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Given the stupid amount of energy and words wasted by all kinds of people in the PC election thread, i wanted to present a different idea out there. This not just about PC. It could probably replace several councillor positions, maybe even the entire Council of Setons.
The goal of the system is mostly:
Ill call it the "Badge System" or maybe "Roles system" because i have no better word.
Example:
Pros:
Negs:
Its basically Discord roles on steroids but for FAF.
Opinions?
Edit: There might the some badges for which sub-badges dont make sense, so maybe restrict those.
People always tend to prefer things they know, when they have a choice. This is why the mapgen can do what handmade maps cannot.
If a person goes into the map vault, they see a bunch of maps they have never seen alongside ones that they already now, and their brain is automatically going to dismiss the maps they dont't know because anything thats new is frightening on a primitive human level.
The mapgen solves this problem by frontloading that choice:
And then forcing you to stay with that choice by preventing your brain from categorizing it as just another map and therefore reverting your decision to try something new. So the way in which the mapgen creates an advantage is not necessarily by just creating unknown maps, but psychologycally.
Of course the mapgen should eventually still reach higher level of quality. But its important to realize how important the UI is here.
Lets assume that there is a way for the client to automatically select a handmade map that
Then maybe handmade maps could in some way fullfill the same function that the mapgen does. However, we dont have that kind of UI for handmade maps, and as long as it is that way, people will resort to the mapgen to play unknown maps instead of simply selecting a not much played handmade map.
The mapgen also crates some sort of unspoken contract: The map is guarantueed to be new to everybody (in reality thats not true because you can regenerate a seed, but this is still the expectation that people have). This is of course very hard to replicate with handmade maps.
PS: Could participants in this thread please stop assuming that everybody else argues in bad faith or against their interests? Turning this thread into a mapgen vs handmade war will not create many usefull insights on this topic. Too late probably.
Stop claiming that "icon confusion" was intended by the devs.
Ok now i want to look at the far future. Arguably there is still a lot of time until map generator maps reach a level of quality where somebody like FTX will replace 100% of the 1v1 queue with random maps. But still.
Lets make some likely assuptions:
If we make these assumptions, it should be quite easy to see, that after a long period of transition, the endgame is AOE2, in other words, the death of handmade maps in competitive play. You might disagree with those assumptions, but please think about wether you actually disagree with them OR if you just dont want to follow through to the conclusion, maybe because this conclusion is subjectively horrifying.
Now, in that scenario, a lot of people will just not care and go with it, some people will be sad, and handmade maps will fight a war for dominance, that they will slowly and agonizinly loose as more and more players desire the things that mapgen can provide. This thread is a good indicator for how that will look like imo.
Now, there is another hidden asumption here:
But we could change this if we want. We already have adaptive maps. What if handmade maps could provide the same guarantuess that generated maps could in terms of BO-whoring?
Im not saying we need to do this. But if the first too assumptions hold, i think that handmade maps need to evolve in the long term. And i think they can, and anyway discussing how that would look like would be much more productive than descussing how far along the trajectory mapgen maps are right now.
In in additon to that, we can think about maybe a better way to present handmade maps or allow players to select them, but that is mo harder to achieve.
The game simulation is updated (recalculated) every 100ms (at speed 0). One such update is called a "tick". Only when a new tick is calculated can inputs be applied to the simulation. This means input is delayed by 5 ticks (500ms / 100ms). So the tick in which the input was made (and sent to others) is different from the tick in which it is applied to the game.
The F11 windows mostly tells you for how many past ticks a player's input has not arrived yet at YOUR computer. For example if you see that "player 2" is behind by 3 updates/ticks/packets that means that you havent yet received the input that you will need from that player 2 ticks in the future. When a player is behind 5/6 ticks, your game simulation stops, because you need his input (which he should have made and sent 5/6 ticks ago) RIGHT NOW.
The F11 window shows you only the connection between you and other players, not between two other players. (every player is connected to every other player), so everybody sees something different in the F11 window.
So when you see that one player is 6 ticks behind in sending you their input and game has stopped, but every other player is 1-2 ticks behind, that means:
Sometimes a player is not constantly behind 6 ticks but is oscillating between about 4 and 6 ticks, resulting in a stuttering game, that means:
If one player is constantly sending his input but at a slower rate than other players, the game slows down (time between ticks is increased) until that player can keep up. Thats why game speed for everyone is determined by the slowest players computer (because the game simulation must be kept in sync on every players computer).
Edit: Keep in mind i don't know if the input delays is fixed to 500ms or to 5 ticks. If it is defined in ticks, that means it would change when you change game speed. Not sure. If it is defined in ms that means that the amount of ticks that somebody can be behind without causing the game to stutter/stop can vary based on game speed.
As FTx said, desyncs are a different problem.
@FtXCommando
I said nothing about who should be Player Councillour in my post. you are creating a horror-scenario out of it. The most important point seems to not have come through:
You are the kind of guy that NEEDS to be judgemental to do your job. Because if you don't judge, you cannot act. The player councillor could look at FAF from a completely different viewpoint andi think that could be very valuable.
