51–60 of 69 posts
As with all historic RPG's, The key lesson is in how you craft your C integer types. One type allows you to cleverly assign various character traits to specific groups and users, the other turns Ghandi from a benevolent peace loving icon to a harbinger of endless misery and destruction https://www.geek.com/games/why-gandhi-is-always-a-warmongeri...
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There is a stigma in the PC gamer community against Microsoft, especially after Games for Windows. "Steam or go home" sentiments also aren't all that uncommon. As for the accounts - I really don't know anyone who actually uses the MS store (whereas pretty much everyone who plays video games has a Steam account), and I interact with plenty of end-users daily. Maybe it just happens that the area I live in never adopted…
Trading one monopoly for another, I guess.
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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…
Except this is a RTS and when players want a unit to get to a place it should get there without taking a detour across half of the map, especially when the player can visually see an optimal path. So no, there are no downsides to better pathfinding.
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?
Those are resources that could go into inventing the first plane. And some superior sooner or later realizes that you are on a unimaginative crusade and cuts the lifeline, resulting in a dead market-plattform, with contract-bound studios being dragged down with the sinking ship.
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Trading one monopoly for another, I guess.
A thus far benevolent monopoly who have indicated positive intent and applicable thought patterns (i.e. the whole piracy is service problem).
Joke aside, i assume a month later they will release on steam. The red number sirens and the fear of pirates have convinced a lot of sailors to rock the boat.
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…
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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?
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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…
Except this is a RTS and when players want a unit to get to a place it should get there without taking a detour across half of the map, especially when the player can visually see an optimal path. So no, there are no downsides to better pathfinding.
In a battle between melee and ranged units the ranged units want to maximize their surface area touching the ranged units so that all the melee units can attack at once and quickly change targets once an enemy unit has fallen. The ranged units want to minimize their surface area so that only the outer layer of the group will be attacked while every unit on the inside can freely fire on the melee units.
In an older RTS with poor pathing this meant constantly jockeying your forces around trying to either get a good surround or keeping rank. Moving your forces in certain ways could unpredictably change the formation of your units so great care had to be taken when engaging the enemy. Getting this to work out was a skill in of itself that took strategy, positioning, the ability to predict the enemies move, etc. All of this depth could take place between very small groups of very simple units.
In an RTS with perfect pathing the ranged units always move in a perfect sphere (minimizing surface area and maximizing volume) and the melee units perfectly synchronize their movements so they don't trip over each other when surrounding the enemy. Once it is decided that a group of simple melee units and ranged units will fight there really isn't much for the player to do except tell them to get on with it.
As real time strategy games have evolved along with better pathfinding, we've found out that with all things being equal, perfect pathing makes for very very boring fights. Active abilities had to be added to give the player something to do during the fight. Rock Paper Scissors type unit counters had to be added so that positioning mattered again. More AOE spells and debuffs had to be added so that another thing would force players to jockey units around.
Study the design of Starcraft BW and Starcraft II and you can see this very clearly. Certain fundamental unit matchups were completely broken by improved pathfinding such that more and more complicated mechanics had to be added to the game to give them balance and dynamism again.
Of course, this only really applies to C&C, SC, and AOE style RTS games. More modern RTS series like Men of War and Wargame don't follow this pattern because the range and lethality of the units typically far exceed their movement speeds and terrain and cover play a much larger role, but that is a whole different topic.
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…