FA Companion / Training Tool

[Skrat]

@sheppy This is a very cool job! Thank you! This is a really useful tool for newbies. The statistics and maps section is great!

Tell me please, do I understand correctly that this mod will give you tips online during the game? If this is the case, then I would suggest making this mod unrated.

[Sheppy]

@Skrat said:

Tell me please, do I understand correctly that this mod will give you tips online during the game? If this is the case, then I would suggest making this mod unrated.

Yes. I have talked to the FAF Mods about this before and I am still massivly irritated by the fact that higher level players concurrently tell me that it needs to be unrated and how useless it is for high level play.

This is a UI Mod which extracts information that are synced to UI and are intended to be used, it is rated and it being rated is fundamental to its purpose, because it will allow people who are not 400% invested in learning and playing training games to improve. It does nothing a backseating trainer in the Dojo Discord doesn't do every single day, probably more effectively. It just does it in a way that is more scalable.

If it were a cheat tool or intended as such I would not have shared with the community in the first place. My vision is that this will elevate players more quickly and easily up to the 1500 1v1 range, after which I belive the live alerts become less useful and the post-game analysis becomes more interessting.

I would suggest you try it yourself before directly calling for it to be unrated, which would be nothing short of a catastrophe for the project.

I'm sorry thank you for you praise and belive that this can be a powerfull tool. It's just this duality of people shitting on me, saying it's useless, and others saying needs to be banned/unrated has become a huge trigger for me, especially if people haven't tried it.

Should individual alerts ever become too powerful. They will be changed.

[Deribus]

@Sheppy said:
I pushed the reference functionality to master now:

Oh I misunderstood what these show. I thought it'd be a comparison between two people in the same match. Would that require both players to upload separately? It can't pull data on multiple players from a single replay?

[Skrat]

@Sheppy I understand that your goal is to make our community a better and I am grateful to you for that! And I'm not blaming you for creating a cheat mod.

I don't think real-time alerts are more useful for learning than replay analysis. But they can give a specific advantage.

The situation with this mod reminds me a big discussion about Eco Manger and the automatic shutdown mass fabricators. Part of the community thought it was auto-clicker, while the other part saw nothing wrong with it. Finally, this feature was added to the game for everyone.

Too fine a line between notifying "Your team relies on your energy" or "View Reclaim" and notifying about your scout has noticed a nuke/exp or notifying that a TMl has been spotted on an enemy ACU (visually). And such notifications should not be in the game.

I don't see anything criminal in those notifications that are in your mod now.

If the notification types are agreed with the moderator team, then I see no reason to make this mod unrated.

[Sheppy]

@Deribus you can pull the data from the replay or both need to submitt it. But currently pull from replay is not really "frictionless". You need to use the --no-ignore-replay command line option and switch army once at the start of the game. Also I think the ref game currently excludes Submissions with the same gameid but thats an oversight on my part.

[Sheppy]

I don't think real-time alerts are more useful for learning than replay analysis. But they can give a specific advantage.

All sub 1k/500 players who tried it disagree with you on this, and I do too, learning in real time is so much easier for low level players that learning from a replay. This is the fundamental thesis of this project. And yes this will also give an Advantage to lower rated players - which is the whole point.

The situation with this mod reminds me a big discussion about Eco Manger and the automatic shutdown mass fabricators. Part of the community thought it was auto-clicker, while the other part saw nothing wrong with it. Finally, this feature was added to the game for everyone.

This mod doesnt click anything for you. It is also open to everyone. Again I dont see a single game from you in the DB. How about you try it before spreading opinions that are not based on experience

Too fine a line between notifying "Your team relies on your energy" or "View Reclaim" and notifying about your scout has noticed a nuke/exp or notifying that a TMl has been spotted on an enemy ACU (visually). And such notifications should not be in the game.

This Information is not synced to the UI layer in the same way the eco or your own unit data is, therefore it is not used. There literally mods which already light up nukes etc with different symbols, which makes this a very strange example to bring up. But again I think your whole concers would be moot if you actually tried it instead of talking about it.

