Posts made by Evildrew

My understanding is that you are creating kind of a lighthouse-like rotating vision feature. I think you have proven it is doable I just am not that enthusiastic about it and don’t see how it’s fits supcom. It’s something I am familiar with from commandos or the men of war series where eye sight focus makes a lot of sense. Maybe others like it though so just giving my opinion, not discouraging you in anyway. I am just thinking people will say it’s great because your implementation is flawless but then they will complain that their unit’s vision was off while their opponent's vision was on their unit at a key point and that would be contrary to the skill expression dogma…
Anyway the sonar idea you outlined I thought was really valuable.
I also have some ideas I was thinking about implementing that would be great but it’s like asking people who live in a circular loop to try something outside their perception. Lots of people just don’t care what you do until it’s in fashion.

@blackyps Maybe the way I said it did not come across correctly. I have tried reading the documents related to FAF by Balthazar, I do not understand it all, and probably it is not covering everything either relevant to the conversation. I have even read other stuff related to lua coding just to manage to do up my skills enough to do the things I have done myself in my mod. However, I cannot dedicate years of learning coding full time to become savvy on all the matters relevant to the topic at hand. I did my masters in business management, not IT management or computer sciences. Besides, there are so many files relating to the game and how it is structured in those files is not so easy to oversee.
You can believe me when I say I have done a big effort to learn as much as I did already and I believe my accomplishments speak for themselves on this matter.

@brutus5000 If you re-read with an open mind you will notice I am not saying the game team is hostile. What I am saying is FAF as an organization or more as a platform is setup in a hostile manner the way things are implemented. The point though is that you are right, it was never envisaged to be setup with what I am asking for in mind. You said it was this way forever which means no one prior had ever brought this up in public discourse so it was presumed to be a non-issue but now the topic is on the table. I have asked what FAF's official statement is, Jip gave his opinion but didn't say he was speaking for FAF, so there is still no answer on this question.

I don't think I am being hostile, I am complaining and have read enough conversations here on the forum and discord to justify my impressions based on those observations. There is opinion and fact. I think I navigate in a fair way between the two and am clear when it is in fact an opinion or a fact. I can understand you do not like some of my opinions because you take it personally, but my criticisms do not target you personally. I try to understand your arguments but at the same time, I think certain elements can be split between the base version and a mod on top. You said it would be difficult to do, ok, maybe we are both right maybe I am wrong. How would anyone know? So many things that were considered impossible and tossed aside years ago have been overcome with the right people showing up. Maybe one day such a person will take charge of the balance team too and those top level players will stop leaving and more will be excited by the game that is a 30 minute U-shape of excitement, time will tell...

@resin_smoker So you would fire say 360 projectiles out in all directions with a sonar radius of say 5-10 to do this?
So if the water is very deep, the sonar radius would have to be wide enough (at least vertically) like a 0 to detect ACUs on the seabed which I believe you have demonstrated is possible.
I really like that you are thinking about projectiles not going through land, that way maps with many smaller islands or channels make subs less easily visible to T3 sonar adding depth to the game.

@resin_smoker said in Messing around with unit intel and whats possible:

@evildrew already have.. I can use dummy projectiles with a sonar intel that gets bigger the further away it travels from the emitting unit / sub.

Subs would only ping every so often, allowing them to see what they were facing at the time the ping (dummy proj) was created. If the projectile impacts land, it stops / is destroyed. (Sonar can not see past a land obstacle) Otherwise, the projectile would travel a fixed distance and then disappear on its own. After a short cooldown, the sub would again ping, repeating the process on its current heading.

Structures would be able to ping in multiple directions at once, but as they've not mobile, poor placement would limit its view. (Placed too close to land)

Is there a youtube video of this or where can I see this?

If you find something to alter sonar so that sonar emits a pulse, that would be really cool.

