ETA for next patch?

[Torgen]

I agree it's silly that my townies keep trying to go down into a 3rd or 4th level dungeon room that is absolutely filled with monsters to collect multiple dead bodies of heroes that have fallen. Surely word would have gotten around to the townies that 3 or 4 heroes have fallen in the 4th level dungeon and there would be little or nobody willing to go down there just to collect the remains. It's silly the way that they work right now but we all know it's still early alpha.

I think the fear mechanic will pretty much take care of that, if the game flags the object in the dangerous location as inaccessible in the townie's search routine for X minutes. It will need a persistent duration to keep him from repeatedly trying to go get it, and getting stuck in a "fetch loop," but also has to expire so to not make that item unusable forever. Perhaps each item will need a "Dangerous" flag, instead of trying to keep individual lists of Things In Dangerous Places for every townie. If townies don't get bravery bonuses for equipped armor and weapons, it could be a simple flag. If they do get bravery bonuses for being equipped, then the "fear score" that the townie encountered in the area would have to be scored as a temporary value.

Example: Solo townie decides it's high time that chunk of goblinite got hauled into storage, and goes down to fetch it. On the way there, he runs into three goblins and a red slime in a group. Since the threat value is higher than his personal bravery value, he runs away, and the goblinite he was targeting gets the fear value of (goblinx3 + redslime) for X minutes. After X minutes, the fear value for that item is zeroed, and one of the townies thinks "Hmm, I wonder if there's still monsters in that room on the way to that one goblinite. I guess I'll go see." and down he goes.

[crono141]

I'll tell you, back when I used to "mingle" with game developers from fairly well known development firms I can't tell you how many times that I heard from some of them that the AI is one of the toughest things to tackle in a game.

Thinking back to this does actually cause me concern for Towns and the fine folks developing it as if it's put off and put off they could well get the whole rest of the game completed and then find out that they have no way to improve the AI and the game goes down the toilet. Bad AI is the number one thing (or so I've heard) that turns players off of single player games since we are so dependant on it doing the right thing.

I've heard that there is concern over the processing power needed to improve the AI and this too concerns me. Is the processing power concern because you are trying to keep the system requirements so low that anybody with a computer that is newer than 8 years old can play it? Maybe you need to forgo worrying about people that have 8 year old computers and up the requirements so that a player needs to have a computer produced in the last 5 years instead if you need the extra processing power to improve the AI.

Now, I don't pretend to know how you work your magic at SMP, it is beyond my comprehension for I am nothing but a lowly game player myself and barely even that by many other gamers opinions, so for all I know your AI already needs a CPU that has been produced in the last 1 year to run, in which case I sincerely hope that you don't draw yourself into a corner leaving the AI for last only to find out that it just can't be done. I have seen many games where the developers put out their game and said that the AI was good enough, yet seemingly the majority of players were kicking the AI's butts all over the map.

Fortunately you don't really have to worry about your AI competing with the player since we work with the AI so it seems the biggest thing to me is likely to be pathfinding as an issue of processing power. Hopefully you do have a way that you'll be able to improve the games AI while maintaining a reasonable system requirements for the player that don't have a newer computer.

There have been games years ago that I could not play due to the requirements not being met, I just moved on and accepted it. Now I play that stupid game of the dog chasing his tail to keep my computers up to date so that I can play the games that I want to play, something that I think is the responsibility of the player if they want to play certain games.

To echo this sentiment, let me bring up again a point I made in another thread: If warcraft 1 and 2 could do it on a 486sx running 66 mhz and 16-32mb or ram, there is absolutley no reason towns can't do it on hardware 50-100 times more powerful.

[caprontos]

To echo this sentiment, let me bring up again a point I made in another thread: If warcraft 1 and 2 could do it on a 486sx running 66 mhz and 16-32mb or ram, there is absolutley no reason towns can't do it on hardware 50-100 times more powerful.

Warcraft 1 and 2 didn't have nearly as many things going on though.. all it had to do was get one person from one spot to another-and fight if something is close - simple AI. The AI towns has and will eventually probably get/need - is much more complex then what is done in those games.. I don't really understand how you can compare them as if they are doing the same thing.. I don't know if I'd even call them the same type of game..

that said.. Warcraft 2 is the best RTS ever..

