Developers Iteration III of 2023

Ctrl-K

I like the changes @Jip done to this game. I really appreciate his efforts. But this one is raw and must be reiterated imho. It is not user friendly.

Paralon

Very important and interesting changes, thank you for the work done. But I would like to clarify what is the need to update the work of mobile factories in parts, while temporarily removing them from the game for czar and mega. If you don't want to break user experience then why not just wait till everything is ready. I guess this is absolutely wrong approach, you can’t do changes like this because of development status, this is completely players experience breaking. You need to prove your point and make some voting among the players

FtXCommando

@jip said in Developers Iteration III of 2023:

I honestly didn't know that people used the Megalith to reclaim wrecks. I've never seen it happen, but it surely works. To jump into your suggestion, giving the Megalith a reclaim ability is possible and we can add the effects or an animation to make it look more 'believable'. I'm fine either way.

It specifically got nerfed in BP because it used to reclaim a GC in like 5 seconds. Reclaim fields were nonexistent with megas. This was like a 2017 change, though.

veteranashe

Voting among the players would be the worst option

snoog

Sometimes I think Jip should just stop posting any news at all bc of all the shitposting he gets in return.

People have been asking for years for the mobile factories to be fixed, he's doing it. And two of the them aren't ready yet. What the fuck is the problem with you guys? So much entitlement.

Paralon

@veteranashe so it might be a certain group of players

Paralon

@snaggs did u ever play equilibrium? There was just the same solution but no one wanted to implement it in the game. The problem is that you can't release a product that isn't fully ready imho

Jip

@paralon said in Developers Iteration III of 2023:

Very important and interesting changes, thank you for the work done. But I would like to clarify what is the need to update the work of mobile factories in parts, while temporarily removing them from the game for czar and mega. If you don't want to break user experience then why not just wait till everything is ready. I guess this is absolutely wrong approach, you can’t do changes like this because of development status, this is completely players experience breaking. You need to prove your point and make some voting among the players

Have you tried the new implementation? I'd love to see the replay id where you did.

Yesterday I did five sessions with five different people. You can find them on the vault:

Of course, people need to get used to the fact that the factory module is now a separate unit. But we can't get around that, it is just how the engine works. Once they realized that it was fine, and it worked the way they expected it to work. To sum it up:

You can (manually) select the factory module by clicking behind the out, outside of the unit. See also the screenshot
You can do what you can do with a normal factory: queue units, issue rally points, pause it, etc
Opponents or observers can not select or target the factory module, to them there is just a Fatboy / Tempest / etc
You can use any existing hotkey that interacts with factories to select / manage the factory modules
Pausing the main unit will also pause the factory module
The progress bar of the main unit is updated as units are built

As I mentioned here in response to @magge the solution is of course not perfect yet. I'd love for it to be more complete, but it is not at this time. But calling it 'raw' is far from the truth.

Paralon

@jip yep this is still very impressive improvement of the game. Perhaps not quite accurately expressed, I meant maybe we can wait with release new features before mega and czar will be ready? My point is this is wrong to remove some game mechanics for a while

Jip

@Paralon The balance team happened to have a meeting and I asked their opinion. We've re-instated the Megalith the way it was, it can build but not move at the same time, like the current behavior in the release branch. Also adds in the standard Cybran drone fx for building. See also:

https://github.com/FAForever/fa/pull/5367

With regards to the CZAR, the balance team agreed to wait with re-introducing the mobile factory aspect until the implementation is finished. It can still be used as a carrier.

I hope this settles it for you too @Ninrai .

And I agree with what @BlackYps wrote. Specifically the forums are often toxic towards contributors that do their best to improve the experience as they see fit. I too am here to improve the FAForever experience. I do that for more hours each week then I'd like to admit to. I've been doing that for more than two years now. I'm open to suggestions and discussions. But please, keep it civil and constructive. I'll respond in kind. Assumptions are the death of any discussion.

Paralon

@jip thank you for response, never wanted to devalue your work at all. I would suggest edit those lines, because its kinda confusing:
The following units lose their mobile factory capabilities:
Megalith (Cybran Megabot)

Jip

Adjusted it , I forgot about it

veteranashe

I believe, at least with the Fatboy, once built you will set a repeat queue of units and leave that part alone, you will just have to move around the rally point.

Xanoxis

@jip When I look at those pictures of new shaders, they look gorgeous, but like with all games that use repeating textures, I wonder if it's possible to improve the look of them on the zoom out? Are there any plans for making textures less visibly repeating, at least mostly for the ground?

Something like those methods - https://blog.unity.com/technology/procedural-stochastic-texturing-in-unity

Implementing some sort of 'noise' for those textures would not be costly, but improve the look of game a lot in the long run.

Jip

Yes, there is an experimental shader written by @BlackYps that explores the possibilities to 'hide' the repetition. It is not production ready, but we hope to start a test trial later this year. I have no screenshots at the moment to show the results so far.

Other possibilities (outside of the shader) is to toy with mip maps and reduce the 'repeating' factors as you load in smaller and smaller mip maps. This is what Supreme Commander does with a lot of the stratum textures that ship with the game.

@xanoxis said in Developers Iteration III of 2023:

Implementing some sort of 'noise' for those textures would not be costly, but improve the look of game a lot in the long run.

We're limited by the old shader model (2.0) that the game uses, including an instruction (256) and texture read (16, I think) limit. That is why working on the shaders can be a struggle, all the modern and limitless shaders are out of our reach.

You sound like you have experience with shaders. Would you like to contribute? We could always use more help

Sycube

@jip said in Developers Iteration III of 2023:

The following units lose their mobile factory capabilities:

CZAR (Aeon Experimental Carrier)

why to impoverished strategic options?

CocaineDiesel

@sycube

It's a temporary measure until it can be implemented.

Jip

Updated the general features / bug fixes post to the latest status quo.

The Wiki pages that help explain some of the more complicated hotkeys are finished. You can find them here:

The game links to these pages in the key bindings menu. Hopefully this can help players understand what these hotkeys can mean to their* play style

Jip

@magge the hover-to-build behavior is now a UI mod that you can enable to have the same behavior. See also:

Jip

I've written a draft of the (in-game) changelog. For those that contributed, please give it a read. You can find it here:

https://forum.faforever.com/topic/6422/developers-iteration-iii-of-2023/7