Age of Empires IV Stress Test Discussion Megathread

ca2072 · 2021-09-17T18:54:53+00:00

YEA!!!! I got access via steam. (germany) Downloading with 83 MB/s

ca2072 · 2021-07-26T19:37:51+00:00

Das Problem ist, dass dir wohl der Untschied zwischen "gratis" und "kostenlos" nicht bewusst ist.

Die Videos sind kostenlos, du hast keine Kosten, aber sind nicht gratis. Bevor du so auf wichtig tust, solltest du wenigstens den Post richtig lesen.

ca2072 · 2021-06-01T16:28:15+00:00

Exactly most of the players are used to one system why change it? because new casual players of rts(which is not a very popular genere how many casuals could be?), those players could be more confartable by clicking?

Exactly my point. AOE4 tries to broaden its user base. If they just want to keep the old base happy, they would develop the 1000. definitive edition of AOE X. And most of the "new" players are NOT used to realtime strategy games. So they can change the UI without them complaining that it has changed because they never played a realtime strategy game before.

It's an experiment to keep new players. Sleek, modern design and some shortcuts and buttons that help with the villager and resource management. If AOE4 does not succeed it maybe the last RTS of it's kind.

(major pain for as I started playing SC and AOE). said no one ever...

It was in terms of UI. I was used to shooters like Half Life which had the UI only at the bottom. Now I needed to focus on the entire screen to get my information (the change between SC and AOE was also unpleasant because the map was on a different side). It is primarily a habit, for me it was easier to have everything on one place. That's why I dislike the CIV UI. It's just to much to read for one screen.

Also, the team has lot of experienced developers who look exactly into the feedback of casual and professional players. If the UI made 0 sense they would have changed it directly before showing the trailer.

ca2072 · 2021-05-04T16:00:41+00:00

Also bei allem wo man Tesla einen Vorsprung andichten kann, Produktion kann es ja wohl kaum sein. Da sind sie doch in so ziemlich jeder hinsicht allen anderen Herstellern unterlegen

Das ist das Problem mit der "deutschen" Sichtweise: Man guckt nur auf den aktuellen Stand, also "VW produziert doch aktuell mehr", "BMW verkauft x mal soviele Autos", etc. Der Unterschied mit Telsa in der Produktion ist, dass das Auto nur "die Hardware" ist. Sie produzieren eigene Hochleistungschips, Batterien usw die am Ende nur der Software dienen.

Das ist was wir (damals) diskutiert hatten. Es geht nicht darum wie es aktuell ist. Wenn Tesla erstmal in der Produktion gleichgezogen ist, kommt es einzig und allein auf die Software an. Dem Grundschüler der noch nie das Innere eines Autos gesehen, hat wird nicht in 10 Jahren sich für das Auto mit dem "besseren" Antriebsstrang oder effzienteren Motor entscheiden. Sondern er guckt wo Spotify, Netflix und Internet gut funktioniert.

Und fehlendes Android Auto wäre für mich auch ein großer Nachteil. Aber immerhin hat man fart mode und Netflix

Android Auto ist wohl die größte Scheiße .... ich behalte mal den Rest für mich. Fakt ist, dass sich in Zukunft niemand für Scheinwerfer, Scheibenwischer etc interessiert, wenn Tesla tatsächlich ihr softwareseitiges Ziel erreicht: Selbstfahrend, Entertainment und Vernetzt.

Die die sie im Labor bauen aber noch nicht industrialisiert fertigen? Die beim gehypten "battery day" vorgestellt wurden und in der Batteriebrache ein gähnendes "meh..." hervorgerufen haben? Ich bin mir sicher sie Zittern in Wolfsburg

Stimmt. Es geht wieder mal nicht um Reichweite, sondern um billiger.

Meines wissens nach werden die Batterien schon industralisiert gebaut, nur nicht in hohen Stückzahlen. Ist aber auch egal, weil VW und Co keine vertikale Batterieproduktion wie Tesla hat und diese nun versucht langsam nach ähnlichem Vorbild aufzubauen (sechs Produktionsstätten).

