There is 1 active coder (me) but that will end soon, KaneTW writes some things from time to time. Art forum is a group of wankers. But if you want anything in the mod ask Megel to accept it. I don't trust any of current "scripters". There is no one working on UI. Kylegar had big plans and that's it. Aircrafts are not being done because we don't have models see art forum. Infantry scripts won't be changed. Every week comes an idiot with totally new scripts and says that now they're 100 times better. We don't need forum trolls to help us. We need new developers with FREE TIME. List of features/changes for 2.25 has been written quite a long time ago and we're simply following it. It's not my fault that people like Kylegar/KaneTW get orgasm saying how they would rewrite half of of Empires code (UI/multithreading/steamworks/achievements/aircrafts) and people are surprised that we don't have them.
btw: who are the current scripters? Only Beerdude26? It's difficult to get him on steam or irc. I just wanted to concentrate on small parts of the game like jeep hill climb and homing missiles. But it's seems to be impossible to get these small changes to a playtest. My idea of balancing is to change a manageable range of parameters. Test them and then maybe change them again, till most devs and testers are happy with them. So now I will wait for the response for my homing missiles suggestion and then hopefully we can have some playtests with changed values. I see many good changes in 2.25. So please continue the good work.
Hence mine are just tweaked 2.24d scripts for balance. There's nothing particularly different apart from balance. And unlike every past scripts for empires, they were actually tested and refined. I accept mine are currently in the SVN, but you did say you were going to revert any scripts in the SVN after any test anyway.
You just don't understand that we have real lives Trickster. Regarding the discussion: I do not want to touch gameplay. I want to improve hints and add steamworks stuff and have trouble finding time for even that.
And because of that, the community offers you guys stuff to help out due to the lack of time. Also, no gameplay updates means everything will just get stale and people will quit. You basically said exactly what I mentioned a few posts earlier. If you don't update gameplay, it won't be any different to how it is now. People will play for 2 weeks then leave. Gameplay must ALWAYS be getting updated, something new to try, new strategys. In 2.24d at the moment, every round is a physics rush. That's it. How is that in any way fun?
Maybe not feature wise, but something that would be interesting is a dedicated scripting team that doesn't aim so much for balance vehicle wise, bu to change things up with script tweaks every 2 or 3 weeks, so that stratagems change. Nothing severe, but tweaks enough that it makes different research desirable.
I included your scripts in SVN for testing. Also, I didn't say that nobody will ever touch gameplay, just that I won't. We need people, like Jek said, who just do gameplay changes and nothing else.
I honestly couldn't agree more. There are many people who offered at some stage to do that. But nearly all gave up due to lack of support from the coding side, which IS required. The scripts are stupidly limiting.
Maybe move more stuff from code to scripts? If you make more things editable via scripting, I bet more community members would be able to pitch in.
Trickster: You can also do many things only with scripts. For me the question is, how to get script changes into the next version. It's already very difficult to only get script changes in a play test (still waiting for jeep better hill climb scripts to be tested) E.g. I wanted to make homing more useful. Most people agreed with the general idea of changes. So next thing would be to add this to a play test. Adjust the values and then add them to the final version.
So we need someone to officially handle scripts and the coding for it, or at least someone who is receptive to our few community scripters and in a position to upload the scripts to svn every week for weekly pug testing (we should have pugs on the weekend again). Don't we already have someone like that :confused:
That is the exact reason these people gave up. The "support" I mentioned was actually getting things taken over to scripts. I and numerous other scripters asked the devs for multiple prerequesite research (I.e. to get rails you need ER/charged cannon or something) for weeks, and kept getting told "it'll be done soon". Then I asked CoffeeBurrito who was no longer a dev, and he did it in about 2 minutes flat from me asking him, compiled it, sent me the syntax for it, sent me the DLLs, an example script and info on how it would work. As for SIP. SIP, we can't just add in little changes to each weapon from different people, or we'll end up with a horrible mismatch of stuff. There needs to be one person overall doing it.
This sounds horrid. Arbitrarily changing the balance to make certain strats the flavor of the month? ugh. I can understand that we need to fix up much of the internal coding for Empires. I've heard horror stories of turrets creating lag by updating their angles every frame to the central server from back in the day. Making a solid foundation of code is something that should be done sooner than later. Next on the list should be a major UI overhaul. It will take time, but the benefits would be huge. Making information more accessible is good and lets players understand their situation instead of "huh, that tank over there seems to always beat my tank for some reason". Some of the recent SVN UI hacks are welcome, but not enough. If anything, simply re-writing the existing UI to make changes easier to do in the future would be awesome. Then we can make serious gameplay changes. Once we have a solid foundation to build upon instead of cobbling on extra features using duct tape.
What people want done, isn't; yet changes can be made. There are no suggestions that need to be made, but if you won't acknowledge that some people have ideas that might actually be better than your own, then perhaps you should not make any changes at all.
Devs are here to decide what is important if you want to help us, join us. Otherwise I don't really care because I spend enough time doing assignments for uni.
I was thinking about the various GUI's in particular. If you could edit the vehicle/comm/infantry/selection screens via scripts, I think you could have community members create lots of fun and unique GUIs (think Nesquiko's GUI). People could then make a bunch of custom GUIs and the devs could pick the one they like the best as the 'official' one. If this is doable code-wise, I'd think it would be a great way for the devs to let community members help.
Most of the requests were for things to be transferred to the scripts. This is one from Mashav: That is the kind of thing I'm talking about. Also, many scripters offered you their services, and yet both positions for vehicle and infantry scripts are empty on the dev team. And yes, I am fully aware that many of these have since been implemented. But it took that long that Mashav has buggered off now.
The problem is it seems all the people who care about gameplay don't know C++, and all the people who know C++ don't care about gameplay. This is a dilemma that needs to be rectified immediately. So trickster, learn C++. Edit: For the record, I finally installed Visual C++ 2005 Express Edition. I'm looking at the .cpp files of the default HL2 mod template and I feel ALL POWERFUL. ...Of course, I don't know any of the syntax, but who cares? TIME TO CHANGE VALUES.
