> Assume the original developers knew what they were doing. The old code shipped and was successful. If you don't understand it, most likely the problem is you, not the code.
This needs to be chiseled on a tablet somewhere.
Lessons learned while developing Age of Empires 1 Definitive Edition
11–20 of 69 posts
Re: Lessons learned while developing Age of Empires 1 Definitive Edition
#12Re: Lessons learned while developing Age of Empires 1 Definitive Edition
#13I'm surprised they decided to modify the old code, I expected them to make a clean start and re-create the original experience from there.
Way before Counter-Strike: Global Offensive people tried to port the classic CS 1.6 (or 1.5) behavior to more modern engines or CS versions. From what I know no project succeeded because even replicating the recoil behavior were extremely hard. Gameplay features that were actually bugs would have to be simulated. I imagine it would be ten times harder for a complex game like AoE.
Re: Lessons learned while developing Age of Empires 1 Definitive Edition
#14It'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.
Personally, I can play a Windows game purchased on Steam on Linux/MacOS using Wine (This is how I currently play Age of Empires II). You can't say the same about a Windows Store game.
Re: Lessons learned while developing Age of Empires 1 Definitive Edition
#15Re: Lessons learned while developing Age of Empires 1 Definitive Edition
#16Re: Lessons learned while developing Age of Empires 1 Definitive Edition
#17Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why not? A MS account is not uncommon.
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).
Re: Lessons learned while developing Age of Empires 1 Definitive Edition
#18Looks 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 similar units, so it's not without precedent. If they change nothing else, my number one wish would be formations like in AoE II. I can't stand the way units just swarm like ants when told to move together.
Re: Lessons learned while developing Age of Empires 1 Definitive Edition
#19As 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...
Re: Lessons learned while developing Age of Empires 1 Definitive Edition
#20Love reading gamedev post-mortems such as these ;) Although what author discusses is specific to Age1 engine. Time sync in webrtc peer networks encounters many of the same pitfalls. With errors tending to propagate non-linearly as more peers (and more complex scene objects) are added. ThreeNetwork - Network sync library for Three.js https://github.com/takahirox/ThreeNetwork
We got way better at dealing with synced/deterministic simulations over time. Much better sync logging system, decoupling render rate from simulation rate, more institutional knowledge/intuition about all the surefire ways to break determinism (using unsynced random number generator, uninitialized variables, reading local machine state from sim, using local timers rather than synced ones, not resetting floating point flags after calling Direct3D, etc). The bad news was once we were generally avoiding all the common causes as a matter of course, the sync bugs that remained were non-trivial ones that took lots of time to diagnose.