Author Topic: August 2015 Development  (Read 9974 times)

0 Members and 1 Guest are viewing this topic.

Offline MarcAFK

  • Vice Admiral
  • **********
  • Posts: 2005
  • Thanked: 134 times
  • ...it's so simple an idiot could have devised it..
Re: August 2015 Development
« Reply #15 on: September 14, 2015, 10:02:18 PM »
I've been thinking of the multiplayer potential aurora has, there's a few options which would require massive changes, or automated and abstracted battles. Or going completely real time.
" Why is this godforsaken hellhole worth dying for? "
". . .  We know nothing about them, their language, their history or what they look like.  But we can assume this.  They stand for everything we don't stand for.  Also they told me you guys look like dorks. "
"Stop exploding, you cowards.  "
 

Offline se5a

  • Lt. Commander
  • ********
  • Posts: 288
  • Thanked: 30 times
Re: August 2015 Development
« Reply #16 on: September 14, 2015, 10:51:45 PM »
yeah, another thing that the ECS branch does already is proper threading , though I expect main also doesn't have the problem that aurora has of reading/updating the ui while ticks are being processed. so while not 'realtime' it will be able to do a constant tick rate without the player drumming is fingers not being able to click anything.
How well it'll handle orders being given that are no longer valid is still something that we'll need to think about. that part has not yet been designed.

half decent individual unit AI is high on the list of features, since I hated battles in Aurora due to the micro.
 

Offline alex_brunius

  • Vice Admiral
  • **********
  • Posts: 1240
  • Thanked: 153 times
Re: August 2015 Development
« Reply #17 on: September 15, 2015, 02:53:46 AM »
yeah, another thing that the ECS branch does already is proper threading , though I expect main also doesn't have the problem that aurora has of reading/updating the ui while ticks are being processed. so while not 'realtime' it will be able to do a constant tick rate without the player drumming is fingers not being able to click anything.
How well it'll handle orders being given that are no longer valid is still something that we'll need to think about. that part has not yet been designed.

half decent individual unit AI is high on the list of features, since I hated battles in Aurora due to the micro.

Good priorities!

I'm really stoked for just a potential that there might be Aurora like Multiplayer in the future. For inspiration you can look at Paradox games like Hearts of Iron series that have a few preset tick times + pause option to handle more quiet times. Despite each tick being one hour ingame time it feels like a pauseable realtime game.

I am a frequent participant in Multiplayer in games like this and a single game can go on for half a year with scheduled weekly sessions of 3-4 hours realtime, so it's pretty Epic!

It's a compromise though I don't see any reason it could work with Auroras system if you also add a second scale of tick size ( It's not feasible performance wise to run through millions of 5sec ticks in quiet/peacetime just to have that combat resolution ).
 

Offline exdeathbr

  • Petty Officer
  • **
  • e
  • Posts: 18
Re: August 2015 Development
« Reply #18 on: September 15, 2015, 07:21:52 PM »
I've been thinking of the multiplayer potential aurora has, there's a few options which would require massive changes, or automated and abstracted battles. Or going completely real time.
Real time can be just click on the button to pass 5 seconds, every 5 seconds, i mean even if pulsar dont go true real time, this could be an option.

Also same country multiplayr would be a very cool feature, new players could play together on same country, in this care they spread the complexity of the game between two players and learn how to better play the game together with another player(s).
 

Offline se5a

  • Lt. Commander
  • ********
  • Posts: 288
  • Thanked: 30 times
Re: August 2015 Development
« Reply #19 on: September 15, 2015, 08:21:17 PM »
Also same country multiplayr would be a very cool feature, new players could play together on same country, in this care they spread the complexity of the game between two players and learn how to better play the game together with another player(s).
Rod and I have had long heated arguments about how that should be implemented...
 

Offline TheDeadlyShoe

  • Vice Admiral
  • **********
  • Posts: 1264
  • Thanked: 58 times
  • Dance Commander
Re: August 2015 Development
« Reply #20 on: September 15, 2015, 11:54:12 PM »
with a proper alliance system, shouldn't you be able to effectively play the same side even if they are technically not?



