In June of 2021 I took over as promotions councillor from Nine to ensure that there was continuity in the news and immediately set out to expand the team. Javi was instrumental in this time in keeping the news flowing with brilliant imagery. With many real-life commitments on the horizon, it is now time for me to pass on the torch and as such I am resigning as promotions councillor.

Since then, we have had Rowey join the team and he has undertaken several initiatives which has spurred activity and excitement amongst the promotion’s community. One of these items include the YouTube channel revival with the uploading of VODs and FAF Shorts as well as the FAF Wiki recreation. I have full confidence in Rowey achieving many more of his goals alongside Javi, Jip, Giebmasse and anyone else who wants to join the team and help generate new content for old and new players alike.

Internally we have put faith in Rowey and the board has approved his appointment to the role. I wish him all the best and he has my complete confidence.

@tsirkitna said in Hate hate:

I think this type of thing is more than simply being offended. This is an obvious social issue that should not be allowed regardless of if people are offended or not. Even if nobody reports it it shouldn't exist ever.

So you are a political activist... for a video game?

If there is a clear stance against it and people know they risk a 30 day ban for first offense and lifetime ban for second offense (as an example) then perhaps they would think twice about their choice of words and how they conduct themselves.

A lifetime ban for a second offense from the online community of a game they purchased is extreme. So is 30 days for a first offence. We have mechanisms to report, please use them. People who create games with those names will face a warning, and cascading bans (eventually permanent if they actually are a menace and will not respond to reason)

Even the politically correct thought police on Facebook etc do not have such tyrannical and extreme punishments.

I would gladly volunteer my time to assist in reading reports and anything that like that

You have shown that you want to punish people savagely for words rather than gently warn and steer or encourage them to do better. You are not quite ready to be in the moderation team. At least not until you learn to approach the situation with some empathy.

I have brought this up in chat and I get shit on for even mentioning it which is surprising.

Outside of college campuses most people hate political correctness as it is every bit as insidious as the problem it tries to combat. It is such a drain to even hear about it. People come to play a video game to escape reality.

Ultimately we want FAF to be a decent, friendly community. Report these games when you see them - that's the best way for you as an individual to contribute to fixing the issue.

Whilst I really don't like how extreme you want this issue pursued I do appreciate that you have spoken your mind on the subject.

The election for the player councillor role began on the 6th of June 2021 at 00:00:00 GMT.

The voting is open until the 6th of July 2021 at 00:00:00 GMT.

To read the platforms of each candidate you can do so here:

Morax

FtXCommando

Emperor_Penguin

The entire discussion is available here: Player Councillor thread

To cast your vote do so here. VOTE!

I've created a PowerShell script to count the amount of game time recorded in your FAForever replays. (Personne#4604) discovered that it didn't work for earlier formats of replays and that has been fixed up.

I'm using PowerShell 7.1.2 but I've successfully tested this in PowerShell 5.1

$replays = Get-ChildItem C:\ProgramData\FAForever\replays\*.fafreplay | Sort-Object LastWriteTime -Descending
#$unixtime = (Get-Date 1/1/1970).AddHours((Get-TimeZone).BaseUtcOffset.TotalHours)
#The replays incorrectly use your local time zone so I don't bother adjusting for it
$unixtime = (Get-Date 1/1/1970)

$playtime =0
foreach ($r in $replays) {
    Remove-Variable j -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue
    $j = (Get-Content $r.FullName)[0] | ConvertFrom-Json
    if ($j.launched_at -gt 0) {
        $playtime += (New-TimeSpan ($unixtime.AddSeconds($j.launched_at)) ($unixtime.AddSeconds($j.game_end))).TotalSeconds
    } else {
        $playtime += (New-TimeSpace ($unixtime.AddSeconds($j.game_time)) ($unixtime.AddSeconds($j.game_end))).TotalSeconds
    }
}

$playhours = [Math]::Floor($playtime/60/60)
$playminutes = [Math]::Floor( (($playtime/60/60) - $playhours) * 60)

Write-Output "You've played for $($playhours) $(if ($playhours -ne 1) {"hours"} else {"hour"}) and $(if ($playminutes -ne 1) {"$($playminutes) minutes"} else {"$($playminutes) minute"}) in $($replays.count) replay$(if ($replays.count -ne 1) {"s"})."

