--- Log opened Thu May 02 00:00:42 2019 20190502 00:23:11-!- celticminstrel [~celmin@unaffiliated/celticminstrel] has joined #wesnoth 20190502 01:14:06-!- bzbarsky [~bzbarsky@pool-108-7-74-116.bstnma.fios.verizon.net] has joined #wesnoth 20190502 03:53:33-!- celticminstrel [~celmin@unaffiliated/celticminstrel] has quit [Quit: And lo! The computer falls into a deep sleep, to awake again some other day!] 20190502 06:39:01< bzbarsky> Well, I've tracked down when the colors changed on Mac 20190502 06:39:21< bzbarsky> [e8c3e99dadf6ade3b57819bc0c65b7ef4c03a076] Make SDL2 the default in cmake and scons 20190502 06:49:37< loonycyborg> so it's basically change to SDL2? 20190502 06:54:11< loonycyborg> There's a good chance that some sdl algorithms for color manipulation changed for sdl2 20190502 07:54:11 * bzbarsky doesn't know enough about the topic to speculate intelligently... 20190502 11:52:24-!- zookeeper [~lmsnie@wesnoth/developer/zookeeper] has joined #wesnoth 20190502 12:33:44-!- aeth [~Michael@wesnoth/umc-dev/developer/aethaeryn] has quit [Ping timeout: 250 seconds] 20190502 12:35:32-!- aeth [~Michael@wesnoth/umc-dev/developer/aethaeryn] has joined #wesnoth 20190502 12:45:57-!- Haudegen [~quassel@212-186-77-29.static.upcbusiness.at] has joined #wesnoth 20190502 14:16:12-!- psymin [~psymin@69.146.8.222] has joined #wesnoth 20190502 14:22:27<+wesdiscordbot> bzbarsky: I bumped the base image contrast by 10% or so (if I remember correctly) on many terrian images at some point during 1.13 20190502 14:22:55<+wesdiscordbot> (this is aside from the changes to the ToD shading values) 20190502 14:23:21<+wesdiscordbot> not sure if I did forest though... 20190502 14:23:44<+wesdiscordbot> hmm 20190502 14:24:25<+wesdiscordbot> no, I appear to have only done these 20190502 14:24:27<+wesdiscordbot> https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/231976805987385345/573515147071455234/unknown.png 20190502 14:24:30<+wesdiscordbot> so not forest 20190502 14:26:56<+wesdiscordbot> hm 20190502 15:00:58<+wesdiscordbot> So I just dug out BfW again for the third or fourth time and am attempting to beat the main campaign again without burning out like I always do. A lot of the game is looking really good, especially the number of fancy animations. Also the website looks fantastic. 20190502 15:02:34<+wesdiscordbot> But I'm having trouble wrapping my head around some of the current stats and I saw this Discord and was wondering if anyone could tell me why water is being handled the way it is in a few situations. Like, for example, most land units get better defense standing in a ford than they do on a beach. That seems completely absurd to me. 20190502 15:05:15<+wesdiscordbot> The movement costs for the terrain type called 'Coastal Reed' also seem really inconsistent- like, Elvish Riders friggin' sprints across it, while druids struggle along at a crab walk. 20190502 15:07:44<+wesdiscordbot> It's not even clear what 'Coastal Reef' is supposed to be, actually. It says 'reef' in the name, but the graphic looks like rocks, not coral, and coral is absolutely not a surface which is easier to traverse than open water. I went into the map editor to see if there were any other aquatic terrain types that would shed light on the matter, and there really aren't hardly any aquatic terrain types at all. 20190502 15:09:35<+wesdiscordbot> Are there plans to implement a wider variety of aquatic terrain in the future? I really like the Merfolk faction, but they don't seem to have much to do. 20190502 16:22:03< Soliton> elvish druid and rider have the same defense and movement on coastal reef, shallow water and sand. 20190502 16:23:24< Soliton> ford works like flat for land units. 20190502 16:48:44<+wesdiscordbot> Right, they have the same numbers when crossing 'reef', but one is a fast mounted unit and the other is a slow foot unit. Which ends up looking really weird when the Elvish Scout/Rider is zipping past the rest of the foot units clambering over the rocks, like the horse is running on the water or something. Which actually raises the question, why do human mounted units get a larger movement penalty for crossing shallow 20190502 16:48:45<+wesdiscordbot> water than human foot units? Horses are usually taller than people. In a lot of these cases, I feel like moving through 'reef' should be slower than moving through shallow water. And ford counting fully as both shallow water and flat creates all kinds of weirdness. Is this just an attempt to avoid having dozens of different terrain types to keep track of? 20190502 16:52:04<+wesdiscordbot> Defensive caps could address that somewhat but they don't seem to be used much at all for most units. 