Re: Recent Additions

Here, various developers can tell you all about what they're up to, so you can yell at them for being idiots. "... and there was a great rejoicing."
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Bigjoe5
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Re: Recent Additions

#31 Post by Bigjoe5 »

Geoff the Medio wrote:Their size is irrelevant, but yes; ships with 0 stealth can be seen anywhere. This means having your ships have nonzero stealth is an important design consideration.
Yeah, but if ships consistently have non-zero stealth, battles will be a pain in the early game when detection is low. For example, if player A and player B both have ships with stealth 1 and detection 10, they'll have to get within 90 battle distance units of each other before they can see each other. If two ships come from opposite starlane entry points, they will be nearly 1000 units apart.

Of course the players always have the option not to fight, and there should definitely be an in-battle option to withdraw without leaving the system if you decide not to continue fighting (all players in combat would have to select this for it to do anything), but players are still going to want to destroy one another's ships in the early game, and the alternative to consistently having long, tedious stealth battles is to just let your opponent live all the time.

Another alternative might be to give ships a stealth penalty for moving in combat, so that even moderately stealthy enemy ships could be seen easily in combat. Actually, this is probably the only reasonable solution, since it is also a fact that if stealth 0 objects operate under normal stealth rules, the situation above wouldn't be helped much by making the ships have stealth 0 - they'd still be unable to see each other outside of a range of 100 units.
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Geoff the Medio
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Re: Recent Additions

#32 Post by Geoff the Medio »

The zero stealth case could / perhaps should work differently in battles than on the map, since the long-term consequences of being detected during a single battle are less than revealing the location of all low-stealth ships to all other empires on the main strategic map.

Penalties for various actions in battle are also a good idea. An interesting quirk might be to make the penalties remain for the duration of a battle. This would mean that if an object, such as a ship, lowers its stealth by moving, its stealth stays lowered for the whole battle. This would mean you wouldn't be able to move / shoot and be destealthed for a brief time, and just go back to not moving / shooting to hide and avoid counterattack.

Edit:
Geoff the Medio wrote:There is presently no stored knowledge about the universe, so what you see in game is only what your owned objects can see on the current turn. There are a few ways this could be fixed. One option is to always show the name of a system if it can be seen at all (including "basic visibility" systems with fog of war scanlines) and to keep track of all systems a particular empire has seen, and to show those at basic visibility.
Turns out that due to how objects are serialized, or stored as data to be saved or sent out across the network, having the name of systems be sent if they are at basic visibility, but not any other object at basic visibility, would be complicated and/or require awkward special cases...

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Geoff the Medio
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Re: Recent Additions

#33 Post by Geoff the Medio »

pd wrote:Could you perhaps provide a screenshot?
From my latest build. The extra-bright detection range circle around the fleet is because there are 6 ships in it, so the circle is drawn 6 times, whereas around the system it's only drawn once. Also note the chopped off corners of the sidepanel and tweaked UI colour sheme (particularly the background colours). Tweaks are expected to be made to these features.
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cropped screenshot of system in little-explored galaxy, moving fleet, sidepanel, visibility radius circles
cropped screenshot of system in little-explored galaxy, moving fleet, sidepanel, visibility radius circles
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Re: Recent Additions

#34 Post by mZhura »

Geoff the Medio wrote:
pd wrote:Could you perhaps provide a screenshot?
From my latest build.
and where can i download latest build???

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Re: Recent Additions

#35 Post by Geoff the Medio »

mZhura wrote:
Geoff the Medio wrote:where can i download latest build???
kroddn frequently updates the linux nightly builds at http://freeorion.psitronic.de/download/

If you want the Windows executables, there probably won't be any latest builds made available. I don't have any suitable webspace, and even if I did, you'd also need to get the SDK, and then update the the latest SVN revision, and then drop the latest build dlls and exes on top of that (which would be all I'd put into a downloadable zip archive), and then it *might* work. PM me an email if you want me to send you the zips, though it might be easier to build it yourself on Windows. I've heard mixed results about people using the free Express Edition of Visual Studio 2008, although you can get the full version free if you're a student. In either case, there are instructions on the wiki.

If you want OSX binaries, I don't think .Id has plans or time to make or package them, but given Bigjoe5's recent success building, you could probably do so yourself as well.

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Re: Recent Additions

#36 Post by pd »

Thanks Geoff, I didn't expect to see those sidepanel UI changes too soon - looks great and the brighter colors really lift the UI from the background! Also, the detection circles are interesting. Fascinating to see Alven explored without having been there. This allows for a whole different kind of exploration strategy. I have to wonder, what the circles are actually showing though - is it the strength or range, or is both the same(I thought there's only one meter for detection)? What if there's a highly stealthy object inside the circle, can it always be seen? If not, what's the purpose of the circle at all?

edit: from the DD
Detection indicates the base detection radius of an object during a battle; this is the maximum distance away at which it can detect a minimally stealthy ship. Stealth indicates the ability of an object to avoid detection, reducing the actual range at which it can be detected by other objects. Both these values are standard meters, ranging in value from 0 to 100.
I assume it's the same for the galaxy map. I'm still not sure how this interplay of stealth and detection can be efficiently communicated through the UI. Am I missing something? There should probably be a discussion about this in the information overlay thread, right?

