Here are some glitches I have encountered in the new update:
When hosting lobby, can’t select - for team setting to select no team. (Auto resets to ?)
Blurry doubled text in team selection box.
Illegible text when unable to advance to next age due to low resources or insufficient buildings.
update: Villagers can no longer efficiently harvest berries, mine stone or gold. They will stand idle in a group around resources instead of grouping together to gather.
Their coding is laughable. They were so incompetent in coding that all they did was implement texts over the panels LOL. This is ridiculous. It appears like they haven’t tested anything either. Everything is glitched as sh*t!!!
Anybody that tests the game would have noticed how the warning texts (like not enough food) are completely broken. How the h*ll can Microsoft release such a thing?
I was all excited when they announced that it would show how many villagers we have on each ressources. Wait, where did they place it? They just placed a number under the ressource. No buttons or anything. POOR CODING. EVERYTHING in the new patch has been coded this way.
Even the % of scenario download is broken. There’s not even any “progress bar” in the download, just a lazy text ‘20%’ and they don’t even bother showing actual numbers, it goes in increments of 20.
Having spent years working on these RTS products full-time (Age 3, Halo Wars 1, Age DE), here’s what I think:
The recent patch breaking a bunch of stuff doesn’t surprise me in the slightest. Microsoft Studios has a track record of continually underestimating (sometimes by an order of magnitude) how difficult and complex Age games are. It’s less the fault of the low-level engineers and more a problem with the executives wanting the cheapest possible games.
You can’t just hack some stuff into the Age codebase, test it on one dev’s machine, then push it out to the public. You need to internally playtest the heck out of changes, repro and track down the out of syncs, and fix them. If the people making the changes don’t love the game or are rushed (because management makes them crunch endlessly), then the patches will be buggy or shoddy. This will drive the fans away from your series and hurt your entire brand.
Until recently the OOS rate was pretty low. It was this way because the DE developers had hundreds of playtest sessions and the developers relentlessly tracked down every OOS they could find. If you start introducing new OOS’s without fixing them, the situation will spiral and multiplayer will become unplayable. Most importantly, you cannot use your customer base to test for OOS’s because getting enough repro info will be almost impossible.
-Richard Geldreich
In your blog (http://richg42.blogspot.com/2018/02/on-age-des-pathingmovement.html), you wrote:
“Villagers can use one of two collision sizes (either small or large), so if a villager bumps into another friendly villager we can immediately switch to the smaller radius to avoid stopping. So basically, villagers can get very close to each other, avoiding gathering slowdowns. Villager vs. military combat was preserved because vills use large radii by default, and if a vill vs. vill collision doesn’t occur after a set period of time the villager returns back to the large radius. (An unfortunate side effect of this: It’s possible to group together a ton of villagers - way more than the original game - and use them to attack other units. Villager Mobs are a game unbalancing issue in DE.)”
I’m wondering if this has been changed in the latest update.
About pathfinding, I remember during the beta, some solution was to give 0 collision to villagers, I always found this solution a bit ‘lazy’ as it could cause balance problems like 20 villagers attacking same enemy or all villagers dying due to a catapult.
In this video : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-LGEafUG-8g the guy tested the pathfinding, there was also non villagers units, the result should be ok, I didn’t test it myself.
And all miners are getting stuck on eachother with this patch now. So no miners are actually working because they’re standing there like fucktards
And all miners are getting stuck on eachother with this patch now. So no miners are actually working > because they’re standing there like fucktards
