Posts made by Jip

@blodir said in Suggest new loading tips:

When a shield is hit, every shield with intersecting bubbles takes 15% overspill damage.

Fact check with @Jip

You can check the code, there's an overspill modifier that units can override

@ThomasHiatt You have not apologized. You can consider yourself reported.

I'm quoting two instances of you stating that the community should regularly participate in discussions and play FAFDevelop before taking a negative stance towards the changes.

Taken out of context, allow me to add the missing details.

For those unaware, the quotes originate from here:

• https://forum.faforever.com/topic/5786/factory-models

The bottom line is that there are community members that feel they were uninformed about a change. To some degree the changes were in the news and promoted by Gyle. We did not mention recreating the factories at that point because it was unclear that it would be required to do so. I won't repeat myself further, you can find all about it here:

• https://forum.faforever.com/topic/5786/factory-models/9

The discussion continued, again people stating that they feel uninformed. People suggested all sorts of channels for this. I'm fairly certain none would work in such a degree that it would solve this communication problem. And I know this because there already is a place where you can see exactly what we're doing: FAF Develop! And if you're not interested in that, then there's this channel:

• https://github.com/FAForever/fa/commits/deploy/fafdevelop

A few posts down the line we get to the content that you quoted from. It lacks the arguments to backup the quote, you can read the full post here:

• https://forum.faforever.com/topic/5786/factory-models/27

Which then brings us back to the bottom line: there are community members that feel uninformed. I point them to a few sources to be remain informed with the latest changes while also helping us out with confirming the changes. Whether they do that is up to them. But if people want to remain informed, regardless of whether I write a post on the forums, promote it in the news, promote it via casters, spam Aeolus or whatever - then you can.

I don't see what is bad about my response. People want to be informed. And they can be if they choose to be.

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As I have stated, the use of "We" was an attempt to defend the "A lot of people" and "Some people" you mentioned in the initial quotes I responded to. I have clarified above that there is, in fact, a large, silent, majority of the playerbase that did not ask for PBR or factory changes, but received them anyway. I did not intend to convey that these people felt you had abused your privilege, regarding factory changes or otherwise, merely that this silent majority did not ask for changes, does not participate in discussions and feedback, yet will come out to complain when the changes are deployed to FAF.

Taken out of context, allow me to add the missing details.

For those unaware, the quote originates from here, at the bottom of the post:

• https://forum.faforever.com/topic/5786/factory-models/39

Neither you nor me can talk as if they represent the silent majority of the player base. Anyone is always free to complain. I'd rather if they'd provide us with constructive feedback though, that way we can make progress.

The quote was referring to your constant usage of 'we', as if there is some group of people behind what you write. As if you represent people. You are, just like I am, just talking for ourselves. Stating anything different is just plain wrong.

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This paragraph is me attempting to clarify what I meant, as I have just done for a second time in this post. I claim that 99.9% of the community is content with the game and do not follow what goes into FAFDevelop to give feedback. The only time I use "We" in this thread is to say "We're just here to have fun playing a video game", which I believe does accurately represent the goals of the majority. People seem to be taking the 99.9% statistic out of context as me saying 99.9% of people disapprove of the changes, but I did not say that. I said 99.9% of people are content with playing the game and not following along with FAFDevelop. Once again talking about the silent majority. The 99.9% number was, of course, made up on the spot, but it is quite accurate.

I feel like I've already addressed this. You can be informed if you want to be. If you don't feel like being informed then that is fine too. And when you complain about being uninformed then I'll happily tell you how you can always remain informed. Which is what I did.

Here is another player echoing my sentiment that most players have no interest in testing these things. They also echo my sentiment that you have the power to upset thousands of players and were notelected by those players. They also echo my sentiment of displeasure with your "having a moan about nobody giving you direct feedback", which is why I wrote my initial post explaining that you should not expect direct feedback.

Specifically:

having a moan about nobody giving you direct feedback

What moan ?

We're always looking for feedback. I'm sure you and I can both appreciate that. It is how we find bugs that we missed during development. It is how we can poll the community on what they think. We put a lot of effort into reaching out and as you state yourself usually only a small group of people show up .

This chart shows that my assumption for the FAF playerbase is accurate. There are about 20,000 active users on FAF.

There were 75.000 unique players playing at least one game, regardless of their type, in the year 2022. I'm very aware of the size of the audience playing this game.

