New KaM Remake Demo r2411

[Shadaoe]

Yes and a "both" check box, so we don't have to manually change planting/cutting everytime :p

[GreatWhiteBear]

I was thinking: maybe it's a good idea to show the radius' of buildings that have one..

Like:
- Quarry
- Woodcutter's
- Farm
- Vineyard
- Fisherman's
- Watchtower
- Coal mine

You can show it with a red circle / square with 50% opacity (or something). I think it would be a pretty nice idea, especially for woodcutter's and farms..

Coal mine depletes all coal in a 1square radius, coal in the 2nd square radius is decreased to a very low amount of coal.

[Danjb]

I very much like the idea of checkboxes for the woodcutter, and displaying radii for buildings that use them.

As for replays, I can't imagine most computers would have much of a problem executing many commands very quickly, so in a sense "skipping" forward shouldn't be too difficult... it just needs to execute all the commands up to a point in the shortest time possible (it needn't render every frame).

If it's quick enough, you could "skip" backwards as well by just having it start from the beginning again, and then treat it as a "skip forwards".

Having it create temporary "save games" during the replay could be a good idea, too, and then you can just "skip" backwards to the last save games, rather than to the start, which would make it more efficient.

You could even have it look ahead while playing the replay (i.e. make it run through the replay double-speed in the background), to have it create save-games ahead of the current point in time, allowing you to skip ahead (up to as far as it has "buffered", essentially).

Also, as regards Bowmen / Crossbowmen, I do recall them dying very quickly in the original, and in fact I think this is very important for game balance, as otherwise they would be rather overpowered! Because of their weakness, it is important to keep them guarded, and if someone gets to them with some melee troops then they deserve to die, because either:

1) All your other troops are dead, so obviously melee units are going to kill your bowmen
2) The attacking player used some clever tactics to reach your bowmen, and they deserve the victory

Just some thoughts, hope they make some sense. If I'm talking rubbish then please disregard it ^^

[Thorakh]

Having it create temporary "save games" during the replay could be a good idea, too, and then you can just "skip" backwards to the last save games, rather than to the start, which would make it more efficient.

Ah yeah, I just remembered, you can't actually wind back to any point in time in a SC2 replay. You can only wind back in 30? second intervals. Very clever

You need some space to store the additional save files during the replay but you can just discard them afterwards of course.

[T*AnTi-V!RuZz]

Yes and a "both" check box, so we don't have to manually change planting/cutting everytime :p

Lol, that won't be necessary, since checkboxes aren't radiobuttons..

If you have 2 checkboxes:

[x] plant
[x] cut

Just check them both..

[GreatWhiteBear]

Or make a slider with on the one side plant and on the other side cut.

[T*AnTi-V!RuZz]

Or make a slider with on the one side plant and on the other side cut.

Why would that be more effective than checkboxes?

[Shadaoe]

Oh yes, didn't understood checkbox like that sorry

[GreatWhiteBear]

I heard lewin speak of a woodcutter system in which you plant even when there are still trees standing, so it would be like the woodcutter would plant the one time and cut the other, with a slider you can say like 50-50 or 10-90 and when there aren't trees to cut he will plant unless you have the slider to 100%cutting.

[T*AnTi-V!RuZz]

I heard lewin speak of a woodcutter system in which you plant even when there are still trees standing, so it would be like the woodcutter would plant the one time and cut the other, with a slider you can say like 50-50 or 10-90 and when there aren't trees to cut he will plant unless you have the slider to 100%cutting.

Ah, so that's why.

But then again.. I'd never use the slider for other rates like 100% (plant or cut) or 50-50..

Would you use 90-10? Why?

[Lewin]

First of all, @Chimerae: You keep going on about units being too "unhungry" in the Remake. We didn't just guess values like these or change them for no reason, we painstakingly measured them from KaM. If you think they are wrong, please do your own measurements. (time the number of minutes from a unit being on full condition to dying of hunger) Here are the results we measured:
- 45 minutes from full to death
- A unit will show the "knife and fork" thought 6 minutes before death
- A unit will show the "skull" thought 2 minutes before death
If you find it to be different in your measurements please let me know. I can't notice a difference myself and I don't want to spend hours repeating the measurements unless you've measured it yourself.

Then forget about the replay ideas. Although if you have a 3 hour match and you want to watch the final fight, a couple of saves would be nice. 5 minute intervals might be too much, but I'd say that at least a few are necessairy to watch it in a comfortable way.

I haven't yet thought of a solution for the map names. You could do it like this:

Warfare in the
Wilderness
(using my problem child as an example )

But that's a bit odd. I'll come up with something better.

Maybe this can be achieved by tabs. One tab brings you to the server list, and by clicking the other tab you return to the lobby. I just love tabs.
But I can understand if it is difficult to make it fit in the menu nicely.