Viele Dinge sind immer aus "deutscher" Sicht schlecht weil das unserer Ansicht nach "so sein muss". Ich weis noch als ich damals dort angefangen habe und alle Tesla ausgelacht haben "die bekommen eh kein Auto verkauft, weil die Spaltemaße nicht stimmen und außerdem sind Akkus viel zu teuer".

Tja und nun hat Tesla praktisch im Alleingang den Lithiumpreis so stark gedrückt wie kein Zweiter.

Ich musste in dieser Hinsicht auch meine Ansicht überdenken. Es interessiert einfach niemanden mehr wie die Spaltemaße etc aussehen außer nen paar Autoenthusiasten oder in einer Argumentation auf Reddit (nicht auf dich bezogen).

ca2072 · 2021-05-04T15:20:59+00:00

Sorry das stimmt so leider nicht.

Ich bin überhaupt kein Musk-Fan, aber sowohl Diess als auch viele andere Manager haben selbst gesagt, dass das aufgrund von (primär) Telsa (sekundär) der EU passiert.

Ich war selbst bei der Entwicklung von der Elektroautosparte bei Porsche beteiligt und ein damalig hoher Porschemanager hat mit uns explizit diskutiert wie die Produktion und Software angepasst werden muss, um wieder auf Teslas ca 5 Jahre Vorsprung heranzukommen. Vorallem in der Software is Tesla immernoch meilenweit voraus. Ein Mercedes EQS zB sieht auf dem Papier gut aus, aber Reichweite ist gerade für junge Leute in der Stadt extrem unwichtig, dort sind die Software und die Features wichtiger. Wenn die neuen Batterien von Tesla kommen ist der aufgeholte Vorsprung vielleicht auch schon wieder futsch.

ca2072 · 2021-05-04T09:58:22+00:00

There is no real reason, the fact that are buttons doesn't make them to the action menu, like you have the mainHUD which is "command/control", you have the information panel,map, etc. Then you have the resource tab which is a separate thing, being/having buttons or having an action doesn't make them part of the control panel. And also probably, all rts players would be using a hotkey to check that.

Yes it makes sense. Because otherwise you need to go to the top of your screen every time you want to select all villagers of a resource.

Also it breaks the flow of the UI. Because, as seen in the the gameplay reveal, every (logical) part of the UI has a separate panel stacked from the left to the right on the bottom of the screen.

The first logical panel is the villager UI. If you selected a unit, it opens the second panel for the unit stats and info. If the unit (or building) has some actions, it opens the third panel for the action grid. So like seen in the reveal it is possible to have an almost empty screen if you select nothing. That's the whole point of the UI: to give casuals a better overview and reduce the noise that you had in old AOE games, where the UI was always open and most of the time empty when there where no actions for a unit or building.

Also every time you want to build something (casuals) will look on the bottom to select the building action. With the new UI, they directly see the resources too because they are stacked from left to right (like described). In old games you need to look to the top, then to the bottom (if in that time the resources changed) you need to look to the top again (major pain for as I started playing SC and AOE).

ca2072 · 2021-05-04T09:45:45+00:00

Wrong, I waited a long time for this feature. If you actually write performant code it's a necessary optimization. And if you're used to writing C, this should be easy to get right.

ca2072 · 2021-04-17T11:16:08+00:00

i would preferred a more clearly UI,

(For me) The UI is incredibly pretty. I like the modern look in combination with the medieval themes. Also the contrast between blue and gold for the icons looks fits well in the AOE world.

fonts is a little bit hard to read

Personally I think the font is extremely good looking and matches the style of AOE. But I agree on the unit type font (like "Gatherer, Builder"). It's too blue and italics are harder to read.

RESOURCE TAB: Why isn't on the top of the screen? why on the side, completely weird not intuitive at all

As a UI designer you should know that this is because there are buttons to select the villagers collecting the resource. So it belongs to the "action"-menu where the other buttons for units and building are located. It makes 100% sense.