20190502 16:54:13<+wesdiscordbot> The devs indeed have always strived to keep the number of terrain types for the purpose of stat calculations (defense and movement) very small 20190502 16:54:46<+wesdiscordbot> In addition to that there's always been a bias towards land-based units since merfolk and naga are kind of an afterthought 20190502 16:54:57< Soliton> yes, these are abstractions. it's a game and it's not particularly striving to be as realistic as possible. 20190502 16:55:59< Soliton> i'd say more water based terrains would be welcome if you can come up with good ones. 20190502 16:56:16< Soliton> and get the art etc... 20190502 16:58:21<+wesdiscordbot> Well off the top of my head: Sea Cave, Rocks, Coral Reef, Abyssal Deep, Kelp Forest, Sargasso, Open Bog. And aquatic villages need their own terrain type, or to be better intergrated with the existing one. 20190502 17:01:02<+wesdiscordbot> Sea Cave is pretty self explanatory, representing it visually could get weird, but the idea is you'd be fully submerged and under the ground. Maybe that's not practical, and what's reasonable is just cave wall art with a coastal grotto look that you could put deep water in. 20190502 17:01:58<+wesdiscordbot> Rapids is a water type for rivers that is very hard to cross for land units, slow for water units, and gives very very bad defense. 20190502 17:03:17<+wesdiscordbot> Rocks are in the water and slow movement for almost anything, especially mounted land units, but offer very good defense. Basically the existing 'reef', but less of a movement bonus to land units. Think of it as very uneven ground, so kind of like hills. 20190502 17:04:06< Soliton> there's not much range left for very very bad defense. HI for example already has only 10% on shallow water. 20190502 17:04:07<+wesdiscordbot> I'm not sure how additive terrain types work, but ideally rocks would be additive to go on top of deep or shallow or rapid water. 20190502 17:05:52<+wesdiscordbot> Well, maybe focusing on defense for rapids is the wrong idea? I mean, it's hard to even get into them for enemies to attack you, but you can't really dodge at all because you're holding on for dear life. I'm not sure how to math that, I just feel like rivers need a terrain type that can distinguish them from lakes. 20190502 17:07:24< Soliton> i would focus less on realism and more on interesting gameplay. 20190502 17:07:34<+wesdiscordbot> Really though that kind of ties them to the absense of numbers for roads in the game, something that kind of makes me scratch my head. Rapids are pretty special purpose, anyway, I'll freely admit. 20190502 17:08:03< Soliton> numbers for roads? 20190502 17:08:27<+wesdiscordbot> You can use tiles to make roads on a map, but they won't be statistically different from other open ground. 20190502 17:09:25<+wesdiscordbot> I would expect that only vehicles would care about roads 20190502 17:09:31<+wesdiscordbot> That goes hand in hand with the whole goal of keeping the base gameplay ruleset simple 20190502 17:09:36< Soliton> most units just have a movement cost of one on flat. not really less possible. 20190502 17:09:44<+wesdiscordbot> for a foot unit there isn't much difference between flat and road 20190502 17:09:45<+wesdiscordbot> As for realism versus gameplay, my understanding of strategy games is that the interestingness of a scenario depends on the crafting of the map, and to craft an interesting map you need interesting ingredients. So, you make the terrain types first and then the map makers come up with fun ways to make use of it. 20190502 17:10:06<+wesdiscordbot> Which is also why you don't get ranged attacks across multiple tiles, there's no technical difference between normal weapon attacks and spells, etc. 20190502 17:10:47<+wesdiscordbot> Yeah, my first time playing the way BfW deals with ranged combat really took a lot to wrap my head around. 20190502 17:11:26<+wesdiscordbot> I'm not saying the lack of road is bad- just non-intuitive. It's a valid design decision. 20190502 17:13:42< bzbarsky> Vultraz: Yeah, the forest images in the actual app bundles look identical 20190502 17:13:59< bzbarsky> Vultraz: the rendering change came with the SDL version switch.... 20190502 17:14:05 * bzbarsky not sure where to poke next 20190502 17:14:16<+wesdiscordbot> Anyway, maybe rapids would make more sense as just 'unwalkable but swimable' water. Which is exactly what abyssal deep would be. 20190502 17:14:43< Soliton> which is what deep water is. 20190502 17:15:10<+wesdiscordbot> Units that don't need to breath air but don't swim can walk through it. 20190502 17:15:56<+wesdiscordbot> From a realism perspective, it would be 'water that's a heckuva lot deeper than just over your head'. 