What should really be ported from GAE to MG?

[claymore]

Pretty much everyone wants everything that GAE has....

You mean the GAE people want everything GAE has.

Auto-Repair: YES! It makes the game feel more real, as if the workers are people rather than dummies.

But there can be such a thing as too realistic. With too much automation, the game basically plays itself. What would be the next step from here? Units that intelligently group themselves, explore and attack automatically? The player should be responsible for micromanaging all these things. When I tried this feature in GAE, I personally found it to be a nuisance anyway. None of my workers were ever available when I needed them.

Besides, Titi is against it, as he's said before. There's no chance of it ever being included (optional or otherwise). But he did talk about being able to issue a repair command to an area, and have workers look for things to repair in that area (like with gathering).

[John.d.h]

Pretty much everyone wants everything that GAE has....

Some seem more popular than others so far -- patrol, guard, and save/load in particular.

What would be the next step from here? Units that intelligently group themselves, explore and attack automatically?

Oh for crying out loud, nobody's suggesting that and you know it.

[will]

explore and attack automatically?

going off on a tangent, but that's exactly what happens when I play MG - my units get drawn away by enemy and before I know it they are somewhere in a tree-line where I can't see them, waiting to be lured yet further away by engagement with the enemy!

Guard, of course, would fix that?

[ultifd]

But he did talk about being able to issue a repair command to an area, and have workers look for things to repair in that area (like with gathering).

Sounds like a good compromise...

Anyways, resources are clickable now...although now it isn't that useful these days, I think. People would just eventually know that each gold has 2000, trees 300, etc.

[Omega]

I like this feature.

[-Archmage-]

I like this feature.

Why isn't this thread MG to GAE anyway. That's the logical way to do it.

[ultifd]

I like this feature.

Everyone does!

[silnarm]

Obviously I hope this thread is redundant now , but I'd like to address a few points,

Load times with PhysFS,
 On linux the difference appears to be nil.
 On Windows it adds some overhead to every read operation. This overhead made it unbearable when it was first added, because Glest was reading just about everything a byte at a time. It is not slow though, its just the overhead for each call to read. We changed it all, to read as much as possible (pref. all) in one operation, and Omega's results should be reproducible on any windows, megapack in a 7z on GAE will load significantly faster than MG loading it uncompressed. (and because of the file loading changes, GAE reading it uncompressed will be even faster still).

Normal maps
 So long as we use them sensibly, this should be fine. First of all it would be configurable, so people using not so good hardware can turn it off, and also we simply wouldn't use it when rendering at a distance. On buildings and other big units, when zoomed in, it would be a nice feature to have.

Specular maps
 Can in some situations create a much more realistic surface (shiny stuff!), and as archmage has noted, its "cheap as chips".

[Omega]

Normal maps
 So long as we use them sensibly, this should be fine. First of all it would be configurable, so people using not so good hardware can turn it off, and also we simply wouldn't use it when rendering at a distance. On buildings and other big units, when zoomed in, it would be a nice feature to have.

Specular maps
 Can in some situations create a much more realistic surface (shiny stuff!), and as archmage has noted, its "cheap as chips".

As long as they are defaultly on, full agreement. Speaking of zooming out, is there any other changes that could help the game when zooming out? Even the most powerful computers crawls to a slideshow FPS when zoomed out to see the entire map, despite having never seen this issue in other games. Of course, Glest was never initially meant to allow zooming out that far, but seeing those times have long since passed, it would be nice if we could zoom out without Glest slapping you on the wrist. This should probably be moved to a different topic though, lest it get too offtopic here...