[Procne]

I don't recall any real AI in warcraft 2. What exactly are you talking about? The only thing that could remotely resemble AI was how computer played in skirmishes. But then it was all about a set of pre-scripted orders which computer executed.

[burningpet]

Well, i personally think Rise of Nations is the best RTS ever made, maybe men of war, but i have a special love for warcraft 2 as it was the reason i started with computer made graphics (Ah, the happy days of warcraft 2 total conversion mods).

Anyway, as caprontos said, Warcraft2 is a completely different game.

We are not neglecting the AI, we will improve it, that's for sure, but we first need to implement all the mechanics that the townies will do before we can form a system that tells them why and when to do so in a manner that will appear intelligent.

As for processing power - yes, we want people with older computers to be able to play the game. more importantly, slightly older laptops.

[crono141]

Warcraft had dynamic pathfinding, 200 units per player with 8 possible players simultaneously. It would find nearest routes between resources and final location of those resources. The same basic action happen in towns, only they are done through a scheduler instead of through direct interaction by the player. The point is that if a game like warcraft 2 can handle complicated pathfinding for up to 1600 units simultaneously on a 486sx, there's no reason it can't be done in towns with modern hardware.

I know I sound like a broken record, and I probably sound pretty abrasive (I don't mean to be). Its just I don't like to hear things like "making townies pick the quickest rout (on roads) causes the game to chug". Why does this cause the game to chug? You've got between 1.5 to 3.5 BILLION clock cycles per second, probably on multiple cores, and at the very least on 2 threads. You have between 512 mb and 16gb of RAM to utilize. You have, at most 200 actors on screen at once that need active pathfinding and scheduling. What could possibly cause the game to chug on this? Other games in a similar genre accomplish this much more efficiently and for many more actors (DF comes to mind). The only technical difference between those games and this one is this one has a gui and interface that makes the game playable without 100 page long tutorials.

[Procne]

From what I remember WC2 pathfinding wasn't real pathfinding. Units were simply trying to move in the direction of their target. If there was obstacle they were getting stuck.
Also, WC2 maps were much smaller than towns map. IRC wc2 maps were 256x256. And towns is what, 1024x1024? With multiple levels

[Torgen]

You seriously just compared Towns to DF? DF, the game that doesn't support ANY graphics because of all the computations that are going on? The game where if you don't die in a disaster, you have to quit the game because even the most powerful computer can't handle the processing requirements once the population hits a certain point? The game where the dwarves run out into the middle of a battle to pick up a sock, and die? Yes, I know all about the graphics mods (I preferred MayDay's,) but the point still stands.

Also, you're comparing a feature-incomplete game in alpha that is modeling desires and tasks, to a RTS with no AI at all except "attack enemies in range."

[crono141]

Warcraft utilized A-star pathfinding (or a variant thereof), which is a lightweight pathfinding algorithm that can effectively find the shortest distance between two points, weighted for faster or slower terrain. This allowed units to dynamically update the path as things moved or got in the way. It would get units stuck sometimes, but on a map with rules like towns has, I think it would work ok. The algorithm would have to be modified for multi-level paths by setting waypoints to ladders.

I don't know what pathing algorithm towns uses, but it seems to select the entire route before the townie begins moving instead of selecting just the next square of the route and then moving. Perhaps they tried A-star pathfinding initially and it didn't work out. I don't know.

[crono141]

You seriously just compared Towns to DF? DF, the game that doesn't support ANY graphics because of all the computations that are going on? The game where if you don't die in a disaster, you have to quit the game because even the most powerful computer can't handle the processing requirements once the population hits a certain point? The game where the dwarves run out into the middle of a battle to pick up a sock, and die? Yes, I know all about the graphics mods (I preferred MayDay's,) but the point still stands.

Also, you're comparing a feature-incomplete game in alpha that is modeling desires and tasks, to a RTS with no AI at all except "attack enemies in range."

Yes, and towns works a small fraction of the kinds of calculations DF does. And it doesn't support graphics not because of all the calculations, but because Toady is a weirdo who likes his reverse polish interface.

You are missing the point. PC hardware is not the problem here. That is the point.