Messages

1

Off topic / What are y'all up to these days?

« on: 22 July 2019, 09:43:37 »

Haven't had a lot of off topic discussion in a while (and I know, I've been mostly just monitoring the forum myself), so figured I'd kick up an icebreaker topic: what kinds of things are you guys doing these days? Work, hobbies, personally projects, etc.

To kick it off, I've mostly been very busy with my job. I've basically got my dream dev job and work with cloud computing (cluster management, namely). I moved across the country for that and love my work. I'm very, very good at what I do! I get lots of responsibility, get to lead designs, get to travel for work, and get to work on interesting things that people actually want. I don't do much personal projects these days because I find the 8+ hours a day tends to leave me all "coded out" (and I have a bad habit of working late because I get very into what I'm doing). Every now and then I can contribute to open source through my work, which is a perk I really love. Hoping to get to do more OSS contributing in the future (but my todo list at work is an ever growing one ).

I do have a bajillion side projects I want to do, though. I've learned the hard way that game dev doesn't really interest me. I think mostly because I have no artistic talent and it's hard to make much without that. And also I loooove my automated tests and games are notoriously difficult to test. My real passion project is programming languages. My last job, one of my final big tasks was extending their parser for multiple other languages. We parsed circuit simulation languages; which are truly horrendous, BTW (I could rant for ages on how poorly they're designed). That was actually a C++ thing since our parser was performance critical. I'm kinda glad to not work with C++ anymore, though. Core dumps are nice, but god the language is like juggling chainsaws. These days I'm mostly Go and Python. I did start writing an interpreter in Scala for a novel language I was designing, but like many of my projects, I kinda just stopped working on it after a while, haha.

My partner got me into Pokemon Go and Wizards Unite, so been playing that a ton lately. I love it. It's great to get out and take loooong walks and explore areas I haven't before. Walks are suddenly fun even solo. Fellow players feel free to add me in PoGo if you want. I usually have excess gifts to send anyway . Friend code 6926 5429 2450.

Oh, and I got married... and soon to be divorced (oops). Married an American and kinda rushed that marriage so we could live together. Though currently in a long distance relationship with an amazing person.

Okay, let's stop there. What have y'all been up to?

2

MegaGlest / Re: How to compile GAE source code?

« on: 22 July 2019, 09:23:35 »

To be honest, GAE is preeeetty dead (the git purist in me wants to point to the fact it still uses SVN as an indicator of how long it's been dead ). And I'm not even sure I can fully recommend downloading from Sourceforge given its reputation these days.

At any rate, the sources are this download and build instructions are (from the readme):

Code: [Select]

$ mkdir build
$ cd build
$ cmake -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/usr ..
$ make
$ make install
I have no idea about Windows, honestly. Haven't done Windows dev in ages and C++ is a royal pain on Windows.

If you're just looking for the learning experience or the likes, have fun. But if you're wanting to contribute, I suggest contributing to MegaGlest instead. Git repo: https://github.com/MegaGlest/megaglest-source

3

MegaGlest / Re: Dealing with abuse

« on: 2 May 2019, 14:40:50 »

Censoring systems work really poorly. They tend to easily either miss things or censor too much. It's futile to block everything that could be offensive (since many aren't profane) and can even teach people ways to be offensive, haha. I remember how much bad shit I learned from RuneScape as a kid. It would censor words like "poof" and that made me look up a word I was using innocently and learn the bad definitions. So, like, way to go, Jagex. Not to mention people very quickly figured out how to get around the censor.

I like to think profanity has its place, anyway. Toxicity is a community thing (I think again to RuneScape, which had some Pride event a few years back and the community handled it very, very badly) and a moderation issue (I've long since concluded that toxicity needs to be stamped out hard by moderators -- there's that whole "paradox of intolerance" thing). If it isn't handled quickly, the good people leave and there will only be toxic people left and then it becomes a self perpetuating cycle (see also: why I refuse to play LoL ).

4

MegaGlest / Re: Hello Topic

« on: 11 April 2019, 04:34:31 »

> how can i acces the glestguide ?

I'm afraid it's dead and it pre-dates me even knowing version control systems, lol. You're not missing too much, though. It would have been extremely outdated. I had concentrated my efforts on the Glest wiki for years after abandoning the Glest Guide.