This will not substantially help a 1.5k player. I know this because it doesnt substantially help me (except for the automatic BO popup). Now maybe we get to a point where we can elevate even more people to be better. You youself have a post on this forum about how dead the 2k scene is. Not saying this project will change that (yet), but there are reason why people are stuck and 300, 500, 1000 or 1500 rating, we should stop arguing about purely theoretical concerns and think about how we can elevate these players, find what is holding people back and give them the ressources to improve.

[Deribus]

@Sheppy I think it would be incredibly helpful to have that feature. As someone who plays a lot of 1v1, you win or lose 1v1 games because of something different you did from your opponent. Being able to compare 1v1 data would be immensely helpful for "well my opponent won because he did X instead of what I did"

[Sheppy]

@Deribus yes it will be implemented in the next Update alongside the reclaim/income split and some more specific categories of units:

+    return { 
+        "combat_units":  0,
+        "combat_unit_in_base": # idle combat units 30 of start location
+        "labs": # UnitName Mech Marine, Hunter, Flare or Selen
+        "tanks": # TECH1 & TANK
+        "arties": # TECH1 & INDIRECTFIRE
+        "buildpower": # via BuildRate
+        "buildpower_t1_engies": # via BuildRate
+        "t1": # TECH1 & mobileCombat
+        "t2": # TECH2
+        "t3": # TECH3
+        "t4": # EXPERIMENTAL
+        "t1_navy": # TECH1 & NAVAL
+        "t1_land": # TECH1 & LAND
+        "t1_air": # TECH1 & AIR
+        "radars_and_sonars": # RADAR & not SCOUT
+        "t2_navy":  # TECH2 & NAVAL
+        "t2_land":# TECH2 & LAND
+        "t2_air":# TECH2 & AIR
+        "t3_navy": # TECH3 & NAVAL
+        "t3_land":# TECH3 & LAND
+        "t3_air":# TECH3 & AIR
+        "inties": # AIR & TECH1 & ANTIAIR
+        "swifties": # unit name Swift Wind
+        "asf": # category ASF
+        "frigs": # FRIGATE
+        "subs": # catetory T1SUBMARINE or T3SUBMARINE
+        "nuke": # NUKE
+        "tmd": # Description": "Tactical Missile Defense"
+    }

I also wanted to review your games and think about if there are any data driven things aren't covered yet/open up the rule engine to custom rules.

[Sheppy]

I finished implementing a BO Submission Editor:

You can manage your own BOs:

For now I created a whitelist of players which will be able to upload BOs because I don't want spam. You will be able to select a BO on the fly:

In the future I plan a favourite BO/creator system to better order them automatically.

You can check your whitelist status in your profile:

If you want to contribute feel free to ping me.

[Sheppy]

You can now also create custom rules/Alerts for yourself. Based on the available parameters:

These rules will not be displayed publicly for now, but I will review them and either include them in the default set or possibly should something become too powerful, limit the usage of certain variables. Though I don't see any danger here yet.

[Hysteresis]

Target demographic here. Super interesting and ambitious mod. Thanks for all your effort!

Is the plan for this page (see image) that you can get a breakdown of any game played by any player using this mod? Very useful if so to see what other, better players are doing (hoping that they choose to use the mod). A little exposing if it’s just Sheppy and I on here for now xD

I’m sure the map specific build information will be useful for me as an noob and returning player. Some of the pings, like the effective unit cap, are great to have come across if they aren’t implemented yet as it’s not a concept I had engaged with seriously enough (i.e. why higher techs have higher combat efficiency than their DPS/mass and health/mass would suggest).

Excited to have a play and think on if there are any other alerts I would like to see. I suspect not too many (for now) given I wouldn't want to become lazy and wait on the alerts panel to tell me information about the gamestate before I've learned how to look for myself. We'll see.

[Sheppy]

Is the plan for this page (see image) that you can get a breakdown of any game played by any player using this mod?

Yes. It is also possible to "record" replays yourself. But it's a bit fiddly atm, I need to automate it and run it on my PC overnight. After that you will be able to compare to averages of certain ratings instead of just individual players/games.

I hope we get some Setons BOs then I might finally start out on this map aswell.