@jip This is not personal, I respect you and many of the FAF people, I will say not all though. It is just an observation based on actions whether intentional or not and the only word that comes to mind to describe it is in fact hostile or lets say unfriendly if that's less pejorative, after all we are on the list of unfriendly countries in Russia's eyes.
My understanding is every time the game team f.ex. adds a new function like the 'display of how long it takes to capture an enemy unit' f.ex. I would have to change the file affected if I merge it or hook it in the correct way. Every time you add a new file for a new function I have to add an empty one to prevent it from passively hooking into the mod.
You cannot deny that it is impossible for anyone to anticipate new files affecting their mod and FAF does not implement a structure that would make modders have the option to use a setting that prevents additional files from slipping in (if I am wrong then please do correct me). Maybe I am not describing this well but since you have to import a bunch of files into unit scripts to access functions f.ex., why is it not that there is a file called XYZ that says "this version only uses this list of files" and FAF teams could add to this list and modders could have their own list to prevent it.

It is correct that you did help me, and I wish I could have helped you more than I did in return but it was not meant to be. I think though you do understand why I can not be part of FAF as explained privately long ago and the reasons are still the same.

If you want to get the word out about this licensing thing, make a pinned post in the modding & tools section explaining what exactly it entails. I doubt hardly anyone is going to read through this thread and find that crucial information hidden in post 9.

Also the only video to follow along how to mod stuff is this one which does not really explain much especially in regards to more advanced mods. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SYfb_XhH25s
I know there are some documents to read through but reading those just takes too long and it's also inferior to seeing it actually be done with your own eyes.

Well the way I see it, almost no one ever plays fafbeta so I have to assume the wider community does not support or at the very least does not really care about what the balance team is working on. I cannot understand why FAF has allowed it to be this way for this long when their mod only panders to maybe 50 people at most. The way it is implemented creates a monopoly and I do not feel the need to have to link to posts of people whining about why the more competent echelon of the player base has disappeared while only casual players with no ambition to improve remains as a means to justify that just about the only people who still play do not notice how bad it is or are responsible for the deterioration.
Forged alliance still has the best fundamentals for any RTS platform out there and one would think with several key improvements that were made over the years FAF would have become better and attract more players but there are just so many things that were changed for the worse and so much crap that has been added that more than offsets the value of the improvements made.
It's like some of the FAF teams want FAF to fail so they can escape the burden of their responsibilities and not making their failure and the damage they caused apparent to everyone by denying anyone else to bring FAF back from the demise it is currently in according to their own words while throwing up smoke screens about irrelevant causes for player churn like name changes...
Anyway my conclusion then is that FAF's main mod could be layered on top of a default version like phantom is and while the default version might have to change for API or other technical reasons it is possible to have key folders for mods such as the projectiles, units, and others be unaffected by what the FAF teams want to modify.
Further. as it is "tolerated" being this way, I can only interpret it as a hostile stance towards any contributors who have their own ideas and do not want to give up their vision by having to be part of their amalgamated mod.

@arma473 Not talking about special prominence, attention or publicity... You are missing the point of the discussion.

Well since you brought it up, I really want to know then if it is also FAF's official stance that featured mods take precedence. If so then I'll have nothing more to add.

Please create a proper (default) version in the list of available options when creating a game. It doesn't even matter if it is the steam version or some older version from a few years back. All it has to be is stable. Modders can always add in new stuff from FAF's patches if they want it in their mods or host in the currently named FAF(default) mod version if they want all the features and files to be automatically applied.
Reason:
Every time the game team (mostly) is modding around with FAF(default) it always risks to break every other sim mod. This creates a lot of work for modders who do not want the extra work especially when extensive patches like the recent one are released. They add new files that were never there before and automatically merge into mods. These files cannot be anticipated and are not coded in a way that will prevent them from becoming activate in mods where they are not intended to have an influence.
An unknown amount of mods have stopped working (f.ex. Equilibrium to name a more extensive body of work) because the authors no longer update them. FAF will keep losing valuable content as long as there is no stable version for mods.

