Does 2 minutes of research time matter?

Do keep in mind that out of everyone that's touched the code in the past year, I'm the only one that's played in the last three, possibly six months, and god knows that I do not comm.

I'm not particularly keen on sharing source. Not because there are super hidden exploitable secrets in it, but because we're talking multiple functions and calls scattered across several files that can take a good hour to understand one aspect of. There's a good reason I spent two months just reading code before I actually did anything with it.

Though, don't even need to see the source to tell that VehicleBioDamage is measured in damage/interval, Time is seconds and Interval is seconds/interval. So (damage/interval)*(seconds)/(seconds/interval) = damage. Or in other words, VehicleBioDamage * VehicleBioTime / VehicleBioInterval. It even says what everything is measure in right there in the script comments. Just multiply it by the "Bioweapon Damage Modifier" to get the total damage for the duration.

For Regeneration, it refers to the amount of a plate regenerated per second. Which is why it's less than one, it's not an amount but a percentage. So Regen regens 10% of a plate per second and Compo regens 3% of a plate per second.

Scripts are nice, they're actually commented pretty well.

 

Probably already been answered but those are just plain text files so anyones free to have a look.

That said theres a lot of stuff in the scripts that works in obtuse ways, tricksters the person to ask for more info on most of them

I assume by "source" people are just talking about the values from the scripts files which are in your Empires\Scripts folder

 

Candles, I was going to post an idea that would help you build self documenting web pages from the source code by exporting the XML embedded comments in the code and importing them into a HELP web page, which gets uploaded and is dynamic with each build. But I know it would be a fair amount of work and I'd rather see you guys work on the functionality. We'll just harp on your for the values to help us learn the settings.

LazyBum - where did you get the regen values ? I assume there are config files on our system ? Or are you special ?

Maybe Trickster can give us some instruction to learn how these values tweak the game and how they are processed within the code.

I once built a Diagnostic program that was completely driven by XML files. When the next project came up I was funded for a year, until I told them it was easily modified by all the users, I didn't need to do anything. Great idea that worked myself out of a job

I know when the other team is pushing Regen heavies. I hit them with dual HE and triple homing, then one more HE and one more round of HE+homing and they are dead. They can not get away - brew haha. Regen rates do not matter unless you are shooting from a distance. Front line guys need reactive or compo.

 

Something to add here, if you make a hacked version of empires (by copying all your files to the "/steamapps/sourcemods" folder) you can change the values in the scripts and use them. You can make nukes 1 slot, which fly at 2000 units/second and have a blast radius of the entire map.

 

I give up trying to help people that totally refuse to read my posts

 

Pretty much every value in the game is stored in the scripts; everything from the number of slots a weapon takes to the speed that the crosshairs grow when you jump while crouched.

You shouldn't need to even copy anything; just modify the files directly and then run a game locally. Steam isn't going to try and update them unless you force it to verify the cache.

Think about it this way. If you double the interval time and keep the time the same, then half the number of ticks will happen and half the amount of damage will be applied.

 

Both Drag and myself have commented the living fuck out of the scripts. They're pretty self explanatory. But I don't fully understand how absolutely everything works. Most stuff I had to work out myself and just comment as I saw things by eye. MOOtant was not the most supportive coder, he wanted to remove scripts entirely so only coders could edit. So I wasn't exactly going to get any copy-pasted code portions or an explanation as to how stuff worked. I do get that now, but I've worked the vast majority of things out by this point, though I still have a few useful code snippets from Beerdude, Brutos and Candles that I can use to reference things every now and then.

With regard to regeneration rate, I don't really know what the value means but it makes no real difference to me. I just judged how fast it regened in game, changed it, judged it again, changed it, etc. All this shit was done in the RCs we used to have (serverside scripts). I'm not a real believer in balance-by-spreadsheet. I tend to just get ingame and judge things based of what and other people see. Inb4 "u dun play now", this version has been out since March, so I've played enough of it to know what needs changing.

If you have any questions about script stuff, just ask.

