We are currently only using SDL on Linux, and only as of this past week. Prior to this, all of our window and input handling was custom in-house code. This was working just fine on Windows (we have decades of experience making Windows games and the hoops you need to jump through are pretty minor), but holy cow, Linux is psychotic in that area. I dabbled with X11 back in college when it first came out (late '80s) and amazingly enough, it hasn't gotten any better. Significantly worse, in fact. I spent some time exploring exactly what you have to do to make a well behaved window in the Linux world, and gave up in despair. But luckily, during that exploration I tried out SDL v2.0 and you know, it is actually a quite fine library. So we decided to see how hard would it be to use it to create/manage our window under Linux. We are still using our custom input handling stuff (with some bug fixes), but we aren't attached to it. We just didn't want to make that big of change before everyone took off for the 4-day weekend in case something didn't work out. Our plan is to test out and phase in delegating more and more window/input handling to SDL on Linux. And if it works out there, we'll explore switching over to using it on more platforms. On the one hand, I'd love to not have to maintain all that custom code we have for window and input handling. But on the other hand, "if it an't broke, don't fix it." It's not like we are running short on things to work on... -William Lead Programmer, PA
I played against 2 AI's and both walked to my start position during the game and stood still shooting only the buildings and bots within its shooting range. I was able to kill them both easily this way. It didn't happen right away. The first commander did this 20 min in the game the other around 40 min.
I was playing against 2 AI's on a metal planet. On AI was below me, the other on my left side. I barricaded the "bridges" with walls. Because my base was in a corner (right side had a trench without bridges) I didn't build turrents at the start position. Its there the commanders breached the wall (top wall) and walked right up at the spot where I spawned at the start of the game where they stood still. They only thing they did was shoot stuff in their range.
Ok. So you turtled. Did the AI attack with armies? Did you keep any track of how many units the AI had and how many units the AI were losing? Basically the AI makes two suicidal attacks with commanders The first, it moves its fabbers to metal spots to build mexes. Those metal points could be highly inappropriate (e.g. far away from base, in the middle of yours, in the wrong side of your army/base etc) In some cases the Artificial Idiot will get fixated on building that mex with its commander. You can generally see a commander roaming around the map towards metal points. It will ignore all attacks and so on. The second case sounds like the one you describe. Basically the AI doesn't have commander routines yet. It doesn't really protect its conmander or anything, it just understands that its a very powerful combat unit, and a very powerful fabricator. So generally the commander gets stuck in the base fabbing stuff. On other occasions however, the AI suddenly becomes aware of the combat power of the Commander and sends it out against your base. Essentially, I've found that this happens when the AI suffers huge amounts of casualties compared to you. Before the bomber Nerf of Nobombsvember, a reliable way to recreate this phenomenon was simply to do an air only start. You could destroy every unit the AI sent against you with minimal losses, and by 15 minutes in the AI commander would march into your base and stop. I can't decide if it attacks your economy, your factories or your fabbers
Just think of what I'm going through. I can't even afford to sleep in case I miss doing the build notes. I haven't slept now in 9 days.
From memory you are an Australian like me... I actually had some Perth friends who did a full Thanks giving diner last weekend. Go roast a large Turkey and makes some cranberry sauce. Then let your stomach rest for 9 days ;-)
Good Call Uber don't release the game till its Done. ultimately the game with never be finished, the saga will continue on forever unto eternity. Thats the way it shall be.
Well, it'll continue on until the game eventually stops getting updates. Then again, GPG dissapearing didn't stop FA from evolving.