FAF is the direct result of the inputs that went into modifying SC:FA. If you concluded that FAF sucks then you know based on who made the decisions to change it to what it is has the culpability. You point out a lack of vision, well it does not seem that the people making decisions about the game were selected based on the vision they presented or got overwhelming support to do what they set out to do and are actually doing.
I can only say the process of selecting the Balance Team is the culprit and all other reasons are an extension thereof. There is this famous saying that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Showing the community that power when forcing through bad changes irrespective of the opposition is just asking to ctrl-k your player base.
Contributors come up with good ideas sometimes that just don't fit the game but if there is no stated vision then how would a developer know that his idea while functional would be a waste of time? I personally do not see any reason to get involved as a contributor with the people who have the final say at the moment, others probably took longer than me to see the light but eventually we all see the light

It would be far easiest if modded games were grouped together and had say an orange font to differentiate them, but the choice was made to make it so you can just hide them because the people who asked for and implemented it that way decided that is what they wanted. Many survivals are heavily modded and get played because for survival that's ok I guess but a meaningful number of people hide them because they want to only play rated PvP games and unrated games they don't take serious. Those games lack that risk reward element. It is not really about it being a modded game because lets be honest, FAF is a mod of SC:FA. Me personally I cannot understand people who say they only play regular FAF when FAF is modified every few months and lacks both consistency and definitive form to meet the definition of regular but people throw out words that sound good even though they clearly have no idea that they are contradicting themselves in what they say.
Anyway, the key problem is that the Balance Team's Game Team's combined mod has taken over the role of the base game. It doesn't even matter that they do not share the same view of what the game should be like. So there is no static dataset considered a real base game. A base game would be a fully functional unaltered set of data that every mod would use to not break each other, but the balance and game team have decided that their mod is the only mod that matters so when they change their mod, they affect all other mods. So the main issue with making mods ranked is that whenever a patch is released, the changes in those patches can alter/break the mod which would make players of that mod unhappy plus gives the modder extra unwanted work to do. I believe if mods were ranked and the base game they modify was stable, then that would improve competition but I just do not see that happening since the base game has been monopolized killing off any competition that could make the game better in preference of one size fits all and "we don't care if you like it or not, we know better".
A common misconception by the malthusians is that mods fragment the community but that is so untrue, they add a lot of diversity to a game and in a free market of ideas the best ideas would trump the lesser ideas and that is what improves a product. If we just think back to Equilibrium, the running gag was sort of "First fixed/seen in Equilibrium". A number of my ideas in the past were taken without asking me or people presented my ideas as their own, or maybe they really just had the same idea after I published them, but they did got into FAF. The issue though is that a lot of people who make mods and have innovative ideas and skills relevant to the task at hand are ignored for the leadership roles because skills such as fast clicking speeds, memorizing build orders on maps are preferred because of the much higher ratings that are associated with those skills.
I can imagine that you are thinking, if they didn't like the mercy change they can just make a mod called Mercy useful again but would that not lead to games having 12 mods eventually just to undo the nonsensical changes over the years.
Anyway, there is a long way to go for what you are trying to achieve and no will among those who have the final say to do it. I personally would like if people played the Superior FAF Experience but people who have never played it have opinions about how shit it is and then make claims that are completely untrue because again, they have not tested the product but are experts on it. Yet when someone sees something they like in it, they don't want to play it, instead they say, lets take this for ourselves.
*Another thing, the replay vault does not even say if it a game was modded or not...

@thewreck said in The End of FAF:

Tell me evildrew what statistics did he show?what numbers did he present to prove his point? I'm making stuff up lmao.

He is making a statement based on non public material information. As you hopefully know he cannot disclose who posted what exactly when he is generalizing when eluding to it happening.
What he told you is that he has seen the players who you said never report each other report each other.
I do not see what statistics or numbers you would want to see from angel. You said that group never reports each other, he said he has seen it happen. So lets say greater or equal to 1 then to put it in numbers. So if angel has seen it happen at least once, I consider it disproving you point.

If you are not making stuff up, then tell us why is it that you know that most people reporting base ctrl k are 1500. Do you have access to the moderation reports, are you compiling statistics? I presume not since what you say and angel contradicts each other and he has an official moderation team tag and you have, well nothing relevant on display that would make you more credible than angel on this matter...

