Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Aztec monks with 1/55 HP no longer die when picking up or dropping a relic

reddit.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 267 posts

Re: Aztec monks with 1/55 HP no longer die when picking up or dropping a relic

#91

Post by rwalle »

vishnugupta wrote: post #23

What’s the best way to play AoE on a MacBook? I can’t afford a dedicated game rig so any pointers would be of great help.

Probably not the answer you were expecting, but you may want to consider getting an Xbox Series S (that is often on sale at $250 or even $200), plugin your mouse and keyboard and you'll have a great experience. Yes that is a "dedicated game rig" but much more affordable than a usable gaming PC. Of course, only if you also play other games on that xbox and can live with no disc. This is what I would do in your situation.

Re: Aztec monks with 1/55 HP no longer die when picking up or dropping a relic

#92

Post by riffraff »

a_e_k wrote: post #14
riffraff wrote: post #3

This is a fantastic out of context change log. For even more abstract ones I cannot recommend enough the Dwarf Fortress Bugs Twitter account[0] The last of which is > Flying creatures keep exploding into pieces and dying: Are they crashing into trees? [0]sadly no Mastodon, https://twitter.com/DwarfFortBugs

Paradox Interactive games, especially the Crusader Kings series also have some pretty entertaining change logs. E.g., from Crusader Kings II, Patch 2.4 [0]: - Handsome and lustful men now also populate the cabins in the wild for the pleasures of people who find them attractive. - Characters who love their spouses very much are now less likely to join holy orders. - Paranoid parents should no longer worry about potent…

These are great, they make me want to play the game!

Although I'm not sure why a threesome during a pagan festival has become illegal, I'd have considered that a feature, not a bug.

Re: Aztec monks with 1/55 HP no longer die when picking up or dropping a relic

#93

Post by still_grokking »

zelphirkalt wrote: post #18
ReactiveJelly wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The formula was probably `return new_maxhp * (old_hp / old_maxhp);` ... > Due to floating point rounding errors, convert_hp(1, 55, 55) equals 0.999999940395355224609375, which is less than 1, which means the unit dies. Ahh. The old "Multiplying and dividing is associative... for the set of reals, not for the subset that you can actually afford to compute with." So it should have been `(new_maxhp * old_hp) / old_max…

Seems all that could have been avoided by using rationals in general and the condition for living being >0 instead of dying The more I write code, the more I notice how rarely one truly should want floats in most kinds of programs and how they almost always carry a whole bag of problems with them.

> The more I write code, the more I notice how rarely one truly should want floats in most kinds of programs and how they almost always carry a whole bag of problems with them.

This! Imho you more or less never want floats under "normal" conditions.

Also in most application domains it makes exactly no difference that floats have HW support, as the bottlenecks are there usually elsewhere. And in case you really need real fast floating point math (say for simulations) you would do it anyway on the GPU nowadays.

The only langue I know of that is sane in this regard is Pyret:

https://www.pyret.org/

[CTRL-F: Pyret has numbers]

I'm still baffled no other new language thought about something so basic like number ever again. Everybody is just using what the HW provides natively since the year of yore. As a result there is no motivation for HW vendors to update the status quo form the state of the art of the 60's of the last century. Imho having support for rationals and (fixpoint) decimal numbers in std. hardware is long overdue! But it would only happen if there would be serous demand form the runtime / language vendors. Classical chicken egg problem.

Re: Aztec monks with 1/55 HP no longer die when picking up or dropping a relic

#94

Post by Reason077 »

potemkinhr wrote: post #42
Reason077 wrote: post #40

It’s great that Microsoft are still actively maintaining a ~24 year old game! Blizzard ought to take note. A few years back they announced “Warcraft 3 reforged” with great fanfare: a remastered version of the classic Warcraft 3, updated for modern systems with improved graphics etc. It looked/sounded fantastic! But despite it being a paid upgrade, what they released was a buggy mess that did little justice to the cla…

It's actually worse, they pulled the legacy version from the users and forced the (effectively) downgraded version to everyone. Even the owners of the legacy version were shafted as they forced a update which removed much of the functionality of the legacy version. To this date still the best version was the pre-patch one for everyone who has the original installers and the latest pre-upgrade patch

Update: In fairness to Blizzard, I did just check this again and it seems like they have started maintaining Warcraft 3 Reforged again, releasing some small patches last year and a significant update in January 2023:

https://news.blizzard.com/en-gb/warcraft3/23896791/warcraft-...

I'll have to take another look now that this has been released.

But still, there was a 2 year stretch between 2020 and 2022 when the game was in a very crappy state and absolutely nothing was done to improve it or address the issues.

Re: Aztec monks with 1/55 HP no longer die when picking up or dropping a relic

#98

Post by Sakos »

voz_ wrote: post #44
shilgapira wrote: post #43

What a weird coincidence. I thought at first this would be about the Guild Wars game, but turns out they both have something to do with monks and 55: https://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/55_Monk

Ahh nostalgia. I thought so too. This was such a fun build. I miss GW1 a lot, GW2 missed the mark, and is no true successor.

Man, I miss GW1. That skill/class system was amazing and still goes unmatched in its flexibility and depth today.

Re: Aztec monks with 1/55 HP no longer die when picking up or dropping a relic

#99

Post by jrochkind1 »

rini17 wrote: post #68
PhilipRoman wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aren't rationals subject to exponential blowup in storage/precision? IMO the best approach for business logic values is picking the smallest meaningful unit and representing it with integers. Precision and storage requirements become very easy to reason about.

Did this exponential blowup ever prove troublesome in practice? I think it can be easily solved by strategically placed rounding steps. But explicit rounding is advisable in many cases anyway.

But strategically placed rounding was in fact the solution to the original problem that in this thread Rationals were proposed as solving...

Rational types are not super popular and don't get used that much, most (not all) people that end up using them do it very intentionally and consciously and know what they're dealing with -- if they were more ubiquitious, I suspect more trouble would be seen "in practice".

While it's probably true that any digital number format will have edge cases that in fact come up in practice, my personal choice of "Why the heck isn't this more popular, why doesn't every language support it, why isn't it in fact the default representation of a numeric literal" -- is floating point "decimal" types, like ruby (or I think Java?) BigDecimal, rather than rational. I think they mostly work matching programmer's mental models of numbers, and for many/most common uses on 2023 platforms the performance is just fine. (this would not have been true 30 years ago).

Re: Aztec monks with 1/55 HP no longer die when picking up or dropping a relic

#100

Post by vultour »

Reason077 wrote: post #94
potemkinhr wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's actually worse, they pulled the legacy version from the users and forced the (effectively) downgraded version to everyone. Even the owners of the legacy version were shafted as they forced a update which removed much of the functionality of the legacy version. To this date still the best version was the pre-patch one for everyone who has the original installers and the latest pre-upgrade patch

Update: In fairness to Blizzard, I did just check this again and it seems like they have started maintaining Warcraft 3 Reforged again, releasing some small patches last year and a significant update in January 2023: https://news.blizzard.com/en-gb/warcraft3/23896791/warcraft-... I'll have to take another look now that this has been released. But still, there was a 2 year stretch between 2020 and 2022 when the game w…

Blizzard also pulled the original W3 downloads and switched everyone to a non-hd version of Reforged. I'm still mad about that because I paid for both and I'm no longer able to get one of them.
Post reply on HN