Let's start with the good news first: Due to relentless work by Nomander, supported through testing by JaggedAppliance, they managed to pinpoint the cause of the desync issues that plagued FAF recently. As I suspected, it was an engine patch, which brings me to the main topic I want to talk about: How do we deal with engine patches?

We are in a peculiar position, because the people doing engine patches and opening Pull Requests for them are frustrated that getting them actually deployed in the game takes so long. On the other hand, these changes are extremely hard to review, because they look like this:
´´´
0x007A7858:
jmp asm__ShouldAddUnit
nop

0x007EF12B:
push esp
mov ecx, esi
call RenderRange__Moho__UserUnit__UserUnit
nop

0x005BF011:
mov ecx, edi
mov edx, eax
call Hooked_SyncVisionRange
jmp 0x005BF02C
´´´
Good luck checking the code for logical errors. And as we can see with the latest debacle, an engine patch can work on the surface. When you test it, it does what it is supposed to do, but it can bite us later when random desyncs pop up because the patch also can corrupt memory under special conditions.
So for me as a team lead, merging in a barely tested engine patch feels like chugging an improvised bomb into my basement for storage. Probably nothing bad happens, but it definitely doesn't feel comfortable.

Recently we got a lot more engine patches by new contributors, which is nice in principle, but it makes the problem even bigger, because with the old contributors I at least know that they have some experience. With the new guys it could be some AI-assisted reverse engineering which can be a good or a bad thing, but I can't tell at all how diligenty they worked on that.

And the thing that annoys me the most is that I as a team lead am supposed to provide a good contribution environment, where people don't feel bogged down by bureaucracy and long approval processes. But if things go south, and nobody knows where the mysterious bugs that have appeared originated from, then I feel like all eyes go to the team lead to fix it. And frankly, I would rather stop storing IEDs in my basement than constantly rebuild the room. In this case, thankfully Nomander took the initiative, but he is also the Balance Team Lead since recently, so once again it is a team lead investing time cleaning up the mess other people made.

I personally think that it is not a good look on FAForever as a whole, if the gaming experience is tainted by random desyncs and crashes. And I think we need to change something about how we apporach this whole engine patch topic. I realize that the position of "just stop it entirely" is too extreme, but just carring on is also unbearable. God, this whole thing makes me angry, not at anyone in particular, but at this whole situation. We can do better than this. We need to do better.

I am looking forward to constructive suggestions.

We still need logs to investigate this

Hotkey integration was so long ago that I doubt anybody still knows where or how you would find the original mod

We need some screenshots

Great project! And thank you for providing all these files! It inspired me to have a stab at it as well. I redesigned the legs to address the structural issues and did some other minor improvements. Here are some pictures of my version:

Chickens are also not free

@Caliber said:

@nuggets In this test on structurs I used 9 UEF land HQs with 16000k health each the chicken storm did exactly 100,000 damage on structers in this test, so half damage to structures which is still roughly 1.5 free nukes

A nuke would destroy all of this and even more if you placed more buildings.

Dualgap in matchmaker is a nonstarter because it's 6v6 and would have too many connection problems

Yes, that is how gpg designed it

I don't consider this to be an issue that needs fixing

Maudlin already explained the process and that it is not bannable unless it involved rating manipulation. And judging from the OP it doesn't look like this is the case.

Do you not read the discord announcements? There are regular announcements when there are significant changes. Just because we don't broadcast every 5 minutes that we are aware of the situation and are investigating does not mean that nobody does anything.
Nobody knows for sure if things will improve anytime soon. Predictions about the future are hard.

Thank you for that mod! Don't worry about the technical issues, it's fine enough for testing.

I thought some more about the Aeon factories and I think I just dislike changing the design of a factory where it is not needed. The idea is to basically keep the original factory models as support factories. I see that you connected the previously floating arcs, which is a nice change, but raising the platform is not really needed. It significantly changes the overal design and it's a change purely based on personal taste. It also creates the issue that the structures in the back have to be even higher to support the arc shields without units clipping into it.
I do like that you moved the structures in the back further out, this is a good change, it reduces clipping with units and makes the factory look a bit bigger without changing the feel of the design.

I have some more thoughts about the HQ: I generally like the extra elements and animations you added. As I said, I think the shields (purple) should be 1/4 to 1/3 smaller. The pillars (orange) are very nicely designed. I think I would like it better if they supported the raising arc in the front instead of these pure black things (red). I'd remove the extra terraces in the back (green) imo they make it look too bulky.

I'm not yet sold on the new Aeon land factories. Especially the HQ looks too bulky. To me it feels like a UEF engineer's attempt at making an Aeon building. It has this massive, bulky aesthetic. I'm also not sure if I like the raised platforms, although I also have to say that the complete flatness from before looks a bit weird as well.

Having said that, I do like the general design ideas you have. For example, the white shields in the corners are very nice, although I would scale them down a bit, because right now the low texture resolution is quite noticable.
I am sure that with some more minor adjustments we can have a great result.

Could you change your mod to make the original models available as well? Just as another building would be enough, it can even be non-functional. It would make comparisons between the old and new much easier.

It would certainly be interesting to find out why your internet went down completely. Maybe you can find some sort of logs in your router?

It looks like the matchmaker could fulfill most of your needs. Have you tried that?

Nice work you are doing here! I'll have to check out your mod to take an even closer look in the game

TMM already allows this

GDPR allows keeping specific data to protect the interests of the organization, even in the case of a deletion request.