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

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

#191

Post by DaiPlusPlus »

bombolo wrote: post #126
hgsgm wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course you can. You just can't use operators for them. Unless you go Haskell where anything can be an operator name, operators are just a minor convenience hack .

So you can but you need to rewrite everything instead of just changing a type, and the code will look completely impossible to read.

And now all your simple scalar values need to exist on the heap as class object instances - and will incur plenty of runtime allocation costs for every arithmetic operation - or try to risk it with non-immutable heap-allocated objects, but that’s a recipe for disaster: no-one should ever think mutable shared state is a good first-design.

A lot of Java/JVM’s design decisions made sense in the mid-1990s, such as not supporting user-defined stack-allocated value-types and only supporting GC-managed objects - as main-memory was fast-enough compared to CPU registers - and many/most Java targets didn’t have any kind of CPU data cache - the idea of using the heap for basically everything wasn’t a bad design… back then. But now it is: high-perf code for the CLR means eliminating unnecessary GC allocation wherever possible - but in the JVM that isn’t possible.

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

#192

Post by alternatetwo »

elnatro wrote: post #147

Is Age of Empires playable in MacOS? I’d like to remember my childhood years but going back to windows after 15 years of Ubuntu and MacOS gives me headaches.

You're a decade too late, there was a ppc port for MacOS back then ...

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

#193

Post by db48x »

mlyle wrote: post #167
db48x wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Again I say “so what?”. The unit is one hit away from death either way, and the player will know it.

At this point, with your Smaug-related comment, etc-- I've become convinced you're trolling. But just to humor you: the desire is to have a system where floating point neither surprisingly kills nor gives characters extra hit points. There's a lot of subtlety in this. Schemes where all damage are percents don't preserve the essential pieces of RPG combat systems. Moving the threshold from 1 to 0 HP violates the conve…

The problem isn’t hitpoints that are an epsilon away from 1, it’s that an operation which looked innocuous moved the HP to an epsilon _below_ 1. That would never happen with 0, however, as multiplication and division of positive numbers always gives a positive result.

And in D&D, incapacitation happens when a character drops below 0 HP, and death happens once they drop below -10HP. There is no grand convention that all RPG games follow here; each game is making things up as they go. They picked badly when they designed Age of Empires, and that’s ok. It’s not the end of the world. Just know that we can do better if we are paying attention.

And I am serious when I ask “so what?”. Why is it so bad if the game displays 0/55HP? The players all know that fractional HP damage exists, and they can see that their unit is still alive, so what is the problem? They will be at least as amazed that their unit survived as they currently are when they see a unit at 1/55HP.

I am likewise serious about Smaug; there is no way that combat makes any sense if Smaug has a large number of hitpoints or that any weapon at all can damage him. Using hitpoints as an abstraction completely loses all of the flavor of Tolkien’s original descriptions. A better model is one using damage reduction and sensible internal organs; a strike that pierces the heart will kill even a dragon.

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

#194

Post by porkbrain »

DaiPlusPlus wrote: post #27
zelphirkalt wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Seems all that could have been avoided by using rationals in general It's 2023: I'm still surprised that so many new languages/platforms still only provide only basic integer and IEEE-754 types for numerics: Rust, C#, Java, Swift and others still lack built-in, runtime-provided, nor even standard-library-provided rational types, which I assume really should be the preferred type for most business/domain/application…

A related discussion about number types:

The Great Debate @ARITH23: John Gustafson and William Kahan

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LZAeZBVAzVw

Kahan points out disadvantages of interval maths.

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

#195

Post by morjom »

Sakos wrote: post #98
voz_ wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The servers are still running and it has had some QoL and even added some new Elite Skills and weapons.

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

#196

Post by xuki »

justrealist wrote: post #106
dragontamer wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Note that T90 is like 2300 Elo. Which isn't "top level pro", but I'm pretty sure he'd kick most of our asses. T90 is probably the strongest dedicated commentator / announcer / caster in this community.

tbh I credit ZeroEmpires with keeping the community alive through the slower times though.

I credit that random UAE dude that was bankrolling TyranT and kept the game going. Without real money the game would not reach the critical level for Microsoft to pay attention again.
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