 

Offline se5a

  • Lt. Commander
  • ********
  • Posts: 288
  • Thanked: 30 times
Re: August 2015 Development
« Reply #21 on: September 16, 2015, 12:15:19 AM »
That was one argument yes, A faction should be a single player and you log in as a faction, then have an alliance system that would handle the interaction, then multiple factions can make up an Empire.

The other side of the argument was that factions should be able to have multiple players and have a player login system instead of a faction login system.
« Last Edit: September 16, 2015, 12:17:52 AM by se5a »
 

Offline TheDeadlyShoe

  • Vice Admiral
  • **********
  • Posts: 1264
  • Thanked: 58 times
  • Dance Commander
Re: August 2015 Development
« Reply #22 on: September 16, 2015, 01:19:29 AM »
well.  sorry to rehash then  ;D

my :2cents: though, in terms of return on effort,  a good alliance system has benefits beyond 'multi player empires' but a multi logon system doesn't. *shrug*
 

Offline MarcAFK

  • Vice Admiral
  • **********
  • Posts: 2005
  • Thanked: 134 times
  • ...it's so simple an idiot could have devised it..
Re: August 2015 Development
« Reply #23 on: September 16, 2015, 06:44:13 AM »
A system that might be very good for multiplayer would be an option to leave battles to be resolved entirely by AI this would be essential for real time Aurora/pulsar, but it would allow any other kind of game to be controlled by infrequent player interaction.
For this to work you need a robust doctrine system, essentially leaving default orders for your fleets to follow when they make contact. Then modified by the personality, past history and grade of commanding officers within the fleet, individual ships, and even the AI of your top admiral himself.
It could be pretty complex but at it's most basic level you need several different AI, with their own command styles which would be randomly selected for each officer, the fleet enguaged in battle follows your doctrine but based on the commanders AI and then each ship reacts to it's orders slightly different based on its own commander.
" Why is this godforsaken hellhole worth dying for? "
". . .  We know nothing about them, their language, their history or what they look like.  But we can assume this.  They stand for everything we don't stand for.  Also they told me you guys look like dorks. "
"Stop exploding, you cowards.  "
 

Offline se5a

  • Lt. Commander
  • ********
  • Posts: 288
  • Thanked: 30 times
Re: August 2015 Development
« Reply #24 on: September 16, 2015, 04:30:20 PM »
DF in space!

I've always wanted to make a game like that.
whether we can do that sort of thing here or not I'm not sure. definitely not for a while though.
The laundry list of things to do is kinda big, and there's a ton of stuff that lies well out of my area of expertise...
(anyone want to have a mess around with getting an OpenGL window in WPF?)
 

Offline exdeathbr

  • Petty Officer
  • **
  • e
  • Posts: 18
Re: August 2015 Development
« Reply #25 on: September 16, 2015, 04:45:32 PM »
Rod and I have had long heated arguments about how that should be implemented...

The entire point behind my 2 players on same team idea, is to allow both players to share the difficulty of playing this game.
This means that if a player think the game is cool but too detailed and would love to play it if another player, he will be able to do it.
Another reason is that 2 new players will be able to try the game together, make (problably) easier to them to learn how to do it), also you could have a new player playing the game with a expecienced player and so learning while he play and the other guy teach him.

DF in space!

I've always wanted to make a game like that.
whether we can do that sort of thing here or not I'm not sure. definitely not for a while though.

The thing (and some mistake people do) is that DF is not just detailed, but super mega ultra specifically detailed and no aurora is not space DF.
Anyway making a Scifi DF is impossible, unless you go post-apocalipse.
« Last Edit: September 16, 2015, 04:49:40 PM by exdeathbr »
 

Offline se5a

  • Lt. Commander
  • ********
  • Posts: 288
  • Thanked: 30 times
Re: August 2015 Development
« Reply #26 on: September 16, 2015, 11:14:51 PM »
 ::) ...Did you even read Mark's post? or did you just read mine with no frame of reference.
 

