2.42?

Discussion in 'General' started by MetricMike, Sep 5, 2013.

  1. MetricMike

    MetricMike Member

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  2. ImSpartacus

    ImSpartacus nerf spec plz

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  3. wealthysoup

    wealthysoup Lead Tester

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    I wouldnt get your hopes up, trickster and myself were only using it briefly to test the updated fission script
     
  4. ImSpartacus

    ImSpartacus nerf spec plz

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    That alone is worth an update.

    I don't get why you guys don't do small updates with manageable amounts of changes. If you're just fiddling with scripts, how much could you fuck up that couldn't be rolled back?
     
  5. Candles

    Candles CAPTAIN CANDLES, DUN DUN DUN, DUN DUN DUN DUN.

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    Nigga' look at the date on the server name. 21/2/13.
     
  6. wealthysoup

    wealthysoup Lead Tester

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    Not my call im afraid.

    Candles--I just ran a server cfg file I created for testing purposes (all cvars set right). Apparantly I updated it from 2.41 to 2.42 at some point but didnt remove the old test date (oops)
     
  7. A-z-K

    A-z-K Member

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    You bitches are all screwed once you sonsa'bichess give me back fusion engine.
    Trickster: Whilst you're up; Grab us one of those Tesla weapons, Ta.
     
  8. ImSpartacus

    ImSpartacus nerf spec plz

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    That's the kind of shit I'm afraid of.

    It's not like I'm against Trickster's pet weapons. It sounds like a nifty concept and the more the merrier. But adding a weapon takes too much time.

    I don't even want to know how you guys make decisions...
     
  9. Z100000M

    Z100000M Vithered Weteran

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    Actually, spartacus makes a valid point for a change.
    Even I now have no fucking idea who does what, who has the final say or how the update system operates. If someone could elaborate maybe it would stop people from calling names. FOr like a whole year all I've heard was "I dont do x" and "we can't x" and nothing besides that. No wonder people are confused as shit.
     
  10. Sgt.Security

    Sgt.Security Member

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    The result of that fission script test?

    If it's good, then it's honestly enough for 2.411.
    You guys are not delivering updates frequently enough to piss off Valve or anyone anyway.
     
  11. ImSpartacus

    ImSpartacus nerf spec plz

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    Is this possible? Is that why we don't have more frequent updates?
     
  12. Candles

    Candles CAPTAIN CANDLES, DUN DUN DUN, DUN DUN DUN DUN.

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    Which is exactly why that's been put on hold. Don't worry about it too much.

    Believe it or not, it's more democratic than it seems. It's not very transparent, but its for a good reason. A more transparent system makes it much easier to get peoples hopes up and then all the more likely they'd get crushed. It also would force even more time to go into each change trying to convince people towards one side or another, which could delay things even more than they already are. Suffice to say, a lot of discussion actually does go into every decision; it's not like Trickster is saying "I want to add this and change that and fuck over those" and then doing that all on his own.

    And to be blunt, there really are people who have no fuckin' clue what the hell they're talking about, and then convince others that their shit ideas are good even when they aren't. It may seem harsh to bypass discussions by making it so opaque, but it's better than being transparent and having to pick between trying to discuss with dumbasses or ignoring all public discussion anyway.

    It really is a simple answer. People are busy, shit breaks down, sometimes people seem to disappear off the face of the Earth. Developing Empires takes a backseat compared to real-life commitments, and sometimes everything gets bottlenecked because there's only one person who can do what's needed and he's busy. Doesn't help with there being as much as an eight hour time difference between people who need to talk to each other.


    For what it's worth though, the next patch is intended to mostly be balance. In particular, I just added code to fix giving ammo to cannons, so instead of getting one shell at a time, each cannon has a variable in the script that sets how much ammo it gets per reload "tick".
     
  13. complete_

    complete_ lamer

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    oOoooOoOoOo secrets~~~~~
     
  14. wealthysoup

    wealthysoup Lead Tester

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    Trickster gave up on his plans and afaik reset it to be similar to 2.4 fission with a bit of a nerf.

    Valve doesnt get involved now its on steampipe (since 2.4)


    Im a bit dissapointed trickster hasnt posted in this thread in an attempt to atleast answer some of the questions (and yes security, I was all for that plan months ago but myself and trickster unfortunately have different ideas of release schedules)
     
  15. Trickster

    Trickster Retired Developer

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    I've posted shit up in the past regarding progress, but it nearly always ends in deadlines not being met and people being disappointed, so I tend to avoid really making large posts about what's going on. I used to, but like I said, I've been burnt a few times with that, so I've just learnt that it's not worth the hassle.

    But, seeing as I'm fucking retarded, I may as well post a few things up here. I've no doubt I'll regret it, but at least this is some thread that will disappear in a while so no-one can hold me to anything.

    With regard to Fission: I gave up trying to have a passive overheat that caps out because the scripts don't want to play ball. I've just sort of got to accept that it's not possible without code support, so I've gone back to the previous iteration of Fission and balanced that up, given it was OP at the time. This script can be put out in a serverside patch, which I already told A-z-K I'll make sure he has before the pug on Saturday.

