Mods in ranked games.

you explain differences between micro, macro strategy and tactics there is however no explanation between the differences of spamming and macro ..

spamming units could aswell be part of a macrostategy ...

That was just an example of the type of gameplay I don't want to see in PA. I also play Starcraft 2 so marine stim is fine in Starcraft 2 but I want PA to be about big armies clashing across multiple planets. Imagine trying to play Starcraft 2 across multiple planets, good luck superman! There's nothing wrong with marine stim or micro in general, it's just that I don't think it fits well within the PA ethos.

to me starcraft is more like a rpg-rtt than a rts

That's just semantics. At the end of the day both games are RTS or whatever we want to call them, but the gameplay mechanics are slightly different, and because of the grand scale of PA (i.e. multiple planets/spherical maps) the features of other RTS games may not fit so well in PA, i.e. spell casting, epic marine unit splitting against baneling hits.

splitting dox against bombers

actualy there is "spellcasting" in pa ... just that it is in a different form ...

I had foerest part his Dox like the ******* Red Sea. I hate you, @foerest

Are you going to give us an example?

foerest ... the revers moses?

Yes that is an example of what I believe doesn't fit well within the bounds of what PA should be about. That's just my opinion, you don't have to agree.

thought it would be obvius but nukes uc and steroids?
and annihilasor ...
in other words its kind of similar to cnc stuff with airstrikes ioncanon in principal ... that is what i mean ...

I wouldn't have called those things spellcasting, but I guess it could be considered spellcasting. The fact that you have to initiate the action, yeah I guess it is.

yea ... quotationmarks

C++. PHP. MIXAL. Java. C#. A bit of Python and LUA on the side. Those are the programming languages I have learned so far (and I cannot shake the feeling I am forgetting one there; happens after the first half dozen).
You talk as if learning a new language or environment was actually the hard part of programming. The concepts stay the same. Just how you express them and what can be done how easily/at what efficiency/at what robustness changes with the focus and the pre-existing libraries.

In the end the only question is: Is the stock UI written in the same langauge and under all limitations of the Mod API?

Even if mods and stock UI have acces to the exactly same functions, Elder Scrolls Online used a concept of applying private/protected atributes on certain functions. Private cannot be called from mods (unsafe code) at all. Protected cannot be called while "in combat" (a distinct game state in ESO). And that applied on a LUA environment where Stock UI and mods did use the same langauge.
Some hackers managed to run random code via a binary hack of hte Lua processing code. But overall using the mod-allowed functions to cheat is practically impossible. All cheaters went towads 3rd party tools.
And as has been said extensively: There is no lasting defense against those anyway, only war. They were also never the concern of this thread.

I never said modders are evil. Please stop putting stuff in my mouth I never said.
In fact I did drew up plans for cross client Addon communication via the Guild Member list in ESO (wich was till then thought impossible):
http://www.esoui.com/forums/showthread.php?t=1571
Multicast via Guild Member Notes. That was way beyond what the developer had thought the system for.

Only the standing rule about "don't put undue strains on the server" and other modders better being carefull about it let me reconsider to actually go there. No point doing something the devs do not want (and will just block). Plus I never made a Network Protocoll before.
Otherwise, give me a event to register and a string to set/send and I make you a cross client network protcoll via any string medium

Stock UI is a composition of the native "holodeck" which manages all the 3D stuff and particle systems, as well as a bunch of Coherent scenes which are each running Javascript and displaying HTML and are responsible for the entire overlay.

Mods are directly injected into each of the Coherent scenes by overloading stock JS scripts, so they have access to all methods available to the stock UI overlay. The holodeck part isn't accessible by mods, at least not directly as mods can only overload vertex and fragment shaders, but have no read or write access otherwise.

The premise was to enable full conversion mods, both for the controls as well as for everything cosmetic (unit skins, animations, shaders) while the client/server architecture still retains integrity and security of all data.

No player must be limited in his performance by inexpedient control mechanisms in the client.

So that's just the arms race that's really not helpful to have. The PA UI is javascript. Basically the UI is a webbrowser and mods inject custom code into it. Making a javascript environment that manages rights for function call isn't pretty. It's also gonna end with an endless "should we allow access to this function?" discussion.
Uber really is so many better things to do than worry about "cheating". Nobody is cheating, people are just using UI mods. Just because sc2 has put ui modding in the light of cheating does not mean that people outside of that game consider it cheating as well. FA has a long history of UI mods and nobody is unhappy about them there. And FA has none of the security features of PA. Client UI mods have access to quite important data of all players in FA, in PA that is not the case.

plus it's rather clear what qualifies as cheating and what doesn't (at least to me) : all the possible cheating stuff has to be server-end in the current state of things so we're golden.

Pretty sure you could mod a cheat with cntrl alt f11. Once you get a radar blip you can see what the building is. Just need to learn their outlines.

While I can't see a way to make it display building outlines it does display unit outlines, so i.e. it becomes visible what the commander is or what an air factory is:


I've had only the create unit cheat active here, so I guess this is possible even in ranked games?

That has nothing to do with modding, it's an exploit without any additional code. A mod might be created to abuse it more efficiently, but that's a different story.

Is this bug listed somewhere? It should be fixed, as this is clearly an exploit.

Yeah possible in ranked games. I use it sometimes instead of going into chromocam just to find the enemy's base when I obviously don't have enough energy for my radar to stay on.

Was sure it showed buildings like mex too. Think when I seen that I used the orbital satellite, not sure if that matters.

I didn't wanna post it in big tracker but mentioned it to garat several months ago.

Edit: pretty sure it will only show units last know position. Nothing constant.