Just keep in mind that I know what I need to know, and I don't need to know everything. Things like what that exact decimal of the regeneration refers to, just aren't important to balancing. It regens X fast. It's either too fast or too slow, so I just change the value accordingly. I don't need to do any calculations for that, so the actual meaning of the value is worthless. I'd say that percentage of a plate is probably a very good possibility though. You could measure it yourself (roughly). Build a regen heavy on a local server, join the other team, get a DU APC and slice away at the armour until you just take 1 plate off. Then time how long it takes to come back.

 

Dear god, why would he want to do that?

Surely Mootant had some sort of reasonable justification for such a thing.

/facepalm

I think that's the kind of detail that many of us are looking for. I'm a little angry that these scripts didn't at least get proper units commented. That's just sloppy.

From what Candles is saying, it sounds like testing might be easier than looking at the source.

 

Yeah of course he did. He wanted to stop people who weren't him, touching anything at all. If you think I'm a cunt, then you have no idea how lucky you are to never had to have dealt with him. I guarantee you that you'd have been permanently banned long ago for even thinking of arguing with him.

There were very few comments before Drag started commenting things. Beerdude might have actually added a lot before Drag now that I think about it. Either way, both Drag and myself added things as we used them and as we required. Most of the actual script stuff was added back when Empires was young, much of it was totally untested. I found stuff that had never been used at all. Some of it worked, some of it didn't. If anyone remembers Gas Turbine being totally unable to move, that was one of those occasions where it didn't work.

Either way, I don't see why it's important to have the units (in this very particular case) known. They make absolutely zero difference to me as a balancer, and they make zero difference as a player, because there's no strategical advantage you can glean from that. Don't try and say otherwise on the last point, because as someone who has found a way to make use of almost every scrap of information I've ever found related to Empires (and yes, that includes shit I've found going through the scripts), I can say without a doubt that knowing exactly what the unit of regen means in the scripts means nothing. You can't make use of that.

 

Trickster thank you for the honest reply. You do have a group of guys willing to help and run tests and report results. I think most of us have done that in various posts online as you well know. Providing a mechanism to recommend something that makes sense requires that we know more of how the game works.

On low population nights I have done tests on various setups, with many different guys to figure out how certain things work. Let us know if we can be of any help. I haven't dug through all the text files distributed with the game, so I'll do that to find the scripts and see if I can make sense of it.

I don't know if you'd be willing to share the source code, but I am very good at reading other people's code. I certainly won't add to anyones work load and may learn enough to be able to contribute. I can not contribute to artistic designs, although am very good at Photoshop.

Also I have NOT and most likely will not spend the hours it takes to read everything on the forums for script information, unless it's in a specific location. That would be reading 99% crap and 1% quality and not worth my time.

 

You sound convinced that you've spent years doing all you can and others can't really improve the your work.

It sounds like Mootant was also convinced that others couldn't improve on his work.

ove:

 

I really don't get what you're saying. You're arguing about how you NEED to know exactly what a specific value in the script exactly means, even though there's absolutely no situation in which knowing the "true" meaning of that value could affect playing or developing the game in any way, shape or form. I don't see how you can try and turn this into me being some sort of hypocrite because I'm just saying in this thread, that I don't really see why it's important and why it would ever be important to anyone. That's all I've said (repeatedly). You're just trying to create some kind of argument out of it, and I don't really know why. There are plenty of areas in which the scripts could do with more detailed comments. This would help in both development and potentially even gameplay. But what the arbitrary value for regeneration rate means? That's just you trying to be an ass again.

 

Well, regen is possibly one of the simplest parts of the armor scripts. Every frame, the game takes that value, multiplies it by the health of one plate, multiplies that by the number of seconds it took the frame to render, and adds it to the previous amount of health on that side.

Personally, I believe that balancing by spreadsheet is the best way to find good initial values to start with, but testing is much better once you have the initial values to work with. Spreadsheets can't account for human variation. (Well, at least none of the one's we'd make.)

And yeah, there's really no need to know what the units are, even from my perspective. As far as the game is concerned, units don't exist. Everything in those scripts is a string followed by an int or a float. If you absolutely *have* to know, it's possible to figure out the units from basic dimensional analysis. For example, regen would be in the units of (health*seconds)[sup]-1[/sup]. But knowing that doesn't put you at an advantage or help you balance things if you're already at the point where you balance by testing.

 

What if regen worked per plate, but regenerated faster on the outer plates, creating sort of a hard shell with a delicious creamy center