As it stands, we don't need to do this exact split, but we need SOME split. The current amount of responsibilities that are piled on this position is absolutly ridicoulous. The list of stuff you do is laughably out of any reasonable bounds. We are talking about work that is supposed to be done by volunteers in their free time here. This is not a critique of you, its a critique of the position, you are doing a great job DESPITE the job description.
This guy still has not understood what it means to not have the source code. I doubt he has ever written code in a compiled programming language ever.
@Spy_Emanciator Im sorry to say that there is probably no random hero dev hiding in the woods that is just waiting to be encouraged by your non-sensical expectations and will spring into action once you say "its so easy" 100 times in a row.
@ThomasHiatt said in Legacy client not working:
Java client has cost FAF a very large amount of developer time for an inferior and unneeded product. Dev power is supposedly scarce around here and this is an egregious waste. The python client could have simply been refactored and improved. Even after several years of work the Java client is not really any better.
"Inferior": subjective "unneeded": no "not really any better" : repeating urself "could have simply been refactored": so simple that nobody showed up for like 2 years after repeated calls for more python devs in the forums;
If was repeated about a 100 times already, but the python client was so abandoned that it actively blocked improvements to the entire rest of the FAF infrustructure.
Your nice idea about making websites today for vault tabs is only easily possible today because the Java API exists, which was basically blocked from being improved upon by the python client.
Java client reduced backend maintenance cost (which is more important than all of the points in your list), made map gen improvements easier or even happen at all, makes TMM UI happen and will probably in the future wipe your ass for you while you sit on the toilet complaining about it without noticing.
It makes no sense (both in terms of gameplay and lore) that you can zoom in and clearly see that its a Mantis (aka bigger threat than lab), and then just zoom out and somehow the information lost now?
The other factions would have to gimp their own tactical overview on purpose to remove information they already have, why.
So what about splittting the role like this:
What about a compromise?
Alternatively, maybe the low res map could simply save the information itself somewhere in the map files instead of the DB, but the client would then have to read the map files to gee that information.
@gruffman said in two room and nonexistent room，LOL:
i believe those green blocks are actual maps that have been in the game for years, its not an error
Look at the hoster
@goblinsly
Just so you are aware. Any test maps you will find are usually trying to measure sim speed, not FPS. Almost nobody cares about FPS, because sim speed is the thing that causes the game to slow down, FPS is usually good enough.
@jip said in Why does Fullshare exist?:
@valki therefore you shouldn't invest (too many) resources into destroying the ACU, but instead of destroying his eco / base. Which is to me a lot more fun than sniping someone or being sniped.
But the consequence of understanding full share is not to stop sniping, its to snipe the higher rated player and auto-win if there is a meaningful rating-difference.
Well compatibility settings probably dont matter much, but run as admin means only programs started as admin can start it.
I don't have the anti-virus activated. ..\bin\ForgedAlliance.exe 'Properties' is set to the default values after installing the FAF client which is to Run as Administrator and in Windows' 'Vista' compatibility mode.
Thats not at all the default values. Default is NOT run as administrator (if the exe is configured to run as admin, the client cannot start it!) and NO compatibility mode. I don't know what program has made these changes to your exe or maybe it was yourself, but that is most likely the problem!
I think there should be a progression that only locks already unlocked units/buildings for important story reasons, so building it yourself would have to be late mission becausei t would require T3. Alternatively, you could still let the ally start building the experimental, but player needs to send T1/T2 engineers to assist, so no overflowing.
But yes, while its fun to come up with these ideas, and we could definitely collect a good bunch of them, putting them into a logical story progression and actually building the missions would be the hard part. But having to incorporate certain situations is i think benefitial to coming up with a good story, constrains can elevate creativity.
I think that the most engaging way (not the most efficient in terms of time spent) to learn stuff as a very new player is by "tutorial campaign". Unlike the vanilla campaign (which really doesnt teach much, it just restricts units/buildings) it would be much more focused and showcase specific mechanics, encounters with specifically restricted toolkit.
Some things cannot be thought well like that, for example general tradeoff between eco / tech / bp / units and general game progression, but make sure that the player is aware of the entire toolbox that the game gives them. Its much less frustrating to get beaten in PVP if you at least have some idea about all the tools.
Problem with this is that of course if big balance changes happen, that might cause certain situations to play out differently than planned. The idea itself is not new, i think several people have mentioned the small starcraft missions that you play with fixed units, but those seemed a bit boring because its just the same thing over and over with different units (and im not suggesting to always put the player in fixed unit situations, that is too repetitive).
At the end of the day, if learning is not enjoyable, not many people are gonna try to get gud. When you first joined FAF, your goal was probably not to dominate ladder rating. The competitive aspects comes after you have seen the potential of all the tools that the game provides. The game must prove that its going to be worth the time spent to improve.
You can start watching them and then tab out and close the client. The client needs internet before starting them to download the correct game version, mods, etc.