20190502 17:17:14<+wesdiscordbot> If the issue is limiting statistical terrain types, rapids and abyssal deep could just be a combination of unwalkable and deep water and unwalkable and shallow water respectively. 20190502 17:23:34<+wesdiscordbot> Anyway, going down that list, actual 'coral reef' would be something that gave good defense to aquatic units but didn't impede their movement, but was extremely hostile to land units for both defense and movement. Coral is sharp and extremely uneven. So, compared to 'rocks', land units could at least stand on them and get okay defense, and rocks could offer easier movement over water for some nimble land unit types, 20190502 17:23:35<+wesdiscordbot> but actual reefs would be worse than water, not better. 20190502 17:26:10< zookeeper> i'd imagine rapids could mechanically have worst movement+defense of shallow water / hills, but then again that might look a bit weird. 20190502 17:26:34<+wesdiscordbot> seems reefs are basically water's answer to forests 😛 20190502 17:26:58< zookeeper> yes, that was more or less the intent. 20190502 17:27:10<+wesdiscordbot> 'Open Bog' is maybe a bad idea and maybe just a visual thing, but I was bothered by a lack of variety in swamp tiles. I feel like there's room for a swamp tile that isn't choked with vegetation, but is the same very dark water you find in a swamp. If you want to limit terrain types, then maybe that's just different shades of shallow and deep water that are meant to match the swamp tile better. 20190502 17:28:27<+wesdiscordbot> Maybe 'swamp' needs to be renamed 'wetland' or something, I dunno, it confuses me 20190502 17:28:32<+wesdiscordbot> real swamps are kinda boring though 20190502 17:28:52<+wesdiscordbot> just some standing water with frogs in it 😛 20190502 17:28:54<+wesdiscordbot> Real swamps have all kinds of stuff going on! They're complicated! 20190502 17:29:23<+wesdiscordbot> And there's very different kinds of swamps. 20190502 17:30:37<+wesdiscordbot> like quicksands 😛 20190502 17:30:48<+wesdiscordbot> But yeah, the more I think about it, the more the kind of terrain I'm thinking of, in BfW terms, is just a complicated mixture of 'Swamp', 'Shallow Water', 'Deep Water', and 'Forest'. 20190502 17:30:52<+wesdiscordbot> just some standing water with scorpions nearby 20190502 17:33:53< zookeeper> also it's worth noting that not all kinds of terrains need to be able to be represented _on a single hex_. you can have all sorts of different swamps, for example, depending on how you actually draw your map. just swamp is boring, but you can and usually would intersperse it with water, forest, sand, grass, whatever. 20190502 17:34:51< zookeeper> arguably, you can't really make something like rapids currently. 20190502 17:36:09<+wesdiscordbot> So, uh, keeping in mind this whole 'minimum terrain types' deal, Sargasso and Kelp Forests aren't really distinct enough for the game to treat them mechanically different. However, 'Sargasso' could mechanically be a combination of 'Unwalkable, Deep Water, Forest', and Kelp Forest could just be 'Deep Water, Forest'. Kelp Forests would offer less defense than coral and be more slowing for aquatic units, but some unit 20190502 17:36:10<+wesdiscordbot> types could specialize in hiding in it or moving through it quickly. 20190502 17:38:43<+wesdiscordbot> Are there plans for a chaotic aquatic race? 'Cause I haven't noticed one. Something with cephalopods or frogmen could work. 20190502 17:41:03<+wesdiscordbot> Or both, really, since Naga are amphibious. Make another amphibious frogmen race that is chaotic, and then add a chaotic cephalopod race that is properly aquatic like the merfolk. 20190502 17:41:20< zookeeper> there's no current plans for new core races of any kind, really. 20190502 17:41:36<+wesdiscordbot> I thought the Dune people were in active development? 20190502 17:41:44<+wesdiscordbot> Balancing another race would be hell. 20190502 17:42:20<+wesdiscordbot> 😐 20190502 17:42:23<+wesdiscordbot> Dunefolk, or whatever they are called now, have taken eons to make and are still tricky. 20190502 17:43:27< Soliton> there's always the possibility of making new eras independent of default. 20190502 17:43:30<+wesdiscordbot> @Bish09 Did you see Dunefolk overhaul? 20190502 17:43:37<+wesdiscordbot> I mean, if the issue is balancing them against everything else in multiplayer, you're already making multiplayer factions that are just a bunch of stuff mashed together and merfolk thrown in as like mercenaries or something to multiple groups. 