You continue on with statistics in how little of the community we tend to interact with on a monthly basis. And you're correct. That is because everyone is free to participate in that as they see fit. Some people do, a lot of people do not. Which is fine - I'm sure you agree with that - half your post is about how strange it would be if we'd expect them to participate in more discussions.

To have a representative sample of a community this large we'd need about 360 people to give their thoughts. You can learn all about that here:

• https://www.surveymonkey.com/mp/sample-size-calculator/

We work with the people that do respond with constructive feedback. We work with what we have. That is how life works

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We can start with the changes to the GC.

Finally - you know that this was the only bit that I was interested in when I told you to back up your claim on abusing my privilege. You also didn't bother asking what really happened. I'll give it to you regardless.

This entire thing got kicked off by @Deribus , interestingly enough.

It started with this question on July the 5th in the balance team channel:

Something wreck-related I noticed recently: units killed by GC claws don't leave wrecks

After which there was some discussion in the balance team channel about whether they should or should not leave wrecks. They wouldn't mind if it did.

That created this change:

• July 5th: https://github.com/FAForever/fa/pull/4020

Which brought us to this:

• July 11th: https://github.com/FAForever/fa/pull/4040

I told the balance team in the balance team channel that the colossus is an absolute beast with properly functioning tractor claws using the existing blueprint configuration. They thought it was a good change regardless. To quote:

As long as it makes it more consistent its better

The pull request was merged because more than half the balance team has no development setup. The only way to test it for them was to merge it so that they can play test it on FAF Develop. Archsimkat did and concluded it was way stronger.

On July the 17th the balance team mentioned they were going to look at it. Nothing happened at that point.

The balance team had a meeting where they showed the intention to release a balance patch soon after the development patch.

On August the 20th I made it weaker, because it was still too strong:

• https://github.com/FAForever/fa/pull/4155

And that is the state we released with, knowing the intentions of a soon-to-follow-up balance patch that would fix all the other issues. That patch still didn't happen for the colossus, but as you state - we have a separate team for that .

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The remainder of your post is about UI features being enabled by default. I'm sure that you and I can both agree that we want to give new players the best possible experience out of the box. That is why some are enabled by default. We tweak with these settings as we receive feedback from the community on what they do and do not like. There's even a post on it:

• https://forum.faforever.com/topic/3248/default-game-options

Not all of that is implemented yet, but as we are refactoring the options menu we take more and more of it into account.

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And I'd like to finalize by responding to this:

Improvements to graphics, performance, or UI are not going to increase my level of immersion, its at 100% already. Games with horrible graphics are just as immersive as games with good graphics. Performance could actually have an impact on immersion, but 99% of 1v1 to 4v4 games I play never get slowed down, so performance is not at all an issue for me. It kinda feels like a joke to improve the performance of the game after so many years and hardware getting so much faster.

There are more communities surrounding Forged Alliance. One is LOUD, which took the same trajectory we did but then six years earlier. Another is the Chinese alternative, which is not far from the Steam version in terms of changes. With thanks @Edtjuh we can get a glimpse of what that looks like. You can see the full video here:

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UQ7LyhdJKXw

I'd like to focus on these snippets:

• https://youtu.be/UQ7LyhdJKXw?t=1411
• https://youtu.be/UQ7LyhdJKXw?t=1527

Do immerse yourself in every single stutter you see there. Do not mistake them with the video buffering - that only happens a few times as Edtjug is scrolling through the recording. Then compare that when Edtjuh plays FAF using the same hardware:

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wi9qEdOH16M&t=1090s

And you can experience this yourself too. Start the Steam version of the game and do the following:

• FPS performance issue: Select 400 ASF while their range rings render, zoom in
• Sim performance issue: Have 400 ASF fight 400 other ASFs
• Sim performance issue: Have 100 hives build something, this consumes about 25% of the total sim budget in the base game
• ...

There are many more, I encourage you to read the changelogs of the past two years. Search for the 'performance' header using your browsers search function. You can find all of them here:

• https://github.com/FAForever/fa/blob/deploy/fafdevelop/changelog.md

There's also a lot of miss information surrounding the reclaim labels. We didn't integrate a few mods because we thought that was a great idea. We improved the performance of the reclaim labels because on a decent, modern computer rendering those labels previously could drop your fps to below 30 in the average late-game situation.