    With regard to balance patches in general: I'm kind of against them in a more general sense because I feel like it's a bit weak to put out a patch with nothing more than some text files. On top of that, there are a few things I want to add that require code support. Candles just added me a new script line that will allow me to fix this problem of cannons taking 10 years to reload vs MLs which takes about 10 seconds. The issue is though (and I haven't had chance to speak to Candles at the time of typing), there's a good chance that it's now mixed in with all the heavy GUI work that Beerdude is doing right now, which would make putting it out impossible. It's probably possible to apply it to whatever revision was going when we did the last patch, but I'm not a coder, so I'm not going to claim it is or isn't possible. I'm just waiting on Candles to let me know if it is or isn't possible.

    In a more general sense, the balance patch would be even more limited, as it would only include vehicles/research as well. Infantry weapons are off the table as far as I'm concerned until we get that shotgun in, which is currently delayed while we try and get the original source files from the creator, who hasn't been online in a while. And of course, the new weapons as Candles said, are a little too buggy to get included right now. Not to mention I don't have any sounds for them, and the fact that they probably require further code support. And honestly, despite what you may say, balance has literally never been better than it is now. The biggest balance issue is that a whole tree isn't viable (Physics) because the engine is shit, but that's a fairly stark contrast to previous iterations when no tree has been viable except one. The fact that every round doesn't see the same research is really a testament to the fact that balance has honestly not been better than it is right now. With the server-side Fission patch opening up Physics, that should really have a greater effect than the other 40 or so balance changes I have logged down for the next patch.

    Lastly, the developer team as a whole. I don't really feel like we "owe it" to explain to everyone how things work. No-one has paid for this game, we aren't paid to develop it, it's not a divine right of the players to be informed and invited to review every single decision. If anything, Myself, Vicki, A-z-K, Deif and Cyberkiller all pay out each month for our servers, with my bill coming to over £100/month for the server which hosts most of Empires' development stuff. If anyone ever asks me how things work, I'm more than happy to tell them, but I really don't like the self-righteous "it is owed to us" attitude that some have. It's actually really offensive to everyone in the development team who puts time into the game. We work to put time into a game that we love playing because we want to play it more, not because it's something we are employed to do.

    The fact is, everyone just works on what they want to work on. I may do the balance scripts, but that's not really what I'm here for. My job is essentially to coordinate things, to try and make it so that when people want to get things done, people don't get in the way of eachother, and that everyone works towards a single goal. As far as gameplay decisions go, over the past couple of years I've made most of them. That's not out of any kind of "power" that I have. As Candles said, no-one just decides shit. If I think we should do something, I'll go speak to Candles, Wealthysoup and Beerdude, as well as some other people in the community who aren't even in the development team, but whose opinion I trust. Wealthysoup and Candles were both people I spoke to regarding things before they joined up. If any of those guys want to do anything, generally speaking, they'll tell me and I'll pass the information on to the others. It's really that simple. It's all about trust, and everyone in the development team has a great amount of trust for eachother. Everyone trusts the decisions that everyone else makes.
     
  16. Z100000M

    Z100000M Vithered Weteran

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    I dont get where did you get the idea that I think anyone owes me anything.
    I am, fact, quite annoyed that decision making and actually knowing if anything is happening at all is kept behind the curtains for reasons unfathomable, but thinking I have a divine right to know everything does not come into play at all. I'm not at all expecting Brutos style devlogging, but even a alight mention of what is being worked on in a locked thread would be great.

    As for the balance opinion, I have to say that from the last games I've played I think you are being super biased here and its not true.
     
    Last edited: Sep 6, 2013
  17. Trickster

    Trickster Retired Developer

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    I wasn't actually referring to you with the "owing" thing. And it's not kept behind curtains or hidden. There's no active effort to keep things hidden, it's just that there's no active effort to publicise what's being done. If other developers want to post up "hey I'm doing this", then that's totally their choice. I personally post up balance progress when we're actually testing the changes, which we aren't right now.

    With regard to balance, idk. I've played quite a bit this last few weeks, and I've seen Regen, Absorbant and Composite in use. I pick up Reactive myself when I play but admittedly I haven't seen anyone else do that. Likewise, I've seen BioML, BioMG, Homing, HE CN, UML, and of course, UGL, all in use. With regard to engines, I've seen every engine except Fission (for obvious reasons). So really, when you take the Physics tree out of the equation given the fact that Fission is making it unusable right now, I honestly think that's a pretty good variety compared to what we're used to. It doesn't mean we can't do better, but comparatively speaking, it's the least stale I've seen 6-month old scripts ever be.
     
    Last edited: Sep 6, 2013
  18. Z100000M

    Z100000M Vithered Weteran

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    Don't get me wrong I wasnt saying that current scripts are shit, I jsut disagreed with the notion that its THE best we ever had.
     
  19. Beerdude26

    Beerdude26 OnThink(){ IsDownYet(); }

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    Haven't checked out his code changes yet, but they're probably way out of the way what I'm doing. The Awesomium GUI code seems to play nicely, though, so that's nice. At the moment, it's just used to show the Quick-Start Guide and to show an HTML loading panel when connecting to a server. For that last part, we'll need some more robust HTML pages that can scale to arbitrary resolutions and still look nice. If anyone is interested, the relevant stuff is in the Empires SVN under the html/generic/1 folder.
     
  20. Candles

    Candles CAPTAIN CANDLES, DUN DUN DUN, DUN DUN DUN DUN.

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    Definitely. All the files I touched are unrelated to the ones that Beerdude has touched, so what I've done can be pushed out without pushing out Beerdude's stuff.
     

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