Can the maps themselves be compressed and then expanded on the client end?

Give matchmaker a go

Should the trailer already exist I'm sure it could be nominated for this purpose. But until this is all concluded it should be treated completely unofficial.

I wouldn't mind a button to download the maps so that both options are available. You could include a warning that on slow internet connections it will not be worth it or something. But I suspect some people would happily leave their client open for a while to grab the maps so that they don't have to wait when they actually want to play.

@ftxcommando

perpetual petty drama

Please note that passive or actively aggressive comments like these are the petty dramas.

Your attitude when things don't go the way you like seems to be the entire cause of these dramas. Nobody wants to constantly read seething posts or comments. The answer is not for the board to just give in under those kind of pressures but rather to resist toxicity. Nobody is ever going to miss not having to read an inflammatory post.

I hope over time you reflect on how you present yourself to others and have an epiphany of sorts and begin speaking non-violently.

NVIDIA have released a patch (466.11) to fix the stuttering issues experienced in Supreme Commander:

[Supreme Commander/Supreme Commander 2]: The games experience low FPS. [3231218/3230880]

http://us.download.nvidia.com/Windows/466.11/466.11-win10-win8-win7-release-notes.pdf

After you update to the 466.11 driver you should be able to disable the Nvidia fix mod and re-enable the NVIDIA Display Container LS service if you also disabled that service during your troubleshooting.

We would love to hear from you in this thread if this fixes the problem for you!

However, in my experience I still encounter some issues. I have narrowed it down to my dual monitor setup. Note, I do not play SupCom dual screened but rather I just have my desktop/discord on the second monitor. If I pull the monitor cable out of my second monitor during the game the stuttering disappears. I'd like to hear from other people with multiple monitors to see if they experience similar issues. The easiest way to notice it is to zoom in and out quick and repetitively whilst swinging your mouse cursor rapidly left and right with air units on screen.

Refer here to the original pinned Nvidia driver performance problem thread: https://forum.faforever.com/topic/779/nvidia-driver-performance-problem/

In June of 2021 I took over as promotions councillor from Nine to ensure that there was continuity in the news and immediately set out to expand the team. Javi was instrumental in this time in keeping the news flowing with brilliant imagery. With many real-life commitments on the horizon, it is now time for me to pass on the torch and as such I am resigning as promotions councillor.

Since then, we have had Rowey join the team and he has undertaken several initiatives which has spurred activity and excitement amongst the promotion’s community. One of these items include the YouTube channel revival with the uploading of VODs and FAF Shorts as well as the FAF Wiki recreation. I have full confidence in Rowey achieving many more of his goals alongside Javi, Jip, Giebmasse and anyone else who wants to join the team and help generate new content for old and new players alike.

Internally we have put faith in Rowey and the board has approved his appointment to the role. I wish him all the best and he has my complete confidence.

@thomashiatt said in FAF Website Main Video:

A silly idea with no real benefits

The benefits are that we modernise our website and it follows current gaming industry trends. It will demonstrate gameplay which cannot be achieved with a static image as well.

draws out several pages of stupid arguments

If you don't like discussing the issues then you don't have to but people came up with some legitimate concerns that we can incorporate into the solution. It also brought up the CDN discussion which needs to be revisited.

The website is the one area of FAF that is pretty much fine and not in need of any work.

Well for starters we are using an image from a different game that we are going to replace.

At this point, the unit database should just be removed because it is only updated when I personally complain about it in zulip after every server update or outage.

Any chance you want to help us update it?

