter. Of course we know the problems. And I am working on this topic for almost 3 years now (see e.g. my first blog post on the topic here). But things don't always work out the way you want to and even after initial success (blog), I was steering myself into a dead end and started with a new approach. This new approach by the way is currently in testing. And the first larger test was a bummer and failed on all Windows machines. So we see, rushing here doesn't solve problems either.
This topic could have been much much further if we wouldn't have been busy fending of DDoS attacks for months (basically getting nothing else done).
Also telling me to rush things will have more of the opposite effect. I have a full time job, I have a family. I don't want to spend all of my free time on FAF anymore. We have asked for help multiple times. People showed up, consumed a lot of my time and then disappeared again without contributing anything. I am no longer pursuing this approach.
Apart from the game team nothing moves fast in FAF anymore. The glorious time where connectivity was working and multiple devs where putting in 20-40 hours per week are long gone...
