The Ethics Of Mods In Competitive Play

I personally don't know if you can do this or not (mostly I don't know if you can get information about what types of enemy units are in your vision which you'd need to determine if they are a threat or not), I'm not a modder (yet... I really need to take the time to learn javascript), I don't know what information is available to UI mods, if it is, it would only be able to report on units that are currently in your vision. UI mods can't maphack they can't see things outside of what you as a player can already see.

Fog of war is kind of a pain right now with the APIs. When you do a "give me a list of all units" query it gives you the last known position of all units. That can mean that it is an up to date position of a unit in your vision. Or it is a unit you last saw 5 minutes ago that was nuked since then outside of your vision, ofc with the position it had back then.

Is there a way of getting the last time a unit was seen at? You could cross-reference and I don't imagine that'd cause much of a performance hit.

Even if you have to handle timestamps, or a call in milliseconds or something.

If that isn't available, it certainly seems like something useful for Uber to expose. There has to be some form of tracking the last visible state to render FoW in the first place.

You brought up training and diets, which is why i brought up sports. Obviously its not a perfect comparison, but that wasn't ever the point. Examples are used to illuminate certain aspects of a topic and are simplistic by their very nature in order to do just that. They arn't meant to be comprehensive.

Mods are tools. They are external to the player as much as the un-modded ui is.

Mods are also not easy to find for the common player, and you would need to provide support for your claim that they are. What highly visible structural supports are in place that notify players of mods? The vast majority of people coulkdn't even figure out you coudl area circle command without a tutorial.

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That's the point. It is a mod that provides advantage to people who know about it, as opposed to those who don't.

When you press 1v1 ranked, you are saying "hey i'm using these good mods and i'm prepared to potentially be matched against someone who might not know about mods at all". What's more, the guy doesn't even know you're using them and can't decline the match.

We don't use it becaus its incredibly unfair and it gives way toomuch of an advantage without doing anything special.

There is not. There basically is no direct FOW info. You just can query the most recent info on units the server has given to you. The only way to correctly do FOW would be to implement it yourself in JS based on unit vision ranges and unit positions. That's why the ubermap has ghosts in the first place: It was much easier to do.

Well, actually i have a secret to confess.

For the past year i've been using some really great ui mods. That's how i managed to beat matiz 20 times in a row, because quite honestly i'm pretty bad at the game otherwise.

The first one i use is this mod I custom made that automatically micros all my fast moving units to dodge bullets and bombs at the exact right timings. Area patrol against bombers is inefficient, in my mod i just need to press one button and all the dox automatically spread out with spacing exactly equal to the splash radius of each bomb.

On my second monitor, I have this economy mod that constantly analyses my metal and energy and tell me where it's going to be in 1 minute from now so i can build the right ammount of pgens and fabbers in the present to avoid floating or choking. It also automatically pauses and unpauses every single one of my units in exactly the right priority to maximise my build power, unit count, and future income.

It also has an algorithm that automatically tells me what i need to build and when in order spend metal at the highest mathematically possible limit. And if i forget, it does it automatically for me after 5 seconds. It also gives me my enemy's metal/energy income numbers are so i can instantly tell whether i am behind or ahead and whether i can trade and bully him or not. All i need to do is waypoint and forget a firefly all across the map.

Another nice mod i made automatically orders my bot factories produce combat fabbers to reclaim trees when it sensed that my future economic state would be metal starved.

And then on my third monitor, i also got an improved version of uber map that shows last known positions of units, shows radar pings and is resizeable so it's enlarged and i can never miss it.

This is how i am king of the planet and retained rank 1 on the uber ladder for so long. Any problems, talk to my lawyer. You should have made your own mods, get good scrubs.

Even more impressed I beat you that one time. I must be dead hot at this game.

Nah, i turned them off to see how good i really was, and some of them i didn't update yet for titans. I mean i should have been able to beat you eyes closed just like before. What difference could mods make anyway?

But then i lost and realised it was because i hadn't researched and updated my ui mods first in order to beat people on ladder. I was a really bad player for neglecting to do that and you deserved the win for sure.

I only got place for 2 monitors on this desk so gg. This does actually sound like a nice gaming setup, such a shame your wasting all of the screensurface showing the boring things about PA on it

Ah makes sense, preparation is the key to success. By failing to prepare you prepare to fail. Your own fault so. Probably should take a look at pa-db while you're at it so you can know that grenadiers are bad and t2 is cheaper..... Oh wait that's an advantage too...

I've been trying to figure out modding in this game for about 7 months. I can't find any good documentation, or examples. Whenever I ask modders how to mod PA they say the best way to learn is to mod PA.
That is not accessibility.

Cola colin wrote a nice tutorial on the forum, have you checked it? I'm doing some test and will try to make my ambitious mod if I get the time.

ikr. If only i had prepared by updating my mods. But then again, i didn't have to prepare by practicing dox micro or scouting or managing my economy.

Nah i didn't look at pa-db. Please, i don't do peasant work. Already got a script that automatically gets all the balance changes and puts them into one spreadsheet. ezpz

@yarmond that's actually a feature I've been wishing for on pa-db for a while: Generate an easy to read diff between two selected versions

That one with the combat fabbers, that nip out, and do you right.
I seriously want that bad boy

I want all of them. Would make the game more fun to play if I didn't have to manage and track all that ****. It's all about teh armies banging into each other

also... preeeeettty sure we've ventured into slippery slope here. And if nothing else, well we all know what kind of game Elodea wants PA to be. Too bad not everyone agrees! Any kind of UI mod is fair if both players have access to it - fun is another matter.

Sorry, too bad. I made these mods and i have no intention of putting them on pamm. It would make all of you as good as i am and that is obviously not going to happen on my watch.

wrong. There are not only 10 pages here, but also a 6 page article on exodus that state otherwise.

I don't want the game to be anything other than functionally the same as the base un-modded game for 1v1 ranked ladder. If uber wants to incorporate mods, they are free to do so at their pleasure.

How will you ensure that all players have access to it? What is your plan to solve this problem?

I think the point where we might really fundamentally disagree is for how intelligent we want to take the average player. Do we expect them to know how to use google or not?