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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

#41

Post by verroq »

munificent wrote: post #35
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…

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.

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

#42

Post by xrisk »

Arkanosis wrote: post #36
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?

It's not the matter of a locked platform per se. Releasing a game on a platform like Steam just increases the likelihood of someone buying it manifold.

The age of physical discs are over, but the developer is still free to release a DRM-free version of the game independently. Witcher 3's Projeckt Red does this. You can simply enter the product key received from Steam to download this DRM free copy.

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

#43

Post by xrisk »

andrepd wrote: post #40
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.

I'd say it'a a pity they aren't releasing it on GoG! Win10 and Steam are both DRM.

They can do both. Steam is just a larger platform.

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

#44

Post by a_t48 »

skittlebrau wrote: post #32
jandrese wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/visua…

I used command latency to do multiplayer for an RTS\Tower Defense on mobile (https://youtu.be/tRAdI0x7L7c?t=300 - think Battle Cats but in 3D). All units were AI controlled, and placing a unit meant it had to go through a spawn animation. It meant the game worked with ping times in the range of seconds. Add in some positional interpolation and events for when each unit changed targets and it worked great.

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

#45

Post by mastax »

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.

Games stores (for better or worse) are expected to have an ecosystem of services of varying importance:

- Friends list

- Text & Audio chat

- Cloud saves

- Automatic updates

- DLC installation

- Sales and Discounts

- Curation, suggestions, and browsing

- Achievements

The Microsoft Store has most of those, more or less, but the experience is not ideal.

The social services are tied into the Xbox app which works okay, but is quite complicated and Microsofty. Also PC gamers might not have their friends on Xbox or maybe it has their CoD friends, not their AoE friends, etc.

The MS store is not purpose-built for games, so it makes it a poor place to buy them. It's hard to find "real games" on there because you have to sift through mobile games, photoshop, movies, and Xbox controllers. Many PC stores make a big deal about sales with purpose-built home pages, best seller lists, weekly sales, event sales, newsletters, etc. The MS store does not have sales often and if they do you're not likely to hear about them. PC stores put a lot of effort into discoverability. There's personalized home pages, followed curators, recommendations from friends, and detailed search systems with a multitude of tags and sorting options. You can search for a recently released co-op action-rpg with steam controller support and sort by recent review sentiment. The MS store, by comparison, is a mobile app store on a computer.

PC Game stores are expected to have fast and reliable downloads. Steam can consistently download faster than my hard drive can write, and can reliably resume interrupted downloads. Steam can validate the integrity of game files and re-download them if necessary. Other clients seem to do fine as well. Download speeds from the MS store are reportedly inconsistent, and it has (or had) no ability to resume interrupted downloads. For weeks after the ~100GB Gears 4 was released exclusively on the MS store, /r/pcgaming was full of people complaining that the download was interrupted at 95GB and had to start over from 0.

All of these problems are solvable. I believe the download issues have been fixed. The store is already the best place to buy "Play Anywhere" titles if you have an Xbox, simply because you get it on both platforms. But MS has a long way to go to make the store pleasant to use and to win back PC gamers' sentiment.

One practically unsolvable problem is that the store doesn't exist on Linux, macOS, or Win 7, which matters to some portion of games and some portion of gamers.

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

#46

Post by Sir_Cmpwn »

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…

As an aside, fixing that problem should be feasible. Linux (or rather libgcc or whatever the case may be) uses an open source floating point implementation (and not virial like the GPL): https://github.com/gcc-mirror/gcc/tree/master/libgcc/soft-fp

With enough finageling you could utilize the libgcc floating point implementation on Windows and make it consistent everywhere. Or you could take the wiser approach of avoiding floats outside of graphics code and using fixed point instead.

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

#48

Post by lanius »

Good thing they decided to keep the gameplay the same, like Starcraft: Remastered. I never played AoE 1 competitively, but if it's like SC many bugs/glitches became core gameplay mechanics. Here's hoping the AoE 1 remake fares better than the one for AoE 2!

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

#49

Post by izacus »

Arkanosis wrote: post #36
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?

Those days were gone when DRM became an acceptable thing defended by people even on this site.

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

#50

Post by asavadatti »

nimbius wrote: post #19

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...

*Gandhi not Ghandi. It is right there in your URL
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