Glest Advanced Engine

[The_Flying_Pig]

Ok, here sum more feedback.
-The graveyard seems a bit big...  It surely doesnt need to be, the space inside is just empty.  All it is is a frame of a graveyard.  Unless ur gonna put sumtin in it, its a waste of space.  Too big for the most part even if u put sumtin worthwhile in it like sum nice looking grave stones.
-earthquake-nice ripple effects.  I can't really think of any better way to simulate a earthquake but u could put a visual effect on those damaged.  Like maybe a puff of brown smoke as if the ground was exploding up or rocks if u could.
-Necromancer Tower, looks not very necromancy, the red flag or watever color it was was too bright for a evil look.   The building looks fine but you could use sum darker colors.
-Summoning-for the necromancers.  THe idea is great but the way u do it, theyre not even better than summoners.  
Summoners can make infinite summons and not have to have them near them at all times and plus, the summons dont die when the summoners do.
So obviously Necromancers should be more powerful than summoners and the limits are making them weaker.  At least add sum sort of advantage to counter these three bad things. (wups just realized i never tested the lich yet.  If you fixed these problems when they transform into lichs, then great, sorta like an upgrade).
-Wall-seriously... huh???  why is it a pig...  Maybe u just did that cus ur gonna fix it later but... yeah i think u get it
-and well, the modeling and walking and thas it.  The models reuse everything but obviously seeing this finish as quickly as possible is best.  These tweaks are best saved for last.  Especially the walking, the legs dont move.
Ill come up with more later

[The_Flying_Pig]

Oh and I don'et get piety.  How do you get piety anyways???  Its not like u get food from a cow or priesties from a shrine soooo wat is it and how do u get more?

[ZaggyDad]

You make monks. You should look at the requirements for stuff and see if anything costs negative something. That means that it generates the resource that has negative requirements.

~Zaggy

[Alexfolland]

Where do you put all these files?(Ya, i'm a total newbi at whatever code you're using)

[ZaggyDad]

Extract them directly into the Glest folder. (If you don't know where that is, then right-click on the shortcut to it in your start menu and then go into properties, and the path should be there.)

~Zaggy

[The_Flying_Pig]

Just a small unrelated question, when fog of war is disabled, is it only for me or can the computer players see everything too?

[ZaggyDad]

I don't think it matters, or else they just never can see anything except the stuff their units can see.

~Zaggy

[daniel.santos]

ditto what ZaggyDad said, except that the AI always knows where the player start locations are, but not necessarily if there's a player in that spot or not.  You can tell this by watching the computer when playing without fog of war.

Also, I was joking about the readme

[orion]

Yesterday, I was working with the GAE on my friends computer to test out the fps when massive amounts of units move at once. His computer dropped from 39 fps to 6 fps when I gave 32 units the command to attack at a certain location. The problem with the GAE (what I think) is that it gives eachunit about 5 different commands when someone may just want to move somewhere. For example, if I wanted to attack somewhere, the GAE would give the command to move, attack (if any enemy units came by). and then move again and then attack again.

PS: you may have already known this. I'll tell you my solution later, but I have to go right now.

[daniel.santos]

orion, did you try this on Glest 3.1.2 as well?  I don't think I've done much to change the code that moves when attacking or just moving.  I did a lot of changes to code for moving when building or repairing however, because I needed them to always be able to find a position to get to or fail.  I did some performance analysis on the pathing a while back and it's a huge bottleneck.  On an unoptimized build running on Linux 64 with an AMD Athlon 64 X2 4200+, I was having some calls to find a single path take as much as 300 milliseconds, which is a very long time.  I did similar performance analysis on the Glest 3.1.2 code and found similar problems.  In fact, I have my debug builds set up for both windows and Linux to compile the path finding code with full optimizations because if I don't, it makes debugging practically impossible.

I don't want to focus on this part just yet until we solidify the specs for gae 0.3, but it may need to be addressed very soon.

[modmaker]

I was wanting to make my own personalized changes and corrections to the current stable glest engine.  However, I've noticed that there's not a lot of documentation in the source code.  Is there something to help me understand what's going on in all that cpp stuff?  Or should I try to work with this advanced engine instead?  What do you think?
I could just revise the stable engine and then post my revisions if you wish to incorporate them into the GAE.  Anyway, I really need that documentation help.  Thanks!