20190502 17:44:39<+wesdiscordbot> You can't even balance merfolk collectively against a land faction because the balance is totally dependent on the way water is used on the map. You have to focus on scenario-dependent matchups. 20190502 17:45:16<+wesdiscordbot> You mean they are situational units. 20190502 17:45:42<+wesdiscordbot> If you wanted to make aquatic factions balanced for multiplayer free-for-all, you'd really need to make a bunch of aquatic factions that only fought each other on aquatic-focused maps. 20190502 17:46:40<+wesdiscordbot> Well, all units are 'situational', to an extent. It's just most of the units in the game are situational to the default situation. 20190502 17:54:56< zookeeper> races arem' 20190502 17:55:12< zookeeper> races aren't factions, so merfolk don't need to be balanced against anything in particular 20190502 17:55:41< zookeeper> of course we couldn't add an "aquatic faction" of any kind to default era, because it would be impossible to balance against the other factions 20190502 17:57:58< zookeeper> if we somehow had more aquatic races and could form many separate aquatic factions and had a bunch of water-oriented maps, then sure, we could in principle have an aquatic era, but that doesn't seem particularly realistic. 20190502 17:58:46<+wesdiscordbot> that was a fever dream, I wasn't serious 20190502 17:59:14<+wesdiscordbot> i was just responding to the idea that a water-based group of units was somehow supposed to be balanced against land-based ones 20190502 18:04:01<+wesdiscordbot> What would probably work better to expand aquatic combat would be to come up with waaay more aquatic units that could be spread around all of the existing factions. That way, say, Elves and Loyalists could both have a larger roster of merfolk types, Orcs could work with a hypothetical frogmen lineup, dunefolk might get along with the full range of nagas, dwarves might build diving gear or something silly, undead could 20190502 18:04:02<+wesdiscordbot> strike deals with nightmarish squid people, and drakes would probably just have an aquatic caste or something. 20190502 18:04:36<+wesdiscordbot> Like, this is me spitballing. 20190502 18:05:10<+wesdiscordbot> I'm just saying, yes, obviously aquatic and non-aquatic factions can never be balanced against one another. 20190502 18:06:58< zookeeper> major changes to default era are basically never going to work out because of the insurmountable complexity of rebalancing, so i always recommend aiming for a new era even if it would mostly consist of default era units. 20190502 18:07:04<+wesdiscordbot> But setting slash story wise, I feel like Merfolk need more specialized aquatic antagonists. 20190502 18:09:06< zookeeper> one can pick a completely different age/setting in wesnoth's world, and make an era representing that, just like default era very roughly represents the age in which HttT takes place. then you can change or drop existing factions, add new ones, mix them up a bit, and so on. 20190502 18:10:08<+wesdiscordbot> That's very sensible. I'm just not even really interested in multiplayer myself, it's all about fun scenarios and stories for me. 20190502 18:13:09< zookeeper> well, in a SP campaign you have even more freedom to do whatever you want since the scope of the campaign can be as small as you want. i mean, as a silly example you could make a campaign that just features a dwarf in a diving bell taming cuttlefish to fight all the deep sea creatures and exotic seafloor terrains you can think of. 20190502 18:13:37<+wesdiscordbot> That's hilarious and it made me laugh. 20190502 18:13:46<+wesdiscordbot> I want to play that now. 20190502 18:14:18< zookeeper> he has a wose friend, but sadly he can only float, not dive. 20190502 18:15:35< zookeeper> i'm just saying that if you do want to explore more aquatic mechanics/races/terrains, nothing's stopping you :p 20190502 18:16:33<+wesdiscordbot> I'm not clear on how flexible the modding is, and I have a bad track record for following through on modding attempts. Can you just, make up new terrains? 20190502 18:17:53<+wesdiscordbot> Also, actually, totally different question, is there code support for conditional recruiting and multiple recruiting units? 20190502 18:18:28<+wesdiscordbot> I feel like units with the 'leadership' trait should all be able to recruit. 20190502 18:18:46< zookeeper> you can make up new terrains reasonably easily, it's the graphics that are usually the tricky part. 20190502 18:18:57< zookeeper> and yes, multiple leaders are supported, and they can even recruit different units. 20190502 18:19:11<+wesdiscordbot> I would make shitty placeholder stuff and then trying and built interesting scenarios to attract a competent artist. 