5

Mods / Re: glest guide

« on: 11 April 2019, 04:18:44 »

Sadly, a lot of the wiki stuff is my work and I'm kinda in "maintenance" mode where MG is concerned. Work, my own projects, and my personal life keep my busy (not to mention spending 8 hours a day coding burns me out too much to do it on the side ). The "Glest Guide" was a verrry old work of mine. I don't even remember what happened to it anymore. I suspect I took it down because it got spammed to hell and I couldn't keep maintaining it myself, anyway. It would have been far too outdated by now.

Fun fact: I made that long before I knew squat about proper web dev. I didn't even know about databases, so my rudimentary "roll my own CMS" solution was to write everything to files. Yes, it's horrifying. No, I don't do that anymore (I actually work in cloud tech now -- all about dat scalability!).


A quick skim of the Blender page of the wiki makes me think you're not missing *too* much, though. The pages on modeling guides were frankly quite poor (I was a kid!). There's better guides online that are entirely applicable (just note that our exporter flips Z and Y axes for reasons). The export page is basically redundant with the G3D support one.

The animation page wouldn't have had anything of substance that the wiki page on animation is lacking and then any bone based tutorial (example) will also work. Just keep the number of frames low. MG will linearly interpolate between all frames, but the G3D format is very inefficient, so excess frames = big size.

Which leaves texturing. Keywords to search for there is UV maps (which you should unwrap). It's called UV as a coordinate system cause programmers aren't that great at naming things . MG just uses vanilla ol' diffuse textures (although making good diffuse textures is a skill that takes much practice).

6

Off topic / Re: Off Topic - Main

« on: 1 March 2019, 05:02:11 »

Oh, yes, I did!

It's great. Great culture, interesting projects, and hefty pay. I've relocated to Ontario for it, so it's been a busy few weeks.

7

Bug reports / Re: If a user installs Steam using a Flatpak, MG doesn't run

« on: 11 February 2019, 04:58:39 »

That error seems to imply an architectural mismatch. It looks like something 32 bit is being used in a 64 bit binary.

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Bug reports / Re: 5 second spikes on wondows10,steam addition + resolution problems

« on: 25 January 2019, 15:33:05 »

Hey, if toasters can play DOOM... 

But seriously, a Pentium G630 is not a GPU, really. Integrated graphics are simply insufficient for most gaming beyond very old games or "Facebook tier games". If you're looking to get into PC gaming, you really *need* a discrete graphics card. In which case, a Pentium kinda stands out a low-tier CPU on its own. Should you ever wanna build a gaming PC, I suggest /r/buildapc/.

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Off topic / Re: Off Topic - Main

« on: 1 January 2019, 14:53:12 »

Yes, happy new... er, what?


But hey, what's going on in everyone's life? I think it's been a while since I've shared any deets. Let's see... I'm married now. To an American, so I get to deal with immigration fun. I currently work at a machine learning shop. Mostly with Python, but recently my focus has been on a parsing project that is written in C++ (for performance reasons). On one hand, I love working with languages. On the other hand, it's a pretty messy codebase (I didn't start it!) and refactoring is currently limited because we got multiple tickets that all touch this component and nobody wants merge conflict hell. Also, I still don't like C++, even with the shiny new features. I also did have a successful interview with a big 4 company, which I'm very excited about going into the new year!

10

MegaGlest / Re: MegaGlest 3.13.0 released： Is this the final version?

« on: 22 September 2018, 00:14:27 »

It's mostly just the community is a loooot slower these days. Used to be that we'd get a few posts every day. I still read through everything myself, but the volume of posts is super low compared to the peak of Glest.

I don't really have interest in modding anymore because I've long since cemented myself as a programmer with no real artistic talent. While MG is an interesting project, I just don't really have interest in developing it personally, because C++ hurts my soul and I get enough of it at work (even though my work is 99% Python -- we only use C++ for performance critical stuff). It also turns out that working full time as an software dev burns me out for programming. I'm honestly impressed with Titi and Softcoder. Side projects are definitely something I found easier as a student. I can see why GAE died. So now I mostly just keep the forums tidy.

11

MegaGlest / Re: Hello friends and lurkers COME JOIN US! [Megaglest unofficial discord]

« on: 19 December 2017, 23:53:14 »

Try turning your *** brain on then, [..]

Hey, chill. Be nice, please.

12

Off topic / What's going on in your life? What have you been working on?