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Re: Recent Additions

#37 Post by Geoff the Medio »

pd wrote:...what the circles are actually showing though - is it the strength or range...
Range...
What if there's a highly stealthy object inside the circle, can it always be seen? If not, what's the purpose of the circle at all?
Stealthy objects need to be closer to be seen. The circles indicate the maximum range at which you could potentially see something.
edit: from the DD
Detection indicates the base detection radius of an object during a battle; this is the maximum distance away at which it can detect a minimally stealthy ship. Stealth indicates the ability of an object to avoid detection, reducing the actual range at which it can be detected by other objects. Both these values are standard meters, ranging in value from 0 to 100.
I assume it's the same for the galaxy map.
From slightly later in the DD:
v0.4 Design Pad wrote:To determine if a detector can detect a target, the target's stealth is subtracted from the detector's range, and the result is compared to the distance between them. If the distance is less than 10*(detector_detection - target_stealth), then the target is seen by the detector. If the distance is larger, then the target is not seen (by that detector; another detector might see it).
[...]
The factor of 10 scaling difference between meter values and battle map distance is used because the range of meter values (0 to 100) and the battle map distance units (1000 unit system radius and 100 units between planet orbits) were decided upon independently and a scaling factor is needed to make things work reasonably.
It doesn't explicitly say that things work the same on the galaxy map, although that's (more or less) the intention. Typical medium-sized universes are about 1000 uu across, so the same distance scaling factor should work for galaxy map and battle map purposes.
I'm still not sure how this interplay of stealth and detection can be efficiently communicated through the UI. Am I missing something? There should probably be a discussion about this in the information overlay thread, right?
There's no obvious perfect solution. One option might be to give a setting in the UI for players to "assume X stealth", so that the shown detection ranges will be reduced by that much, to indicate the distance at which the player could see an object with X stealth with the various available detectors. Kind of clunky, but potentially useful. A discussion on a UI thread would probably be helpful.

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Bigjoe5
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Re: Recent Additions

#38 Post by Bigjoe5 »

I'm having another weird issue with being able to see the AI opponents (didn't seem like it should go in the support forum, but move it there if you think it should). On the first turn, I can't see my opponents. Everything is as it should be. On the second turn:

Image

I can see all the systems that my opponents can, but I can't see their ships or planets. I put the svn default file in the FO contents folder before taking this screenshot; it's not caused by any of my additions.
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Re: Recent Additions

#39 Post by pd »

Sounds similar to this recent change, but obviously not the same.

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Re: Recent Additions

#40 Post by Geoff the Medio »

pd wrote:Sounds similar to this recent change, but obviously not the same.
Actually it is the same... And is fixed, due to that change. So (Bigjoe5) update from SVN and rebuild.

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Re: Recent Additions

#41 Post by Bigjoe5 »

Yep, it's fixed. Thanks.
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Re: Recent Additions

#42 Post by mZhura »

here's my third

Image
and fourth turn
Image

the galaxy view on fourth turn leaves me frustrated.
1. all ships suddenly lost their scanning ability
2. some explored starlanes disappeared
3. some explored star systems turned unexplored
4. planet supply range become invisible
5. ship supply network disappeared
6. pathfinding stop working for already explored systems

FO in their current state seemed to me completely unplayable :(
maybe i did something wrong?

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Re: Recent Additions

#43 Post by Geoff the Medio »

The ships didn't lose their detection ability... you just zoomed out so that the visibility circles were small enough that they weren't rendered.

Regarding losing vision of starlanes or systems, this is the expected behaviour in the SVN version. There's no memory of previously known information, so all you can see is what your ships and plants have vision of that turn. This isn't how it's going to be long-term, but remember you're playing with an SVN snapshot, not the v0.3.14 release.

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Re: Recent Additions

#44 Post by mZhura »

Geoff the Medio wrote:The ships didn't lose their detection ability... you just zoomed out so that the visibility circles were small enough that they weren't rendered.
You're right, my bad :)
Geoff the Medio wrote:This isn't how it's going to be long-term
thanks, that's a relief :)

but here's more:
again 4-th turn right before end-turn
Image
and 5-th turn at the very beginning
Image

you see? ship at the bottom of galactic map - it's just disappeared! without any "SOS!" or something like that...

and one more: it seemed to me that when i quit the game (or maybe when i load AutoSave) it erases all other AutoSaves. is it meant to be so?

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Re: Recent Additions

#45 Post by Geoff the Medio »

mZhura wrote:you see? ship at the bottom of galactic map - it's just disappeared! without any "SOS!" or something like that...
Hit turn a few times. It'll probably show up where it was headed. This has been fixed in the (newer than you have) SVN version, in which ships travelling along starlanes reveal them to their owner, and give basic (scanlined) visibility of the systems on either end of the starlane. Edit: In your version, you'll probably find the missing ship located at position (0, 0) in the universe, at the top left of the map. /Edit
it seemed to me that when i quit the game (or maybe when i load AutoSave) it erases all other AutoSaves. is it meant to be so?
When loading, all autosaves except the one you loaded are deleted. I don't know why this is, but it's been that way for a long time. Edit: and is/was intentional / supposed to happen. /Edit

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