Any change we made to improve this would've broken all mods, regardless of the change. So we took a few that we thought were most useful for the average player and integrated those accordingly.

@Mach it is the time that the engine waits before scanning for new targets. It is similar to the weapon check interval, but in this case there's no value in the blueprint to tweak it.

In general I'm in favor of features that would make the game feel more modern. But this particular example is just not what this engine is made for. To quote myself:

• https://forum.faforever.com/topic/3846/reclaim-brush/28

@ftxcommando said in What do you want from FAFs default AI?:

Would it be possible to get an AI that doesn’t even consider units but is purely concerned with optimizing for the fastest full t3 mex timing in a given area? Would be interesting to see how it approaches a variety of maps and if there is anything to learn from.

I think @maudlin27 achieves that with M28AI

Judges

This post is a draft until further notice

Jip
Resistance
Deribus
Relent0r

Grading

This post is a draft until further notice

We'll grade your submission through four categories:

• Strategy
• Aesthetics
• Theme
• AI support

You can earn up to 10 points for each category. They are described in detail below. Each category is accompanied with examples. You can use those to get an idea what we're looking for. The categories combined can get you up to 40 points. We can give an additional 6 points for exceptional work. The total number of points that you can receive is 46. The players are sorted from most to least points.

Strategy

This section boils down to what options a player has available on a map. A few common questions you can ask yourself are:

• (1) Is it clear where a player can expand to?
• (2) Is it clear where a player can send raiding parties to (resources)?
• (3) Is it clear where a player would define the rally points of its factories?
• (4) ...

You can ask these type of questions to decipher the skill range that your map can represent. Usually the more options there are the more skill it requires to utilize all the capabilities of a map.

A few examples of maps with many strategic options:

• (1v1) Open Palms
• (2v2) Adaptive Archsimkats Valley
• (2v2v2) Lily Pads
• (1v1) Forbidden Pass
• (1v1) Desert Planet II - FAF Version
• (1v1) Regor VI Highlands
• (2v2) DualGap Adaptive

A few examples of maps with limited strategic options:

• (3v3) Open Palms
• (3v3) Astro Crater
• (4v4) Goodlands
• (6v6) Dual Gap

Aesthetics

The look and feel of a map is as subjective as it can get. Therefore we'll try to keep it objective.

• (1) Stratum textures should not look (obviously) tiled
• (2) Decals are to be used to accentuate the heightmap and stratum textures
• (3) Unpathable bits should be well-communicated
• (4) Terrain type is to be used - it matters more than you'd think

And a few personal suggestions:

• (5) No perlin noise ocean floors
• (6) No maps that are surrounded by mountains

A few examples of maps with little to none of these issues:

• Cadmium Green
• Perrote Glacier
• Zerg Canyon
• Adaptive Mars - Mangala Fossa
• Amoor

A few examples of maps with some to many of these issues:

• Rainmakers Survival (problems with 1, 2 and 3)
• Hardshield Oasis (problems with 1 and 2)
• Adaptive Islet (problems with 1, 2 and 5)

To immediately bust a possible miss conception: just because you use map-wide decals doesn't mean your map is going to look better. They are a great tool. But they are only one part of the machine and it happens to be notoriously difficult to get right.

There are many options to give you an edge in this section. You can experiment with the lighting and water settings. You can also look into subtle weather. Another useful tool is the use of color theory to find well-matching textures. And speaking of textures: you can always use custom textures found online.

Theme

AI support

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No matter what expertise, all grading is subjective and highly depends on those who are grading. I hope this section allows you to understand what it is that we're looking for. And I also hope that it helps you understand how one can look at a map.

Soft requirements

This post is a draft until further notice

Theme

The map should give the user the impression it is on a planet that belongs to the Aeon faction. How you achieve this is up to you. You can take inspiration from campaign maps that involve Aeon bases and settlements.

AI-support

A lot of games have one or more AI participating in the it. These games usually do not show in the client because they launch as soon as they were hosted.

Reason game is unranked	Number of unique players	Number of unique games
The game has at least one AI	40,380	384,982

Strict requirements

This post is a draft until further notice

There are a lot of creative people in this community. Those who make content all learn by making (a ton of) mistakes. Usually the results are there for everyone to see. But the road that you had to take to get to those results are nowhere to be seen. The goal of this tournament is not so much about the results as it is about the road you took to get to the results. Some of these hard requirements reflect this notion.

