Developers Iteration III of 2023

veteranashe

Reserved to give gg's

Jip

Added a section about the distribute orders feature.

Guy

@jip said in Developers Iteration III of 2023:

Distribute orders

You can now distribute (or: spread) any order type! With thanks to @Strogo, KionX and RTD who made an engine patch to make this possible. This new implementation intends to improve upon the old spread attack implementation. We're looking forward to hear your feedback on how it works.

...

Apologies if I'm being dumb but I've tried using this and don't understand why it's not working - perhaps someone can put me straight

My assumption is I can select a bunch of units, issue a sequence of orders to all of them as a group, then press this key and it should change the order into a separate order for each of the selected units to do part of the task (e.g. as shown in the screenshot, a long wall will be broken into short sections, each one done by a different engineer).
The same as how Split Attack works.

I select a group of engineers, give a series of orders, then press the key I have assigned (which is ` [backtick], if that matters)
It just cancels the original series of orders and all the engies immediately go idle...
I've tried holding down Shift after giving the orders and whilst pressing the hotkey, doesn't make any difference.
How is the hotkey supposed to be used? Can someone spell it out....

Thanks

Nex

@guy Do you have the logs of that game and maybe the replay id?
Did you have any mods active?
If so, can you reproduce this in a sandbox game without any mods?

Jip

@guy You're playing on the wrong game type:

The hotkey shows up but is not functional on the FAF game type. It is functional through the FAF Develop game type, you can change the game type as you host a game:

The feature becomes functional on the FAF game type after the release on the 26th of August

Guy

@jip said in Developers Iteration III of 2023:

@guy You're playing on the wrong game type:

The hotkey shows up but is not functional on the FAF game type. It is functional through the FAF Develop game type, you can change the game type as you host a game:

The feature becomes functional on the FAF game type after the release on the 26th of August

Oh, didn't realise, makes sense, thanks

snoog

Just to make sure, I should disable UI Party if I host a develop lobby?

Jip

No, you should disable it if you want to make use of context-based templates. It is not compatible with that. Do note that the old spread attack implementation is no longer available on FAF Develop, you'll need to remap the hotkey

snoog

Does the new spread move also deprecate the Disperse Move mod?

Nex

@snaggs
@jip said in Developers Iteration III of 2023:

Deprecations
This will remove the old spread attack key binding and the functionality of it. All (UI) mods that relied on that functionality will no longer function. This includes but is not limited to the Disperse move UI mod.
yes

snoog

My bad, missed that somehow.

Tomma

"#5321 Pausing engineers will also pause their reclaim progress"
Can we please not do that? I often want my engies reclaiming regardless of if they are paused or not. For example, you are in emergency, you want to build something asap, you select all engie on map, you pause, then unpause those engies which are building what you want. With this change you would also need to unpause all reclaiming engies. Also there is a feature where placing order to build something on reclaim pile would cause engies to reclaim it at high speed, which is useful on like desert arena, but i think it would cause problem on other maps too, imagine placing fac on some trees, and then pausing engies, they wouldnt even reclaim trees so when you unpause them, they gonna reclaim first which will cause some pathing issue etc. which is annoying.
If you overflow mass reclaiming its just skill issue and you should have planned accordingly, so now you have to waste mass or redo your queue.

Jip

@tomma said in Developers Iteration III of 2023:

you select all engie on map, you pause, then unpause those engies which are building what you want.

I'd argue that this is not the best approach

@tomma said in Developers Iteration III of 2023:

but i think it would cause problem on other maps too, imagine placing fac on some trees, and then pausing engies, they wouldnt even reclaim trees so when you unpause them, they gonna reclaim first which will cause some pathing issue etc.

This sounds hypothetical. The feature is live on FAF Develop, give me a replay id where you experience unusual pathing issues

I understand that this is a change in behavior that people may get used to. But pausing an engineer should pause it. It is what players expect that aren't familiar with the quirks of FAForever. There's not just downsides, also upsides. It enables you new interactions, like being able to preserve your attack move commands by pausing individual engineers when you're about to fill your storage. Or being able to preserve the queue by being able to pause the engineer instead of hitting stop

maudlin27

Could the engi 'dont reclaim when paused' behaviour be made an optional setting so people could opt out of the behaviour? I make use of the pause option similar to Tomma where if I'm e.g. power-stalling I'll want to quickly select engineers on-screen and pause them, so may occasionally pause ones that are reclaiming.

Alternatively could there be a new pause hotkey that pauses every unit except engineers with a reclaim order? I'm not sure if this would be feasible though - i.e. you could have it not affect engineers currently reclaiming, but I don't know if it's possible to analyse the command queue to identify cases where an engineer has a move order followed by a reclaim order, or has a reclaim order on a target outside its build range

Jip

@maudlin27 said in Developers Iteration III of 2023:

Could the engi 'dont reclaim when paused' behaviour be made an optional setting so people could opt out of the behaviour?

It is an assembly patch. Those are difficult if not impossible to make optional on a per-user basis.

We can make a hotkey to select all engineers that are currently consuming resources, that would qualify for engineers that are building things (at that moment)

Chenbro101

So about UI party not working, are there any other mods to set your factories to repeat on construction?

Nex

@chenbro101 Is there a reason to not use the built-in option?
Or did you mean something else?

Nex

@tomma said in Developers Iteration III of 2023:

If you overflow mass reclaiming its just skill issue and you should have planned accordingly, so now you have to waste mass or redo your queue.

So why is the change breaking your approach bad, while it solving problems for others is a skill issue?

Tomma

@Nex What problem does it solve? Sound like "great" feature for the sake of consistency which noone wanted.

Jip

@tomma said in Developers Iteration III of 2023:

@Nex What problem does it solve? Sound like "great" feature for the sake of consistency which noone wanted.

I want it. People on Github, including the balance team want it. And apparently Strogo wanted it enough to spent time making an assembly patch for it.