Offline sloanjh

  • Global Moderator
  • Admiral of the Fleet
  • *****
  • Posts: 2805
  • Thanked: 112 times
  • 2020 Supporter 2020 Supporter : Donate for 2020
    2021 Supporter 2021 Supporter : Donate for 2021
Re: August 2015 Development
« Reply #27 on: September 19, 2015, 08:54:39 AM »
A system that might be very good for multiplayer would be an option to leave battles to be resolved entirely by AI this would be essential for real time Aurora/pulsar, but it would allow any other kind of game to be controlled by infrequent player interaction.
For this to work you need a robust doctrine system, essentially leaving default orders for your fleets to follow when they make contact. Then modified by the personality, past history and grade of commanding officers within the fleet, individual ships, and even the AI of your top admiral himself.
It could be pretty complex but at it's most basic level you need several different AI, with their own command styles which would be randomly selected for each officer, the fleet enguaged in battle follows your doctrine but based on the commanders AI and then each ship reacts to it's orders slightly different based on its own commander.

I think what I'm about to say is already implicit in this thread, but I'm going to be explicit just to be sure:

One of the things I wish Steve had done with Aurora is to set things up so that the AI is multi-leveled, and so that different tiers of AI can be used by the player to delegate micro-management.

From an implementation point of view, I think this would mean introducing the concepts of e.g. "CommanderSlot" (or "Hat") and "Commander" into the design, where a Commander is an object (human or AI) that makes decisions about which commands to emit for a particular CommanderSlot, while each CommanderSlot represents the commanding officer for some organization in the game.  Examples of types of CommanderSlot might be UnitCommander, Task Group Commander, Governor (makes economic decisions), ResearchDirector, Emperor (top of CommandSlot hierarchy).  The AI might then be implemented as a set of "CommandDecisionMakingAlgorithm" types that would be 1-to-1 with the CommanderSlot types and might take individual personality properties of the Commander instances into account.

The nice thing about this sort of design is that it admits both forms of multi-player play se5a mentioned: multi players per faction or multi factions per empire, plus it allows the player to decide how much of the micro-management he wants to delegate to AI Commanders (by deciding how many hats the player wants to wear and how many to assign to AI commanders).  I'm not sure if it's easer or harder to pull off though - on the one hand it feels like having to write an AI can be as challenging as a human for each CommandSlot would be tougher; on the other it seems like any AI written is going to need to be able make decisions for each of the types of CommandSlot, so this is an obvious way to make that decision-making design crisp.  Oooh - that's another nice thing: it also gives the human the ability to have advisors/staff that can suggest sets of orders for hats that the human is wearing.

John
 

Offline TheDeadlyShoe

  • Vice Admiral
  • **********
  • Posts: 1264
  • Thanked: 58 times
  • Dance Commander
Re: August 2015 Development
« Reply #28 on: September 20, 2015, 03:29:23 AM »
there's two games i'm aware of that have pulled that off properly so far. Distant Worlds and Space Empires V (if you use Kwok's mod.)

both use the 'minister' model, with each minister being an independently functioning ai responsible for a particular facet of the empire.

for example, in space empires V, the minelaying minister takes any automated minelaying ships and tells them to automatically pick up produced mines at colonies and deploy them at jump points designated as threat zones.  While in Distant Worlds the ship production minister produces new ships dependent on your capabilities and needs (preset shiptype production ratios, whether you are at war, the strength of your economy).   they are both responsible for a very narrow slice of activity and competent within that slice.  each minister can be turned on or off as the player desires.

personally i've always found colony/city governors to be an unsatisfactory stopgap in most 4x games i've played, but i've been pretty happy with ministers that i can unload drudgework off to.

Aurora/Pulsar are tougher candidates for that for many reasons.  There's a reason NPRs don't have to deal with maintenance or fuel or morale in Aurora, those are challenging factors even for players, and expecting an AI to handle that challenge is asking for failure. NPRs run out of minerals and effectively choke to death often enough as it is.

though it should be noted that civilian shipping lines are an existing low micro ai 'ministers' that theoretically should help take the weight off the players shoulders for certain tasks.  unfortunately i think theyve mostly just turned into a way to make money.  With a minor redesign that could probably be changed.  On that note (randomly inspired suggestion), i always thought how tax and the civilian economy interacted in Distant Worlds to be pretty cool, and might bring a lot to Aurora. In effect, your tax level would determine how much money/resources the civilian economy had to work with.