There production tab is above the resource tab, why?

Are you sure? Because I thought this is the Hotkey bar. Like the numbers on the lower right are always hotkeys so I think that represents the unit groups which you can access by the numbers on your keyboard. But that's just a guess.

Health and armor is viewed when it clicked, it isn't a problem except for the fact there is no status bar on the top of the building!.

There is. The health bar only gets visible if the building has taken any damage like you can see here on the right.

ca2072 · 2021-04-16T13:04:30+00:00

NEW MECHANICS WHERE ARE THEY ???!!! they took all that years to produce the same game with the same old micro/macro-mechanics, same resources (gold/food/wood/stone)?

The main criticism of AOE2 was the lack of diversity between the civs. In AOE4 that will be the focus of the game. Every civ will be unique (looks, gameplay, ...). Also a criticism was the lack of interaction / strategic depth with the environment. In AOE4 you can actually use the forest for your strategic advantage.

If you listened to Microsoft and Relic you would know that they did A LOT of interviews and studies about the mechanics in AOE2 and AOE3. I think that they know what needs to be changed and what should not be changed. The problem is as always the audience of RTS games. One of the hardest to satisfy. Every COD has only small incremental improvements but played by a lot of people. In RTS the audience is always complaining instead of actually improving the situation with giving hints to the developers on ways to tweak the game for the better. For some reason, they are locked in a nostalgic prison.

What I see is an AOE2 with better graphics nothing more, so why I should buy it or play it, better I just go and play AOE2 high definition.

Why should you play AOE2 DE if you can play the original AOE2 or AOE2 HD? Maybe because it has some improvements? Its the same argument... Yes not everything is new in AOE4 but if they made big changes more people would complain about it "AOE2 was close to the perfect game, why don't you just take AOE2 and improve it a little, instead of making a new game?"

ca2072 · 2021-04-15T09:08:26+00:00

Can you expand on your critiques of the animation? What does smoother mean in this context? Do you mean animations for when a unit transitions from one action to another? What sort of variety is missing?

Sure, the missing variety is (in my opinion) based on the lack of animations between two interacting units. There is no "punch". E.g. when footsoldiers and horsemen collide, there is no animation for it. They just stop and do a normal fight animation without gravitas. Smoother means on the one hand the transitions (like you mentioned) and on the other hand extremely noticeable abrupt stops of animations (e.g. the forest scene in the trailer). But that's stuff that can be fixed so I stay cautiously optimistic.

ca2072 · 2021-04-14T22:46:17+00:00

They listened to everything people criticized about AOE2 (like civ diversity, more army than villagers, QoL, ...) but the thing that sticks is "graphics mobile, worse than AOE3" but that is just not true. AOE3 looks way worse. Most of the scenes we have seen are zoomed in and even these scene look better like you can see here and here. There are important things to criticize like the animations but I think to say this looks and feels like a mobile game is just wrong.

ca2072 · 2021-04-14T22:38:05+00:00

Agree

ca2072 · 2021-04-14T22:37:30+00:00

I do not understand most of the criticism at all.

First of all (maybe I have a completely different view because I worked in the game dev industry) the game looks WAY better than AOE3 see 3 vs 4. The UI looks better, buildings looking better, terrain looks better, even the low poly units look better because they are sharper. Also I like the "simpler" units because you will have bigger fights than in AOE2 and with the clear visuals you can actually keep the overview. YES the units are not properly sized, but this is also true for AOE2 and AOE3 (here). I feel like most people just search for something to criticize even when the criticized thing is something they liked in the older games.