@thewreck said in The End of FAF:

No most of these reports come from when a medium ranked player gets in the lobby ie some 1500 and doesn't know the rules of 2k lobbies. They are also the most likely ones to not know the game is over and refuse to recall. I'm also getting tired of moderators claiming how the 2k community works when not a single moderator is a part of it.

So angel has access to this information and stated that it is the way he said it, yet you without that information say angel is wrong. What are you saying, that angel is not able to read or angel is deliberately misleading us when saying what he said about these high players being tilted when the game didn't go the way they wanted?

I like many others have noticed this for years, across many balance teams, that when games don't go ways certain people (who have way more influence than they should have) want, the game gets changed to the detriment of all other players. Hence people stop playing and then the group who is responsible for kneecapping the community go blame everyone else, but never do they once point the finger at themselves...

@thewreck said in The End of FAF:

@Evildrew I will not disclose who helped me with creating the grievances in my post unless they want to.

I totally get that you are not making that decision for them, you clearly respect their rights to anonymity and to make that decision of outing themselves. Would be nice if you respected other people's rights in the same manner and not speak for the community, which you and these 6 people clearly do not represent when making your claims.
Good luck though with getting your grievances resolved.

@thewreck said in The End of FAF:

No you don't have that right

Ok I get no special rights but you get the right to speak for everyone including myself when you claim no one ever had an issue with people constantly renaming though you say you only speak for 6 people. Very interesting…

@nuggets said in The End of FAF:

@evildrew said in The End of FAF:

So you are under the delusion to think you have a right to change your username on a database you do not own but willingly registered yourself to at any time and that the entity offering you the service under its terms of service cannot change the terms of service even though it is stated in them that they can.

Clearly your dillusion is bigger than i expected.

Yes, as the rename feature exists (since the beginning?), which is a normal feature to have in ANY online community, i do expect my right to rename to exist.
Even talking about ownership is absolutly insane. Just because i do now own something, does not mean i can't be expected to interact with it how the community wishes. Yes, i know "the community" is a term a single person can't really use, but unless one has lost all common sense, i believe everyone knows that a rename feature is a good and expected feature.

You can ask to be removed, that right is granted to you under GDPR but no where is it mentioned that you have a right to change your username.

You made a real fool out of yourself by grandstanding, saying I have no clue what I am talking about. Maybe try being more lowkey when adults are speaking.

Wow, got me there! Just claiming the fact that my opinion is childish is the worst argument ever. Its the last thing to say when you can't think of a counter.
I said that you do not know what you are talking about, because you legitimatly do now know why it has come to the descision the other high ranks have made (talking about the posts, leaving faf and so on..). You just said "to vent dissatisfaction". Typical take to "say something bad -> you are just flaming, no complaints allowed"

I suggest the mod team should let you change your username in return for paying $25 like on PlanetSide 2. I highly recommend they do that, then you have what you want and they know you will not be changing your name every week, easy.

I know (or also hope) you wrote this in jest. As comparing a company that stands behind planetside 2 to faf is just not possible (do i need to mention common sense?).

You still did not post an actual argument why the moderator descision is legitimate.
If you are saying "they own it, they can do whatever they want"; you are first of all, not even completly correct, and second of all, imagine how ANY company / online community would crash if they do not react to feedback.

Again, read the terms of service. No where is the right to rename guaranteed and the terms may be changed at any time. You agreed to those terms so your whole argumentation is ridiculous. Now stop making a fool out of yourself. If you feel wronged, sue them about it and see what happens…
Unless you can point to something binding in the terms of service that underpins your argument, stop posting nonsensical arguments.
This level of reasoning is the same level applied by the balance team and the reason why the FAF mod is such trash.

@thewreck wow 6 people. That’s a massive sample size. Stellar! They should have co-signed then…
So what about the argument then, since we can just proclaim to have rights that are not enumerated anywhere, that if other players know who I am, I should have the right to know who they are, because knowing someones play style gives you an advantage…

@thewreck said in The End of FAF:

The most clown take ever. Bro is completely unaware no one had any issues with frequent name changes for over 10 years.

No one? How do you know this to be true, you just state that like it is fact but you got no proof and even a 7 year old could see how stupid it is for you to claim you know what everyone thought...