20190502 18:20:21<+wesdiscordbot> But, for scenarios with multiple races, I feel like holding a keep belonging to a race ought to be a condition for recruiting their unit group. That's a much more Age of Wonders style of concept, but I think it's a good one. 20190502 18:20:47< zookeeper> you could make your campaign scenarios work like that, sure. 20190502 18:21:50<+wesdiscordbot> You could also do a think where recruit costs scale with alignment difference. So, same alignment gets base cost, one alignment away is +50%, two alignments away is double, something like that. 20190502 18:22:20<+wesdiscordbot> Maybe that's a bad idea, Orcs recruiting humans still seems really weird. 20190502 18:23:05<+wesdiscordbot> I dunno, I feel like there needs to be some kind of limiter on ability to recruit other races that way to keep things from getting too crazy. 20190502 18:23:47<+wesdiscordbot> What's probably more reasonable is player-specific recruit lists for each keep. 20190502 18:25:05<+wesdiscordbot> So like, if humans take an orc keep, the lowest goblin spearmen can be bullied into fighting for you, but that's it, while some human units who don't mind the place too much would move in, like outlaws. 20190502 18:26:04<+wesdiscordbot> But that would have to be custom tuned for every map. 20190502 19:13:39<+wesdiscordbot> So, also, another totally different issue, but this has bothered me since the very first time I ever played BfW years and years ago- random unit traits appear to display in the random order they proced in. Mostly, this is cosmetic, but it's weird that a strong, dextrous unit and a dextrous, strong unit appear to be statistically identical but have their stats displayed differently. In the case of units that mix traits 20190502 19:13:40<+wesdiscordbot> that modify hitpoints both additively and multiplicatively, ambiguity is created over which modifier is being applied first and whether a quick, resilient unit is slightly better than a resilient, quick unit. 20190502 19:14:00<+wesdiscordbot> Is this a conscious design decision? If so, what's behind it? 20190502 19:49:01<+wesdiscordbot> probably concious 20190502 19:49:21<+wesdiscordbot> like different results of stats based on order of application would seem more like feature 20190502 19:49:46<+wesdiscordbot> since the point of those traits is to make each unit a little different to each other 20190502 19:51:14<+wesdiscordbot> They're random, not subject to point buy and thus not subject to minmaxing 20190502 19:51:44<+wesdiscordbot> unless you want to waste your time saveloading for recruit with desired stats 😛 20190502 19:54:14<+wesdiscordbot> actually I might even have done exactly this at some point 20190502 20:42:00-!- zookeeper [~lmsnie@wesnoth/developer/zookeeper] has quit [Ping timeout: 246 seconds] 20190502 22:00:01<+wesdiscordbot> @Karma Chimera don't you think dwarves suffer from the same problem to some extent 20190502 22:00:05<+wesdiscordbot> w/ regards to merfolk and water maps 20190502 22:00:15<+wesdiscordbot> since they do so much better on mountains than everybody else 20190502 22:00:37<+wesdiscordbot> so if a map has more mountains, it stands to reason that dwarves are more favored 20190502 22:02:02<+wesdiscordbot> Oh absolutely, and Elves are the same way with forests. But those cases aren't as extreme as the situation with Merfolk, who are totally dependent on the presence of water to be effective at all. 20190502 22:02:34<+wesdiscordbot> fair point 20190502 22:16:53<+wesdiscordbot> I think hoplites are good even on land 20190502 22:45:20<+wesdiscordbot> I have a wacky idea 20190502 22:45:23<+wesdiscordbot> and stop me if this is stupid, but 20190502 22:45:25<+wesdiscordbot> check it out 20190502 22:45:37<+wesdiscordbot> a water-based faction that can alter terrain by adding water to it 20190502 22:46:26<+wesdiscordbot> I have an even crazier idea 20190502 22:46:52<+wesdiscordbot> but I have to start off by understanding the code in depth 20190502 22:47:15<+wesdiscordbot> I wanna make a mod so that new factions based off the Trojan war are made 20190502 23:02:16-!- psymin [~psymin@69.146.8.222] has quit [Quit: Leaving] 20190502 23:20:37<+wesdiscordbot> my gosh, i really have not been keeping up with this server 20190502 23:21:21<+wesdiscordbot> i've been trying to install BfW on my new android (specifically samsung) phone but it gives me the message of ''failed connecting to sourceforge.com/somethingsomethingsomething'' 20190502 23:54:09-!- celticminstrel [~celmin@unaffiliated/celticminstrel] has joined #wesnoth --- Log closed Fri May 03 00:00:43 2019