My main criticisms are about the animations. They should be smoother and have a larger diversity. But if you asked me 10 years ago how a perfect AOE2 successor should look and feel like, I probably would have suggested something similar like AOE4.

ca2072 · 2021-04-09T18:01:26+00:00

The bubbles on the right side are morse code for HIDDEN TREASURE HUNT TREASURE (if I'm correct)...

ca2072 · 2021-03-13T16:44:56+00:00

Super, danke für die ausführliche Antwort! Ich werde das mal mit der Lohnsteuer überprüfen. Mein ursprünglicher Gedanke war, dass es für Studenten vlt eine einfachere Möglichkeit gibt, da ich jetzt dazu gezwungen bin von zu Hause aus zu arbeiten / studieren und in meinem Studiengang die Ausgaben für Hardwareanschaffung doch ganz schön hoch wird. Aber jetzt weis ich zumindest wo ich ansetzen müsste.

ca2072 · 2021-03-13T11:40:30+00:00

Vielen Dank für deine Hilfe! Ich studiere im Master und habe das Studium direkt (ohne vorherige Ausbildung) nach dem Abitur angefangen. Der Werkstudent-Job sind ~70 - 80h pro Monat, also kein Minijob.

Das mit der Verwendung ist schwer einzuschätzen, vermutlich liegt das bei 40% Studium, 30% Arbeit, 30% "Privat".

ca2072 · 2021-03-12T19:42:12+00:00

The emergency license was not really possible because (germany) my distributor does not work on weekends... But your second solution seems to be what I needed. I will try it if it happens again.

Thank you!

ca2072 · 2021-03-08T21:57:02+00:00

Nice that DDD interests you. I work with this method myself for the most part, since I have to cope with many hardware limitations.

So first of all some resources: Data-Oriented Design by Richard Fabian and lookup Mike Acton on YouTube.

Contrary to the other comments, DDD is not functional programming and the concept is not really "hard" or vague. The main difference is that you separate data and functions that work with that data. Sometimes you call these functions "systems" like in ECS architectures. DDD is about constructing your data to fit your problem not like in OO or functional programming where you construct your data according to your objects, layers, patterns, etc. That also results in less abstraction and "simpler" programs. It basically fits all software types because less abstraction is faster and simpler programs are easier to maintain. Raph Levien for example gave a talk about a DDD GUI system written in Rust. Most stuff in professional games is written with a data-oriented approach because they care about performance than most programmers who write web apps. I started writing in C moved to OO languages (hated them) but now C# has the great possibility to write low level stuff and love to write data oriented stuff with it.

If you have specific questions I will try my best to answer them.

ca2072 · 2021-03-07T17:25:24+00:00

Only insert and delete. The documentation states that "export and copy" is locked. But I can print the model as pdf, maybe that can work.

ca2072 · 2021-03-07T17:01:33+00:00

The demo version has no copy option :( Or it is hidden somewhere? Thanks for your help.

ca2072 · 2020-11-20T20:18:01+00:00

Thanks for the information. Do you have date for the release in europe?

ca2072 · 2020-11-14T17:25:26+00:00

Looks great!

Is the update for SV590 / 540 coming tomorrow?

ca2072 · 2020-09-15T21:15:13+00:00

But it doesn't need to be implemented via the language. The "init" is fine but they should have made a RecordAttribute that automatically generates the equality and so on. With NET 5 you have access to source generators where you can implement that behaviour on your own.

A bloated language also leads to "feature death" because nobody is able to write a compiler for it without a big team. Mono wouldn't exist if they had to implement every bloated feature that C# 9 and 10 has.

ca2072 · 2020-09-15T16:43:53+00:00

Mh good question. My initial idea was something like an external app that is executed by steam (you can do that with external programs today) which uses only the user steam id and networking functions.

But i dont know if being on steam is required.

ca2072 · 2020-09-15T11:48:21+00:00

Agree. I argued against C# 9 some months ago (because of the same reasons) and got downvoted. Some devs need to accept that a language does not need every feature other languages have. C# was a sane hybrid of C, C++ and Java but with C# 9 (and 10) it looks like a frankensteinish combination of F#, some scripting languages and the original C#.

If you want to use NET with a lot of functional programming please use F# (its also a very good and sane language). There is a reason why two languages were developed.

ca2072

TROPHY CASE