« on: 26 March 2017, 05:24:46 »

So, this off topic board has been kinda dead for a long time. And I feel like this forum has really strictly focused on MegaGlest related stuff. There hasn't really been much personality or expressions of individuality going on. So let's use this topic to talk about more personal stuff. What are you doing with your life (school, work, etc)? Work on any interesting projects lately (not necessarily programming or gaming related)?

To start it off, I'm close to finishing my final year of school. Hoping to try and find work somewhere in Vancouver or Toronto. Something related to full stack web dev, likely. Recently I've been finishing up my research project on semi-automatic image segmentation, for which info and the repo can be found here. I've recently also been working on a minimalist Android app for budget tracking.

What about the rest of you?

13

Feature requests / Re: Randomly generated maps

« on: 26 March 2017, 05:05:15 »

I very strongly second the idea of random maps. I just think fog of war is partially rendered useless on known maps.

I don't feel like fog of war is really meant to make the map unknown. It's really more for strategic purposes I mean, plenty of games have fog of war and known maps. The most blatant example are MOBAs like League of Legends. The map there is totally known and fog of war is strictly to allow for strategic play. Ensures that unless you have a unit somewhere, you can never tell what your enemy is up to. Allows for surprise attacks and the like.

But you're right that the AI has a disadvantage because of map features like having gold in the middle. Perhaps for high AI difficulties, the AI should actually start with the map revealed? Not sure how much of a difference it makes, ultimately.

14

Feature requests / Re: record games

« on: 26 March 2017, 04:54:35 »

I would think that creating a video file would be kinda out of scope. There's no shortage of dedicated software meant for this purpose and it's often more efficient, too (working directly with the graphics card in some cases). There's no reason to reinvent the wheel. Anyone wanting a video can use such capture programs to make the video (either from a game itself or from watching a recording).

15

MegaGlest / Re: My impressions and thoughts

« on: 26 March 2017, 04:36:42 »

I admit I must really laugh about this. Nearly every new player I met is shocked about the horrible strong AI and you state its dumb and too easy to win .

Hmm, I feel like that's mostly because:

• The AI doesn't need to waste time making decisions. It can make them almost instantly. Means little downtime. New players? They get overwhelmed easily and thus aren't maximizing production.
• New players don't realize the importance of maximizing resource production. The AI can be much more effective at that simply because it knows this.
• Those both really add up to allowing the CPU to be an effective brute forcer. They can easily do a good job at producing many units. Of course, humans *can* do better, but for a beginner, it's easy for the AI to simply have that upper edge.

16

Feature requests / Re: Simple Water Waves

« on: 26 March 2017, 04:25:55 »

Can we get this in SVN asap please people? ! XD.

SVN? What year is it? 

17

Feature requests / Re: [8]Case sensitivity for windows too

« on: 26 March 2017, 04:23:09 »

Man, some of you guys are taking this OS war stuff waaaay too seriously. Let's chill a little.

Even myself, as a hardened Linux fangirl, I got nothing against Windows and think its approach has some merits. And for context, I've done software dev on all three major OS families for a significant length of time.
Let's not pretend Windows is the only platform that is case insensitive. Arguably most things that aren't programming languages are, really. And plenty of programming languages are (eg, SQL). Many things related to the web are case insensitive. Eg, domain names are. OS X is the other platform that's case insensitive (well, by default at least, when using the HFS filesystem configured that way).

I also see some misinformation in this thread. There should not be any "magical way" to name a file "example.png" and it would actually end up "example.PNG" short of a program purposefully doing that. And that would happen just the same on Linux. And I've never seen a program do that. Simply some programs default to making the extension uppercase for a weird reason. Most famously the Windows snipping tool does this. That'll only happen if you don't specify an extension.

I find it hilarious that anyone might act like Windows is the only OS that does things "against your will". Most pieces of software have some feature at some point that doesn't have an easy way to disable that you don't like. For example, Firefox is a favourite program of mine. Yet they constantly introduce and remove features with no choice to users. Remember when Pocket got integrated? Or what about when Chrome stopped allowing extensions that weren't from their store. And heck, iOS has had that idea of a walled garden forever.

But anyway, can we chill the OS war a bit? I mean, obvious Linux is the best (ok, I'm biased), but there's nothing wrong with using other OSes, too (I actually mostly use Windows and my last job was all over the Microsoft stack, anyway).

18

Feature requests / Re: Units reaching the meeting point get killed because they are not in attack mode

« on: 16 March 2017, 21:21:50 »

I'm not sure I agree that it's a "desired" feature for short sighted units to sit there when being attacked. If they were controlled by a human player, you'd probably just follow the projectile to find the attacker. Which is the simplest option: move in attack mode in the direction of the projectile.