@eternal said in FAF Website Main Video:

It is a slowly server work.

We should already be using a CDN and we will discuss that separately to this but it would completely remove that as a problem.

@ftxcommando It will actually be substantially faster than it currently is since it streams the video.

Though we're optimising images and taking 2.6MB out of the page load so the comparison evens out once that is sorted out.

We also need to look at a CDN for at least the main faforever domain. Some of the hold up here was the possible issues with Cloudflare and MSI files but we can just move them onto a separate subdomain (edit: the main page links to github, I can't recall where the client pulls them from but putting them on a separate domain away from the webpage/news would remove that as a problem).

@katharsas said:

Yes, it is streamed, and if you go down this route please make sure that an Australien user with 16 Mbit downstream shared by family can experience the page without problems (but i will assume that nobody will test that, because this is what usually happens). Most likely they will end up with a stuttering, buffering background, because a full HD video stream can easily require 5-10 Mbit.

The C&C demo we're testing with is 3.2mbps and Rowey has experimented with making it even lower than that.

Also the ad-blocker story was not supposed to be a "case", i just wanted to tell you that even a 2 MB image on a landing page has the potential to effectively break the page, and that we have already had problems with content being hosted by our servers being slow to download in the past.

Good call out. We're going to fix all the images because of your comment. The main image is 1.6MB when it can be 190KB. The footer image is also 1MB when it should be 100KB.

If whatever end-result will work on 3G mobile phone in a country not close to Germany, as well as on a 3-5 Mbit desktop connection im gonna stop complaining, but this whole idea is in my mind still really bad from a technical standpoint, and likely to end up with people coding something that "works for them" an then being called "good enough".

Yes it will default back to a static image for mobile phone users.

And all of that just so that things move in the background. I really don't get it. A good web page is fast and lighweight, and does not include a auto-on video.

The world has moved on from that. We want to showcase what the game is.

@jip Yeah, it's a bad choice when the console command works for the majority of people. It will also likely be fixed again soon.

Also it's worth noting that this prevents people from using the NVIDIA Control Panel and there's possibly other consequences that make it not desirable for us to interfere with it.

@kazbek Any chance you could make a version with no audio track and just 20 seconds worth of the best action scenes with a very short transition to and from black at the start and end so that it can loop without being jarring?

The scenes would need to be selected with consideration for the text that will sit on top of it.

@rowey The video should be no more than 3 to 8 MB. We will strip the audio track to save size.

The 20 second C&C video shows the kind of content we want. Action shots transitioning into other action shots. A typical trailer or existing video likely will not be suitable.

@RandomWheelchair Good point - we will use a static image for mobile devices.

Also I wasn't aware the current image was 2MB. We can optimise that too.

@Brutus5000 If you're worried about server bandwidth then it's yet another reason to use Cloudflare...

@Eternal MP4 is fine for streaming content like this. If we included webp we would need to provide an mp4 failback anyway.

@Katharsas Hosting a video of this size ourselves doesn't really suck.

1. It will be cached by browsers.
2. It is streamed not downloaded.

YouTube is out of the question for a background video.

You are also an edge case that blocks the existing background image. We cannot design a webpage for someone using an adblocker to block existing images.

What we can do is keep this file super small and make it so that it falls back to an image for mobile phone users. We can optimize the current fallback image somewhat too.

@el_syd
Yes. You might have to downgrade your video driver until NVIDIA fix it if nothing here works.

@morax I like the news hub side banner. I think the UEF commander might need to be a little higher to match the Seraphim one. Maybe in front of the logo though.

@Giebmasse Simple, not too much going on which I like. I wonder if the information could even be below the commander.

@Femboy I like this one the best but the perspective on the commanders needs a bit of a look.
Cybran looks a little small and probably shouldn't be on top of UEF but slightly moved over, Seraphim looks like it is in front of Cybran when AEON is behind UEF - doesn't make sense.