The following rules are hard requirements. If you do not meet these requirements then your submission will be disqualified. I don't want to disqualify your submission. Please make sure you've read, understood and applied them accordingly.

License

A lot of the code base of FAF is shared using an open source license. Such a license guarantees the continuity of the project. The most common license we use is the MIT license. Even some of the game code, including the navigational mesh, has that same license applied to it.

This is in contradiction with a lot of the content in the map or mod vault. Usually there is no license. As a consequence the author retains all rights and people are not allowed to make derivatives. I've always thought this to be in contradiction to the open nature of FAF. This tournament is here to help mitigate this.

All submissions require either one of the following licenses:

• cc-by-nc-sa 4.0

or

• cc-by-sa 4.0

I'd highly recommend you to license it with the non-commercial license. This prevents people and companies from using your content commercially without your consent.

To license your map you need to:

• (1) Add a LICENSE.md file in the map folder with the content of the license
• (2) Add a reference to the license in the description of the map

A healthy consequence of this requirement is that your map can be used in other communities such as LOUD and BAR. A lot of my maps are available in the LOUD community. One of my maps is available in the BAR / Zero-k communities.

Functional requirements

Documenting the road

Documenting the result

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There's more to this tournament than just making maps. It is about sharing the knowledge to create content. It is about promoting the community and the content it creates on a weekly basis.

Prizes

This post is a draft until further notice

First place

You are rewarded with the Grand Sculptor avatar. Additionally, the winner of the tournament receives one of the following rewards:

• A license for the Indie edition of World Machine

or

• A license for the Indie edition of Gaea

or

• A €150,- one time donation to the Oranje fonds

Second place

You are rewarded with a Face of Faction avatar. Additionally, the runner-up of the tournament receives one of the following rewards:

• A license for the Indie edition of World Machine

or

• A license for the Indie edition of Gaea

or

• A €150,- one time donation to the Oranje fonds

---

Unlike other tournaments you can not receive a direct cash pay out under any circumstance. Each prize has separate options available. The use of or is exclusive, meaning you can't have both options. Any received license as part of a reward will be all yours to use as you see fit.

The winners will be tagged in this forum post. A prize is automatically converted into a donation to the Oranje fonds if left unclaimed for one month or longer. The receipt of all donations to the Oranje fonds will be posted in this forum thread.

All the prizes are funded by myself. This first tournament is an experiment. No additional donations will be accepted. I first want to gain some experience hosting tournaments like these before I make it more complicated for myself

This post is a draft until further notice

The tournament is not open for submissions until it is finalized

These posts are a draft until further notice. I need to start writing it up somewhere

It feels to me that there's a lot we can do with those funds that we should definitely not do. One of them is paying casters or channels to promote our community. It never ticked for me. If a channel wants to promote FAF then they can already do so out of the kindness of their hearts. Paying may costs thousands.

I think it is better to use the funds to empower content creators to help in various tasks. As two examples:

• (1) A premium account on www.textures.com to make it easier for veteran mappers to retrieve high quality textures and to experiment with them
• (2) A premium account on https://beta.elevenlabs.io/ to make it easier for campaign / co-op / mod authors to create high quality voice overs
• (3) Access to premium tooling such as World Machine or Gaea to help create maps

The difficult part is that neither of these services have proper support for sharing an account across multiple users. Therefore there's some sense of trust involved with sharing credentials.

One idea I'm tinkering with is to have a mapping tournament where the reward for the winner is a one-year license to World Machine or Gaea. That would be an interesting prize to win for sure, and it would be given to someone that would be able to appreciate the prize. It is also a lot easier to give someone a key code then to give someone money.

I've found the issue. I'll bring it along with one last hotfix

You'd need to be more specific - what type of UI lag are you talking about? Can you give us a video that shows the lag?

It is underwater, yes

@ShibAlex it is this one:

That would be an engine hack, specifically designed for that unit

I don't think what you're suggesting is possible. @Balthazar could you enlighten us?

How do you issue the command? Do you right click the commander, or do you issue a ground attack command?

@ctrl-k said in New ScoreBoard:

Death notification: after recent patch there is possible to determene who killed whom, so, now It will eventually end up in scoreboard

Please don't. We want to add this in the base game. No need for a scoreboard mod to take on that responsibility.

A wrench, of course

edit: apparently that was a pretty bad typo