Yeah we can add features like that to the replay system eventually, for now it'd be nice just to fix the mismatches... We will probably do it similar to SC2 in that case, create saves while you're watching it to allow you to skip to places every 5 minutes or so.
Putting a break in the middle would work fine for clients, but for the host the name is in a dropdown so we can't make it wordwrap.
I really don't think there should be tabs for the lobby and server list at once... I've never seen another game with this and I think people would just find it confusing when only a few of us want to do that. It would also mean people would often be "afk" in the lobby because they'd be checking out other servers, I'd rather people stay focused. Just run two copies in Windowed mode.

Can we make woodcutters have a check box:
Plant Trees
Cut Trees

I just discussed this with Krom, and we're not exactly sure that's the best solution. We had previously thought of allowing you to request certain trees to be cut within the radius because if you just set him to cutting-only mode it could still take 10 minutes before he chooses the tree you want removed. It's on our long term features list, and I added the checkbox idea to it.

I was thinking: maybe it's a good idea to show the radius' of buildings that have one..

Yes great idea, I've added it to our short term features list. It can also show it while placing the building so you can choose the best spot.

Here's an old and possible out of date description of the combat system:
http://www.atfreeforum.com/knights/viewtopic.php?t=493
It is supposed to be correct because it was taken from the official German KaM Guidebook which described the technical details of fights.
Something most people don't realise is the importance of the target's facing direction. As Siegfried pointed out a crossbowmen facing you only has a 12% chance to die, but one with his back to you has a 60% chance of dying as it is 5x more likely to kill. So this explains often unexpected results, and it also discourages you from running your archers away as they will be cut down. (quite realistically) I think the fighting system is a pretty good match for now, we'll probably revisit it later in development. Once again if you can create a test mission in KaM and show that the results are consistently different than the Remake let me know.

As for replays, I can't imagine most computers would have much of a problem executing many commands very quickly, so in a sense "skipping" forward shouldn't be too difficult... it just needs to execute all the commands up to a point in the shortest time possible (it needn't render every frame).

If it's quick enough, you could "skip" backwards as well by just having it start from the beginning again, and then treat it as a "skip forwards".

Having it create temporary "save games" during the replay could be a good idea, too, and then you can just "skip" backwards to the last save games, rather than to the start, which would make it more efficient.

You could even have it look ahead while playing the replay (i.e. make it run through the replay double-speed in the background), to have it create save-games ahead of the current point in time, allowing you to skip ahead (up to as far as it has "buffered", essentially).

It's not just a simple matter of "executing commands", the entire mission must be simulated. Every tiny decision made by each unit must be calculated. (e.g. the woodcutter searching for a tree, serfs doing deliveries) Yes it is possible to speed this up, but only by the same amount you can speedup normal gameplay. Press F11 and try the speedup x50 button. On anything other than simple missions it won't be able to go at 50x, so it will give you an indication of the maximum speed.
Buffering is NOT possible because that would require buffering the ENTIRE gamestate at each step (including details about every unit, every terrain tile, etc.) and loading these saves will take a number of seconds. As I said before we could save these every 5 minutes or so but even that will take 20MB+ per hour.

I heard lewin speak of a woodcutter system in which you plant even when there are still trees standing, so it would be like the woodcutter would plant the one time and cut the other, with a slider you can say like 50-50 or 10-90 and when there aren't trees to cut he will plant unless you have the slider to 100%cutting.

I am almost certain I have never spoken about such a system. I think checkboxes might work but a slider would be basically useless. It's not possible to increase the efficiency by changing it so what's the point? Since r2411 Krom has made woodcutters plant and chop at the same time, rather than only doing one or the other at once as in r2411 (chopping is always preferred there) However the woodcutter will still mostly chop when there are lots of trees to be chopped, so that when you first place him he won't start planting right away.

[GreatWhiteBear]

Not the system I just described but you did tell me once you would make a different system in which the woodcutter wouldn't wait with planting till all trees were gone.
I think we discussed it during a match(older remake).

[Lewin]

Not the system I just described but you did tell me once you would make a different system in which the woodcutter wouldn't wait with planting till all trees were gone.
I think we discussed it during a match(older remake).

By that I meant we would make him plant and cut randomly, rather than always cutting if possible and planting if that fails. (as happens in KaM)

[Ben]

You may know this, but if one hasn't played a game yet, then the game crashes when you try to watch a replay.
It was quite annoying since I couldn't tab out to terminate the program (I had to pull the plug)
Speaking of which, this game could really use the ability to use alt+tab. I can't tell you how many times I've wanted to do that. The window doesn't really fit on the screen that well, so yeah, tabbing out would be nice.

EDIT

In terms of the woodcutting feature, I would actually prefer a feature that allows your laborers to just "dig up" (Like a delete that requires time) the trees. Is that possible?

Also, back to what The Dark Lord was saying about the replays, in Age of Empires, one could chooses how many "Chapters" were in a recorded game. Whenever one wanted to make a bookmark in a replay, all he would have to do is click "Save Chapter." Then in the replay, he could skip to that point whenever (Like a DVD players without a rewind).

[Shadaoe]

I can do alt+tab and when the game crashes I can easily leave itand kill the processus. I never had any problem going back yo desktop in the remake.
I don't know why you can't