[daniel.santos]

I hear you modmaker.  When I started modding Glest, I tried really hard to stick to the existing coding standards (formatting, comment structure, etc.).  However, its become apparent that the lack of documentation hurts the ability for the community to contribute, so I started adding Javadoc style doxygen comments here and there, but that's a still a WHOLE lot to address here.  Sadly, I've learned the engine a little bit at a time, sometimes by observing in-game, sometimes by reading posts from Martino, but mostly just digging in and studying it, that and a dash of experimentation.  check out gae from the 0.2.x branch (https://glest.codemonger.org/svn/repos/ ... ches/0.2.x) and build the Doxygen docs (there's a Doxyfile there) and it should at least help some.  I'm going to eventually modify my release script to generate these and post them on the server, but I haven't uploaded any in a few months, so what's up there is very old.  Also, keep in mind that it's very different from the original engine in some areas, and identical in others.

[orion]

I understand that the movement issue isn't a big issue yet, but, like you said, it will become a serious one soon when people with lower end computers start complaining.

My solution to the problem is (though it may not be possible) to find a way to give an auto command to a unit after it finishes another auto command. For example, the auto return feature of the GAE (where the unit returns to it's original place after it attacks). When a unit sees an enemy unit it is given the command to attack, but it is also automatically given a command queue to return to its original space. I think this is what is killing the fps with low end computers. Is there any way to make so that the units only get the command to return to original space only when the enemy unit is gone; no more command queues;

[Platyhelminth]

Here is the link where you can find linux 32 binaries for 0.2.6:
 http://www.mediafire.com/?ybgyddmjyfg

  Extract this file where glest is installed.

[orion]

Thanks again Platyhelminth.

[Platyhelminth]

People which made this site : http://glest.codemonger.org/ Sould add my binaries.

  I would like that someone else than me test these binaries too.

[orion]

Daniel is the owner of glest.codemonger.org, but I currently have access to the website so I'll add it soon.

[orion]

Just so you know, hailstone made a patch for the GAE that loads only neccessary faction into memory. For example, if you're only playing a game of tech vs. tech, Glest will load both magic and tech into memory. I think titi's patch is for the GAE and it can be found at this url:

http://http://glest.org/glest_board/viewtopic.php?t=3434&sid=be475f2db98257e2e428abc0163d665b

[encoish]

We need not type glest.codemonger.org anymore! Everyone should just type codemonger.org. That'll save a great deal of typing for the future as the project expands...

Sorry, that was quite random. I'm just in a hysterical mood because of all the typing I had to do lately. Great job, by the way. GAE is moving along nicely.

[weedkiller]

Hm, thats not a topic-related but a emotional post   => ... <=
I got GAE 0.2.6 working on my PC(sidux)!! I had the movement error before (units walk to topleft mapcorner).
Now that the bin fits to my libraries it works good.

What i really liked at first glance: The free camera mode! That has lot of style (am i right you smoothed the zooming-movement, it looks like the camera moves like on a parablel than just rotating constandly and getting higher.. or it is that it can move closer and higher)

I think i will compile me now every new version and i will even be able to edit source now (ok, if i understand how that goes... theres so complexe relations, hard to get behind that if you even have no good understanding of c++)

//EDIT2:

After i insalled all the libraries the compiler complained about even my movement error with the official binary is gone! I dont really understand why because i only added new ones but didnt replace any library, so it should have worked fine or not at all.

So, in main attitude i want to say: Thanks for it.

[orion]

There's a GAE 0.27? I thought the latest was GAE 0.26. That's the version on glest.codemonger.org too.

[ZaggyDad]

It's not released. He probably got the newest revision of 0.2.7. And it's 0.2.7, not 0.27.

~Zaggy

[orion]

What's up with glest.codemonger.org? When I logged on to the server, the index.html page was missing. So, I added an index.html page that says "temp". What's going on?

[ZaggyDad]

I think it's there, but it's just messed up. There are index.htmls with the dates after index in the filename.

~Zaggy

[modmaker]

I would like to start working on certain aspects of this engine, but I'd rather not do so until it's a little more stable (so I know if I did something wrong or if the problem was there before) and until there's some documentation (I've been confusing the heck out of myself on the current glest engine trying to figure out what every .cpp file is actually for, and how they are implemented).  Does anyone know how long that might be?
I appreciate all the work everyone is doing on this project!