Release build 78071 is now live

You would think that in a time like now where you can do pretty much everything over the internet, companies would be made of people from around the planet working together.

I mean you don't really need to be in the same room for any reason other than the boss not having to hop on a plane for 8 hours to punch you when you do something stupid

I have worked as a software developer for a few years already and I would tend to disagree, being in the same place together is more effective.

it's definitely more effective, especially since teamspeak and teamviewer don't deal with timezone differences, but I'm just saying that I don't see working from another country as a huge barrier like it used to be

Better to see if @DeathByDenim is interested in integrating it into his UI mod.

hmm so looking further into the new idle alerts:
It seems they are buggy (yeah I know a "surprise" considering they are disabled completely so far).
When I enable them they show this behavior:
- most units trigger "idle" not only when they go idle but also when they are not idle anymore. Not generally bad, good in fact as it allows to track what is idle, but:
- fabbers only trigger idle when they go idle. Sucks, I wanted to track which fabbers are idle so I can add a "click here to select the next idle fabber" function.
Making that consistent would be good before that feature is activated.
Additionally it seems that when I enable "idle" alerts nothing triggers "ready" alerts anymore. So if you make factories trigger "idle" they will trigger "I am idle" when they are constructed. While this is not wrong it makes it impossible to track what units/structures are build. ... actually I guess not impossible because the "idle on ready" even trigger when the factory is given commands to build stuff forever while the factory is still in construction. I would expect the idle not trigger there, but so far it does. So I could simply track what units ids I have seen and whenever something "idles" for the first time it was build.
Still hacky. I would wish for:

- trigger idle alert when a unit goes idle
- trigger unidle alert when a unit is not idle anymore
- still trigger ready alerts just like before
- add a "unit move alert" that triggers when a unit, which is not hidden by the fog of war, moved by a configurable margin. Make it trigger at a max rate (batch together all updates) that can be configured and maybe strip it of any information apart from the unit spec, the unit id, the owner army and the location/planet. Yes I still would like to make the minimap show all unit locations like a real minimap does. I think if the "minimum distance" before it triggers is set to a well chosen value and it only batches updates together once per second it has a good chance to yield nice looking results without spamming the UI to death, especially since the minimap is an extra scene. I guess a further performance optimization to make it work with for example 1000+ air units is to not actually trigger alerts for every unit. Add another configurable margin (so parameter to the config call for the alert) that makes it only trigger a single alert with a single location in case units are within that margin together. That "unit group" alert could have an array with all unit ids.

Yeah good idea I will wait for him to decide.

hmm i guess i will never get to actually learn this game, even worst never to master it. don't get me wrong i love patches i love them like you can't even imagine (as a software engineer i do love them) but seen so many patches that are focused on BIG balance changes so often, if you are just a casual player you will never get to know this game
Monday is 3000HP Sunday its 9000HP after 10days it willl be 5000HP that units or what ever.

no no i am not crying or bitching, just sharing a thought that technical issues and performance updates are the ones i would like to see more often than changing the unit stats....

yea, the hotkey bug that i reported didn't get fixed. This build is unplayable sorry to say

*switching between hotkey groups should reproduce it for you.

Hm I'm seeing idle factories are noted as "verhicles" at the new idle interface, could the devs look into this?

It seems to remove the control groups altogether though. Whether those are useful or not is debatable, but I don't want my mod to unexpectedly remove functionality. A separate mod sounds more appropriate to me. So go for it!

I know you love this game but your posts always seem overly negative. I mean "unplayable" is a bit over the top.

While I feel for you, Uber needs to move to improve balance so the best players hang around and promote the game.

In all honesty this is unusual, and a direct result of us (wider community) complaining that there were problems with balance that stuck for too long (read months). I think the idea is fix all the main issues raised so that everything is working and useful (even just occasionally) then let things settle. I think you've just jumped in at the big changes phase

I don't really get the point of this post. Why are you trying to make me sound like a drama queen?

Unplayable is exactly the word i mean to use. No reliably working hotkey group selection, no game.

While you may not use hotkeys, that doesn't mean they arn't an integral part of RTS functionality.

well you can play the game without hotkey, so its not unplayable. I agree its bug there should be fixed asap, but dont get the drama on ur end.

I think he means that for his purposes, aka being the best PA player currently, it is unplayable. Which I sort of agree with. Even playing just for fun and *not* using hotkeys will give you bad habits.

For me, its fine cause I don't use them anyway, heh.

#NoHotkeysClub

All hotkeys what i using are fine. So i have no problem.Game has enough working hotkeys for competitive play.I am positive.

"unplayable"... hum... on Linux the selection box stop working unexpectedly and you have nothing else to do than alt-F4 the game. And this has been there since 2013! And guess what? The poor guy working on Linux at Uber can't fix it because the defective "coherent UI" on Linux was sold by a third party. We, linux users are.... Well, you name it!

It does make it a stubborn part of the game Uber can't entirely control on their end. However, if it ever got much worse than it does now, which I thought they mostly controlled linux to be playable without a 90% crash rate now...

...then they could rebuild the UI on another "see through webpage ui" that uses practically the same code fed to a different third party transparent overlay UI. That is a lot of work, but it isn't literally rebuilding the entire game again, it is effectively the work of rebuilding just about a 10th of the game just about. I still think if their hand was forced, they could do it, and that one of us could even in the not too distant future mod the game to work with Chromium. Its not easy, but it should be entirely possible.

Wait, do you mean to say then:

Release Build 78071

Balance

-Mines can now only be seen by Combat Fabricators and Advanced Combat Fabricators AND SKITTERS?