RS revived

[zaimoni]

Note: since you're affected, can you check for me whether 0.9.9.8 is lagged (that would confirm/refute the obvious cause...the radical AI changes that spam A* pathfinding).

Also, I'm curious whether the disabling animation option does anything here (it defaults-on but it may not be working correctly on the development machine).

[MP]

Oct 25, 2017 21:18:10 GMT ibazly said:

Hey! Just wanted to let you know that I'm still around, so let me know if there is anything you need. It's kind of hard to keep checking in here when for so long there was nothing happening.

Hi ibazly. Given that the other mods appear to have moved on, can I suggest that you promote L33tMasterJacob to mod (if he's willing)? He seems to dedicated to visiting daily, even when the forums were essentially dead, so would make a good choice.

[ibazly]

zaimoni - I see 0.9.9.4 and 0.9.8. Did you mean 0.9.8? If so, 0.9.8 seems to work fine for me! So I might run that version. I did notice it lags a BIT though, so I'm going to compare it to the original and see if the original game just lags a bit and I forgot or something.

MP - I don't actually know if I CAN. Unfortunately with the absence of all the other mods, I don't know what permissions or what control I have over this forum. I'll take a look and see if I can - to be honest I've been thinking that we might just need to start a whole new forum / website, since ziamoni is working on the revival project and essentially taking over development of the game.

[ibazly]

zaimoni: update, 0.9.8 is also laggier than Alpha 9 is/was. Not as bad as 0.9.9.4, but yee.

[zaimoni]

Ok ... interesting (0.9.8 is slightly faster than RS Alpha 9 on the development machine, and far more stable at 6+ days out due to multithreading fixes).

0.9.9.0 is when the two big suspected lag inducers went in: police threat tracking (this is what slowed down game load times) and Dijkstra pathfinding. Any residual speed difference between RS Alpha 9 and 0.9.8 is likely to be from inventory management (guessing ... since profiling doesn't work on RS Revived these are all educated guesses)

[zaimoni]

It took several tries to get "free turn when closing door behind me" right, but that was a highly annoying difference between AI play and min-maxing play.

The other min-maxing immersion-breaker is heavy armor (the speed penalty means the min-maxing thing is to wear it only when an attack is imminent).

[burbank]

ibazly your signature genuinely scares me. haha

[zaimoni]

REVIVED 0.9.9.5 CHANGES
* NPC speech restored.
* bump to chat crash bug fixed
* some redraws added -- should have much more immediate feedback that you have moved/rested/recharged.
 There are most likely additional coverage holes (that is, won't guarantee that all times lag is happening
 that your displayed energy level is 0 or less).

We also have a new unstable release. Unstable is laggy even on the development machine (3-4 seconds/turn with debug build is typical, and I did see a few instances of 5 seconds/turn. ZIP is release build, 2x-3x faster than debug build in early game).

REVIVED 0.10.0 CHANGES
------------------
* names better matched to stereotypical English gender
* key configuration files are not backward compatible.
* even more AI overhaul.
* Closing the door behind you is now a free action.
* map generation radically altered.
** survivalist weapon caches more usable (ammo is matched to ranged weapons in cache)
* It is rarely possible to see where a living is planning to move next.  (If you are about to shove him, you will see this.)
* player-player trading is now possible.  A similar implementation is used for player-NPC trading (no more roulette, if the target doesn't
 want to give up anything you want, you will know immediately)
* new (stub) command: Faction Info (default Shift-Ctrl-I).  See the main manual for details.
* Items will survive better if the method of death isn't particularly destructive to them.  (A slightly weaker version
 of the change in Still Alive).
** the historical resistance of food and ammo to destruction has been retained.  Armor will survive better
  if the method of death is non-violent.  Other items will survive better if they aren't exposed to zombification.
* The surface maps and sewer maps have lost their peace walls. For example, you can
** see across district boundaries (so does your minimap)
** throw grenades across district boundaries
** fire at targets across district boundaries, etc.
** Unfortunately, the AI is just as unimpaired as you.

Note that one achievement is much easier in unstable-20171112 than 0.9.9.5: powering up the CHAR Underground base. Once that is no longer secret, the police will try to clear it for you -- and they do know how to turn on generators. (They also will strip the base bare of anything they're interested in.) This is a material change from RS Alpha 9; not "planned" (I was testing a realism change with intent to back out if not "fun") but ties in nicely with the vaporware police storyline.

unstable-20171112 is known to have extreme problems with supplies in general (all stores will be stripped by the end of day 2 or so; again, problem is police. They do make hiding near the center of a district much more practical, but anything they leave behind is either not that important, or an AI defect.)

