Developers Iteration III of 2023

@snaggs
@jip said in Developers Iteration III of 2023:

Deprecations
This will remove the old spread attack key binding and the functionality of it. All (UI) mods that relied on that functionality will no longer function. This includes but is not limited to the Disperse move UI mod.
yes

My bad, missed that somehow.

"#5321 Pausing engineers will also pause their reclaim progress"
Can we please not do that? I often want my engies reclaiming regardless of if they are paused or not. For example, you are in emergency, you want to build something asap, you select all engie on map, you pause, then unpause those engies which are building what you want. With this change you would also need to unpause all reclaiming engies. Also there is a feature where placing order to build something on reclaim pile would cause engies to reclaim it at high speed, which is useful on like desert arena, but i think it would cause problem on other maps too, imagine placing fac on some trees, and then pausing engies, they wouldnt even reclaim trees so when you unpause them, they gonna reclaim first which will cause some pathing issue etc. which is annoying.
If you overflow mass reclaiming its just skill issue and you should have planned accordingly, so now you have to waste mass or redo your queue.

@tomma said in Developers Iteration III of 2023:

you select all engie on map, you pause, then unpause those engies which are building what you want.

I'd argue that this is not the best approach

@tomma said in Developers Iteration III of 2023:

but i think it would cause problem on other maps too, imagine placing fac on some trees, and then pausing engies, they wouldnt even reclaim trees so when you unpause them, they gonna reclaim first which will cause some pathing issue etc.

This sounds hypothetical. The feature is live on FAF Develop, give me a replay id where you experience unusual pathing issues

I understand that this is a change in behavior that people may get used to. But pausing an engineer should pause it. It is what players expect that aren't familiar with the quirks of FAForever. There's not just downsides, also upsides. It enables you new interactions, like being able to preserve your attack move commands by pausing individual engineers when you're about to fill your storage. Or being able to preserve the queue by being able to pause the engineer instead of hitting stop

Could the engi 'dont reclaim when paused' behaviour be made an optional setting so people could opt out of the behaviour? I make use of the pause option similar to Tomma where if I'm e.g. power-stalling I'll want to quickly select engineers on-screen and pause them, so may occasionally pause ones that are reclaiming.

Alternatively could there be a new pause hotkey that pauses every unit except engineers with a reclaim order? I'm not sure if this would be feasible though - i.e. you could have it not affect engineers currently reclaiming, but I don't know if it's possible to analyse the command queue to identify cases where an engineer has a move order followed by a reclaim order, or has a reclaim order on a target outside its build range

@maudlin27 said in Developers Iteration III of 2023:

Could the engi 'dont reclaim when paused' behaviour be made an optional setting so people could opt out of the behaviour?

It is an assembly patch. Those are difficult if not impossible to make optional on a per-user basis.

We can make a hotkey to select all engineers that are currently consuming resources, that would qualify for engineers that are building things (at that moment)

So about UI party not working, are there any other mods to set your factories to repeat on construction?

@chenbro101 Is there a reason to not use the built-in option?
Or did you mean something else?

@tomma said in Developers Iteration III of 2023:

If you overflow mass reclaiming its just skill issue and you should have planned accordingly, so now you have to waste mass or redo your queue.

So why is the change breaking your approach bad, while it solving problems for others is a skill issue?

@Nex What problem does it solve? Sound like "great" feature for the sake of consistency which noone wanted.

@tomma said in Developers Iteration III of 2023:

@Nex What problem does it solve? Sound like "great" feature for the sake of consistency which noone wanted.

I want it. People on Github, including the balance team want it. And apparently Strogo wanted it enough to spent time making an assembly patch for it.

It solves the problem of losing your attack move orders because you can't pause your reclaiming engis

@nex LOL did not know about that. Its the main reason I used the mod.

@jip said in Developers Iteration III of 2023:

We can make a hotkey to select all engineers that are currently consuming resources, that would qualify for engineers that are building things (at that moment)

That sounds like it could be helpful. Personally I suspect I'd end up being lazy and just use the 'select engineers on screen' hotkey since in some cases I'd want that, in others I'd want to just select engineers consuming resources, and I'm not sure if I'd get around to ingraining two separate hotkeys in my muscle memory, so I'll leave it for others to say if they think they'd use it.

@maudlin27 said in Developers Iteration III of 2023:

@jip said in Developers Iteration III of 2023:

We can make a hotkey to select all engineers that are currently consuming resources, that would qualify for engineers that are building things (at that moment)

That sounds like it could be helpful. Personally I suspect I'd end up being lazy and just use the 'select engineers on screen' hotkey since in some cases I'd want that, in others I'd want to just select engineers consuming resources, and I'm not sure if I'd get around to ingraining two separate hotkeys in my muscle memory, so I'll leave it for others to say if they think they'd use it.

See also: https://github.com/FAForever/fa/pull/5330

With the new 'spread building' feature coming, having paused engies able to reclaim would allow something very close to area reclaim.
grab some engies, drag a couple of lines of factories over the reclaim location and then split the builds and then pause - they will reclaim everything under the templates but not build anything
this trick was used sometimes to get reclaim patches quicker but was limited to 1 fac really

Added a few small features and bug fixes

Added a section about Mobile factories

Added a section about advanced map shaders.

A shoutout to @IndexLibrorum who recently took the initiative to update the mapping section of the Wiki. It has been improved significantly and there's a whole section with Gaea related tutorials to help you get started with the tools required to work with these new shaders.