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Lessons learned while developing Age of Empires 1 Definitive Edition

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Re: Lessons learned while developing Age of Empires 1 Definitive Edition

#31

Post by tambre »

jandrese wrote: post #29
xrisk wrote: post #7

It's a pity they aren't releasing on Steam though. Most players aren't going to buy the game from the Win10 store.

Windows Store has been surprisingly fragile for me. I've bought a couple of games through it and things like turning off IPv6 will cause it to fail to download anything and spit out cryptic error codes. But mostly I don't want my games spread across a dozen different storefronts. Keeping them all in once place is more convenient. I would probably be more open to the Windows Store if I owned an XBox and there was some…

Steam is doing even worse with IPv6 support – in fact they have absolutely none (although their CDN provider has great support for it). Really a shame that they're missing such an useful piece of functionality in this day and age. This of course has made me consider some of the alternatives...

Unfortunately the only Steam alternatives that have some amount of IPv6 support are Humble Bundle and Green Man Gaming. Though you may as well not count Humble Bundle as accessing their website over IPv6 results in it being completely broken [1].

[1] https://vgy.me/0E4HBm.png

Re: Lessons learned while developing Age of Empires 1 Definitive Edition

#32

Post by skittlebrau »

jandrese wrote: post #28
quadcore wrote: post #25

Develop strong out of sync (OOS) detection tools early, and learn how to use them. The way lockstep work is that the clients gives themselves a rendez-vous in the future and agree to compute one turn of the game, given the players' input of that turn, at that moment. It's very clever. The players input are sent to every clients and will be computed in the future in a deterministic way. So every client is computing th…

Of course if you want your game to update its state at a rate faster than the slowest ping time of the connected client then you've got problems. On LAN play you can get away with this, but over the Internet it's not as workable, especially if some players are on modem. I remember one game that has crossplay between Linux and Windows brought down by a scheme like this, because it turns out that Linux and Windows defa…

You can run your updates faster than the slowest ping. You just need more command latency. So when you, say, command a unit to move somewhere, there's an agreed-upon future time when that's going to happen. This time has to be longer than it takes for the command to get to everyone. If it's not, then you stall. If command latency is very high, the game feels very unresponsive though (and tricks of showing local/visual-only confirmation of your commands only goes so far).

You can't run updates any faster than the slowest machine can run them, though, or again you stall. This was a bigger problem on Age 1 and 2 where render rate and update rate were linked. On Age of Mythology and beyond, the render rate was decoupled from the update rate, so updates could happen more slowly while animations and so forth could still look smooth via interpolation.

Re: Lessons learned while developing Age of Empires 1 Definitive Edition

#33

Post by xrisk »

tambre wrote: post #31
jandrese wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Windows Store has been surprisingly fragile for me. I've bought a couple of games through it and things like turning off IPv6 will cause it to fail to download anything and spit out cryptic error codes. But mostly I don't want my games spread across a dozen different storefronts. Keeping them all in once place is more convenient. I would probably be more open to the Windows Store if I owned an XBox and there was some…

Steam is doing even worse with IPv6 support – in fact they have absolutely none (although their CDN provider has great support for it). Really a shame that they're missing such an useful piece of functionality in this day and age. This of course has made me consider some of the alternatives... Unfortunately the only Steam alternatives that have some amount of IPv6 support are Humble Bundle and Green Man Gaming. Thoug…

I'm curious -- why would IPv6 access for a website be an important matter?

Re: Lessons learned while developing Age of Empires 1 Definitive Edition

#34

Post by madez »

glenneroo wrote: post #17
ashtube wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Literally never used the MS Store

I even go so far as to block all requests to MS Store (via winstore.app.exe) with NetLimiter. I also block outlookcommunications, microsoft.photos.exe and video.ui.exe, all of which I never use but they keep wanting to call home every few days).

Why do you stay with a system whose developer has proven to act against your interest?

Re: Lessons learned while developing Age of Empires 1 Definitive Edition

#35

Post by munificent »

adityab wrote: post #18

Looks like they want to avoid changing gameplay as much as possible. Considering their focus on preserving even minute details of game dynamics... I wish they'd made an exception for pathfinding - the algorithm in the original AoE is extremely bad. In particular, I really wish they'd introduce some improved ways to command groups of units. IIRC the Rise of Rome expansion introduced double-click group selection of all…

It's really hard to change something like pathfinding without revamping the entire game. A game's balance is like a hanging mobile. Change one aspect, and the whole thing becomes unbalanced until you adjust all of the other weights in the system.

For example, if you make the pathfinding smarter, then there's a good chance you've made all AI enemies effectively more powerful and now all of the level difficulty is too high. You may also affect the strategy of levels — levels that used to have carefully crafted chokepoints that the player must notice may no longer be chokepoints with smarter pathfinding. That in turn might lead you to want to tweak the design of the level...

Re: Lessons learned while developing Age of Empires 1 Definitive Edition

#36

Post by Arkanosis »

xrisk wrote: post #7

It's a pity they aren't releasing on Steam though. Most players aren't going to buy the game from the Win10 store.

> It's a pity they aren't releasing on Steam though. Most players aren't going to buy the game from the Win10 store.

I agree but I'd go even further: it's a pity they aren't releasing as standalone. Where are the good old days when using a locked platform wasn't required to install a game?

Re: Lessons learned while developing Age of Empires 1 Definitive Edition

#37

Post by jandrese »

tambre wrote: post #31
jandrese wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Windows Store has been surprisingly fragile for me. I've bought a couple of games through it and things like turning off IPv6 will cause it to fail to download anything and spit out cryptic error codes. But mostly I don't want my games spread across a dozen different storefronts. Keeping them all in once place is more convenient. I would probably be more open to the Windows Store if I owned an XBox and there was some…

Steam is doing even worse with IPv6 support – in fact they have absolutely none (although their CDN provider has great support for it). Really a shame that they're missing such an useful piece of functionality in this day and age. This of course has made me consider some of the alternatives... Unfortunately the only Steam alternatives that have some amount of IPv6 support are Humble Bundle and Green Man Gaming. Thoug…

Not supporting IPv6 is better than breaking in mysterious ways when you have IPv6 support but have to disable it on that machine for reasons (Netflix).

I would like to see Valve get with the times on their v6 support though.

Re: Lessons learned while developing Age of Empires 1 Definitive Edition

#38

Post by fnord123 »

gsich wrote: post #10
xrisk wrote: post #7

It's a pity they aren't releasing on Steam though. Most players aren't going to buy the game from the Win10 store.

Why not? A MS account is not uncommon.

Gaming for Windows Live died. Let it stay dead.

Re: Lessons learned while developing Age of Empires 1 Definitive Edition

#39

Post by oblio »

madez wrote: post #34
glenneroo wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I even go so far as to block all requests to MS Store (via winstore.app.exe) with NetLimiter. I also block outlookcommunications, microsoft.photos.exe and video.ui.exe, all of which I never use but they keep wanting to call home every few days).

Why do you stay with a system whose developer has proven to act against your interest?

What's the alternative? And before you offer some obvious answer, remember that we're in the context of a Windows-only game :)
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