Weekly Discussion #29 - What would you like to see in the game next?

Unsurprisingly mine are PvE related! However they're all UI/client related rather than changing the actual game.

• AI in matchmaker (https://forum.faforever.com/topic/5549/the-what-ais-in-ladder-season-2 and the separate discord discussion)
• UI rework for both the lobby and the client, to improve the experience for PvE players. On the lobby side, an improved AI selection interface where you just select you want an AI opponent and then it results in a separate drop-down menu to pick the AI; a drop-down menu to set its AiX modifier individually (if it's possible for it to be different for individual AI); and a button to get more AI that takes you to the mod vault and shows you a filtered list of the AI mods to pick from (with a nice to have being a rating displaying for each AI so players have a better sense of its strength); On the client side, introducing something like this (and earlier post in the same thread) to improve the campaign selection:
  https://forum.faforever.com/topic/5642/coop-campaigns-order/13

Limiting the number of SACUs: https://forum.faforever.com/topic/4715/sacu-lives-matter.

Cosmetic faction texture skins

Remove ui lag thanks boss

@thomashiatt said in Weekly Discussion #29 - What would you like to see in the game next?:

Pretty much everything I could think of fell into the client, server, or balance domains, but after extensive thought I did think of a single thing.

There is a blueprint variable:

AttackGroundTries = 'n', <This determines the number of shots at a ground target before moving on to the next target.>

That would be cool if it was set to 1 for bombers, or able to be toggled in some way, so that you can queue up multiple ground attacks ahead of time. The problem is that when you use this variable it causes bombers to miss by quite a bit, like how all bombers used to miss their first pass when FA was launched. It would be nice if this was fixed and implemented in some way.

I've looked into this. It appears the bomber acts as if it a regular move order and therefore de-accelerates too soon, causing the bomb it is dropping to hit somewhere in the vicinity, usually in front of the target

I would like to see a Beetle being built and used...
Also would like to see a Beetle explode on a GC's claw, now when it falls to the ground.

Idk what to tell you boss but i see more beetles build in high lvl teamgames than rhino's.

The main reason why you see very little of them in general is because 1. The current meta is focussed on t3 land rush while beetles are only really good against t1/t2 and 2. Because the map were you play 50% of your games on is specifically bad for beetles because there's a big chokepoint where 1 radar can see everything.

Beetles exploding in gc's claw sounds cool though

How about overlays for units and structures as implemented in e.g. ecomanager and idle-engineers?

Quite a few of the better players use ecomanager purely for the overlays and having a nicer looking version of idle engineers accessible to everyone from the settings menu would certainly be amazing

I dont know if this is possible but having groups of engineers of different tech and factions that are selected at once be able to build anything that one of the selected engineers can (eg if you select 2 uef t2 engineers and 2 t3 aeon engineers, you could get them to build a t3 pgen (uef would assist the aeon engis) or a triad (aeon would assist the uef engis). Ideally via the main building selection screen and hotkeys but I expect only hotkeys might be feasible.
Similarly seecting a mix of t1-t3 engis would allow building t3 buildings with the lower tech engis assisting the higher tech engis

@maudlin27 what you're asking is not possible. But we did implement a hotkey that allows you to quickly split your selection. See also:

• https://github.com/FAForever/fa/pull/4587

And then specifically option (7). You'll need two key bindings:

Then you hit the 1st one to create the splits, and hit the 2nd one to switch your selection between the splits. That way you can quickly do what you're asking:

• first split only contains the highest tech (tech 3 in your example)
• issue build order for tech 3 power generator
• second / third split contains tech 2 or tech 1 engineers
• issue assist order to one of the tech 3 engineers

Galactic War

Key actions overhaul

@jip said in Weekly Discussion #29 - What would you like to see in the game next?:

I've looked into this. It appears the bomber acts as if it a regular move order and therefore de-accelerates too soon, causing the bomb it is dropping to hit somewhere in the vicinity, usually in front of the target

Does that mean it can be fixed or not? Strange that changing the number of times it does a ground attack changes the interpretation of the order. I guess it is probably a new variable that was added with FA and was never properly implemented or something.

Has anyone ever tried using DLL injection to get more control over engine side things? Maybe you could intercept calls to the audio API and fix them or pass them along to a more modern API to fix the sound bug. I don't know what else could be accomplished with it, I'm just vaguely aware of the technique.

First-person ACU perspective

Subs build underwater mass, hydro, sonar, and reclaim.

I think the long term health of faf as a community would be greatly helped by a system of dealing with laggers. I can only imagine the frustration of new players if their early games all have laggers in them. I'd be surprised if they didn't assume that FAF was not worth playing as a result.
We need a system to enable us, as a community, to flag players that cause issues. Flagged players can then be educated in how to improve their setup or maybe put in a pool of similar players.
It's insane to me that in a 12 player game for example if there is even one lagger then 11 other people have to have their fun spoiled. You just don't get that in real life, you'd move away from such selfish people, whereas in FAF I cannot.

At the very least, as an absolute starting point, if every player (including myself obviously) could see how many times they have been set as FOE that would be eye-opening...!

@cheeseberry said in Weekly Discussion #29 - What would you like to see in the game next?:

How about overlays for units and structures as implemented in e.g. ecomanager and idle-engineers?

Quite a few of the better players use ecomanager purely for the overlays and having a nicer looking version of idle engineers accessible to everyone from the settings menu would certainly be amazing

@Jip asked me to elaborate a bit on what those overlays do, so here we go:

Ecomanager adds a mex-overlay which shows you if a mex is currently being idle or upgrading depending on the color of the overlay:

Idle Engineers adds a black overlay over idle engies

and over idle factories

All three of them are really useful for figuring out a glance what your stuff is doing and where new orders need to be given.

Ecomanager also adds a variety of other overlays, most notably overlays for nukes and smds that tell you how many missiles are loaded and how long it will take to build the next one:

Both mods actually have more overlay features, e.g. information about the state of something depending on its color, and ecomanager is even able to tell you how many missiles are loaded in your allies smd, somehow. (If both players use ecomanager, anyway.)

As should be obvious the above overlays are not the prettiest, but they are imo very useful and I do think there is quite a bit of potential here.

@serpentor Even Starcraft 1 shows to each player how laggy every other player is to them.

net-lag reduction, idk how. almost never see anyone able to reconnect to the game. Tho sometimes they do reconnect but they already got ejected by like 1 player and then you get 2 players that can never reconnect while the rest are connected and game gets stuck.
Galactic war
Line move