If we wanted more depth, we should consider that the projectiles aren't necessarily visible (and thus it's hacky to know the direction of the attacker). A field could be used to determine if the projectile is visible. If so, move towards projectile (or run away if you can't attack). Otherwise random walk (which would hopefully either escape the attacker or find them). Of course, this gets complicated because an intelligent AI wouldn't walk randomly, but rather would probably move towards fog of war (or maybe towards allies).

19

MegaGlest / Re: wiki overhaul

« on: 16 March 2017, 20:20:52 »

Thanks, Kat. Only question so far is.. how do I add the template that indicates something like "This page is in serious need of updating."?

That's Template:Outdated. Documentation on the page has an example.

Are you on IRC or you just prefer me to use the forum if I have questions?

I'm afraid I'm not on the IRC. Can find me here (I usually eventually read everything that gets posted) or email me if you want to ensure I get it (kat.hoffert at gmail.com).

I suggest a (temporary) forum board for the wiki discussion. Here's what I see:

An individual page may require discussion.

Is there enough activity for that? I feel like it's easiest to just use one of the existing boards. We don't like to delete stuff, anyway (so the idea of a temporary board kinda runs afoul of that).

20

Forum discussion / Re: suggest link to home page on forum and wiki

« on: 14 March 2017, 21:43:53 »

Well, what about the idea of links that aren't on the main logo, as mentioned above:

If there's gonna be a link to the MG home page, it probably shouldn't be the logo. Could add something to the main menu (the gold/brown bar at the top) on the forum. The wiki can add something to the sidebar.

21

Feature requests / Re: main buildings always face south when game starts

« on: 13 March 2017, 01:57:32 »

One possible solution? A value hard-coded into the map that say "This is a top v bottom map. Rotate the buildings 180 degrees when starting the game. Also, the appropriate code in MG to interpret that value.

A more generally helpful approach would probably be to have the players on the map have a few extra options. Namely the direction that the main building should face (hence allowing for similar with left/right, etc). Problem, however, is that buildings in mods don't really have a well defined rotation. That's totally up to the mod maker.

There may be other interesting things a map could suggest to players, making such an approach extensible.

22

Forum discussion / Re: suggest link to home page on forum and wiki

« on: 13 March 2017, 01:48:02 »

This slipped by me, sorry.

How often are people going to the megaglest home page? I feel like it's not a place you'd typically go back to when on the forum and wiki. And the current behavior is very consistent with every other forum and wiki that I've seen. I'm reluctant to change it for that purpose alone.

If there's gonna be a link to the MG home page, it probably shouldn't be the logo. Could add something to the main menu (the gold/brown bar at the top) on the forum. The wiki can add something to the sidebar.

23

MegaGlest / Re: wiki overhaul

« on: 13 March 2017, 01:38:57 »

I added you as an admin on the wiki, allowing you to edit the main page.

Feel free to ask me any questions related to the wiki, its structure, templates, etc. I'm probably the most familiar with them, since I created most of them.

Also, on the topic of duplicate info, I firmly believe that it would be better to have info on the wiki instead of a github wiki. It's just plain easier to modify and mediawiki is vastly more powerful than Github's limited wikis.

You'd probably want to archive the GAE and vanilla glest info. Move their pages to something like "Old/<page name>" and then throw a link to that on an archive page. That way we have this historical data easily accessible. It's just very hard to navigate pages by their history alone, especially when pages have no links to them or get deleted.

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Mods / Re: Re-Mastering the Egypt Faction (Big Update January 2017!)

« on: 13 January 2017, 19:08:59 »

Looks great Arch. I'd think that putting it into the actual MegaGlest distribution would be a great idea at some point. Of course, it'll make for a rather large change. I'll say that I don't see a major inconsistency with the art style of the MegaPack. I mean, let's be honest, Magic and Tech really stand out because Tucho was very good at what he did. I don't believe anyone else in the community actually formally studied art as he did, so it's was hard for the other factions to compete. Arch's work here seems to, though!

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Feature requests / Re: Spawn on death

« on: 27 November 2016, 19:53:47 »

For most GIT repositories the experimental branch is always "master", so my brain is set to assuming that

They're totally doing it wrong then, haha. The consensus I've seen among developers is that master should reflect production.