[zaimoni]

Finally had a thaw in work schedule. The next few changesets to go in should wire in a CHAR Guard Manual: an "entertainment" item (book icon, for now) with a 0% boredom rate, but only as interesting as a magazine. As this will alter map generation, this is a reasonable time to re-implement non-blocking tables/chairs (inspired by Staying Alive) so that will be included in the above changesets.

There should be one CHAR Guard Manual per CHAR Office at day 0 turn 0. Reading the manual will advise the player of when key events (e.g., the national guard supply drops and biker raids) are expected to happen. I will be reviewing whether one can study skills from the CHAR Guard Manual, without wrecking game balance.

[zaimoni]

New unstable release cut. The new game I used to check the validity of the ZIP archive before uploading (a release build) was running very quickly on the 7-year-old development machine (arcade-twitchy fast), so it's possible this version addresses the speed issues on new computers. The debug-mode build is still doing 3-4 seconds/turn on the development machine, however.

It is almost certainly worth getting familiar with the new self-orders command (default CTRL-SHIFT-O).

The next planned changeset series includes a savefile break to set up minimap assistance in re-finding "important" items; this will include introducing a UI for designating such items. I'm also evaluating whether a new unique is justifiable: Father Time, the New Year's Day patron.

[chuckokokos]

Yo, still working on this? Playing some Still Alive and changes are pretty nice. I would really like to play Revived, but turns/s is just really terrible. New features seem to be really cool, I got couple of suggestions but I don't know if they would be that easy to implement.

[zaimoni]

Yes. The commit log is bursty because of work schedule.

The worst part about the speed problems, is that they are for the most part not testable on a seven-year-old development machine. I do keep an eye on what they are theoretically, but response time in the Jan 1 2018 unstable checkpoint is less than half a second. To get a 2-3 second response time I need a debug build.

[zaimoni]

Also: I am reviewing Stay Alive for changes to import or re-implement. I just have very different priorities (basically I want the AI "working" before I do anything too radical).

E.g., the introduction of the police storyline in the New Year's 2018 release is a balancing change to increase availability of ammunition in the early game. When CHAR guards target police for the first time, they become faction enemies. Thus, the gun stores are stripped bare late on day 4, rather than late on day 2. The introduction of CHAR Guard Manuals likewise has dramatically reduced the incidence of mentally ill civilians.

The technically hardest changes that have been mentioned as intended for Rogue Survivor Revived, but are not in yet, are:

• locked doors for the police station and CHAR Offices
• on-map helicopters for the National Guard, supply drops, and Those Guys.

Everything else that is declared but not in, is simply hard to state what it does clearly. So, no need to self-censor by apparent difficulty; if I don't know about it I can't consider whether it fits.

[chuckokokos]

Got it, will You ever try to put some kind of script language into the game? Adding weapons and armor by editing some kind of config file would be cool, I don't know how hard it would be tho. On-Map helis sounds awesome, and I would like to see an option to begin playing as "Those guys", Military lads and other faction members. Basically if player wants to play as one of the "Those guys", game would need to simulate whole city for 10 days and then player would incarnate as some freshly-spawned "That guy".

[zaimoni]

Config files were inherited from Rogue Survivor; format is (Microsoft) CSV. Their functionality is both limited, and they need some reformatting for functional correctness prior to a 0.10.0.0 stable release. (In particular, scoring needs to be per-character rather than all PCs agglomerated together; there should be score columns in the CSVs for each faction, the current scores are only valid for civilian non-police.)

The current CSV files do not go as far as controlling allocation weights. That is a technically reasonable change target.

The extended melee weapon range is one of things I do plan to import from Staying Alive once the AI changes have finished causing savefile format breakage.

Scripting language -- depending on what you mean, it's either a non-starter or very far off.

• I do not want to require fluency in two general-purpose programming languages rather than one. Lua is a classic choice and has a .NET binding, but I'm not going to do the R&D to link in a C#/.NET binding. Python is a non-starter: it is Insecure By Design as an embedded language.
• I am in principle fine with a domain-specific language that implements a substantial subset of the functionality of Wesnoth Markup Language. (Google "Battle for Wesnoth"; it's a hex wargame that is easily abused as a CRPG). Unfortunately, the C# internals required are very much not there yet (even something as syntax-simple as a proximity event has no efficient data structure currently). The test case for the internals, is the after player turn event processing (it's entirely things that are scriptable).

The runtime for simulating until an appropriate spawn appears excessive even on the development machine. Bikers [day two] would need ~96 minutes on the development machine on a standard game (5x5 city with 50x50 districts) for a debug build. So, no not happening.