Raveen wrote:QUOTE (Raveen @ May 12 2007, 06:42 AM) If you want to learn Allegiance relatively well then I suggest you sign up for the Cadet course. It's provided by the community to help new players find their feet and will give you an insight into the ins and outs of the tactics and strategies used commonly.
I have the hours, but not the days. This project will almost certainly be complete in eight weeks, so it would be of limited use.
Learn the ins and outs of all the FAZ 3 source code.
Write all new code to capture in game events.
Capture enough data for it to be statistically relevant.
Do this in a hit or miss process determining what is and isnt the important stuff
All in eight weeks
Also
QUOTE For example, if I tried to track the positions, thrust vectors, and orientation of each ship every time the physics engine fires... that's a lot of data![/quote]
How do you know for sure since you neither played the game nor looked at the code indepth
QUOTE (Especially because I have to record the data of everything that moves, not just players!) We could collect it, if we thought it was worth it, but it usually isn't.
So, say we only record shot vectors. But what do we record on firing? Just the shot vectors? Do we want to keep track of live ammo remaining? Ammo left in cargo? Health? Proximity of enemy? Health and ammo of enemy? Too much data![/quote]
OK then so you are only going to record shot vectors? Of course you'll need to know if it hit. The type of ship. The appropriate skill level of the player ( oops you don't care about that you said ), whether he was told to do it or did it on this own, whether it helped or hurt his team, the current state of the technology for that ship, your opponets ship.
QUOTE Instead, you have to pick and choose what data are most interesting.
3. I don't know enough about the game to give specifics as to what we want to track, but here are some examples of things that we might want to track:
What ships players fly. What roles they fly in those ships.
Actions taken by injured players.
General proximity to other players, ally and enemy.
Team performance after a significant loss or gain.[/quote]
How do you propose to do this without having some way to judge if the team was worth crap or not. The commander too. Oh wait you not going to develop a ranking system. Also you are back to recording everything in the game since almost all moving objects are directly controlled or can be player controlled.
QUOTE Overall tactics pursued.
Effectiveness of different weapon loadouts and techniques against specific enemy tactics.
Responsiveness to commands. Tradeoff of response to command (IE, trying to figure out a bad command versus a good one).
Effectiveness of automated units (turrets, bases, miners, probes, etc) based on some kind of relative position to critical elements...[/quote]
How do you propose to decide effectiveness of any of it since you aren't developing any sort of ranking system
MrChaos wrote:QUOTE (MrChaos @ May 12 2007, 02:39 PM) Im calling shenanigans right now
You have a few fundamental misunderstandings, MrChaos. The sort that refuse to be explained away.
You're also a troll.
Please stop getting in the way.
On the other hand, the ranking systems part should be explained: obviously, we'll have to develop some system of deciding whether someone or something is good or bad. I just don't think it should be used to decide games or community ranks.
If you are going to observe squadgames, the Squad leaders can probably tell you who the top players on each team are more accurately than our current rating system can.
Raindog wrote:QUOTE (Raindog @ May 14 2007, 10:37 AM) If you are going to observe squadgames, the Squad leaders can probably tell you who the top players on each team are more accurately than our current rating system can.
Squad leaders will definitely be important.
On another note, we seem to have lost about ten posts. Mostly good ones. /tongue.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid=":P" border="0" alt="tongue.gif" />
The Escapist (Justin Emerson) @ Dec 21 2010, 02:33 PM:
The history of open-source Allegiance is paved with the bodies of dead code branches, forum flame wars, and personal vendettas. But a community remains because people still love the game.
BlackViper wrote:QUOTE (BlackViper @ May 14 2007, 03:12 PM) Direct question Craig: Do you identify active players(and their friends) and sell their contact information for direct marketing by a third party?
Would you post a link to your company website please?
We don't plan on selling anything, but we plan on making everything available free. It's easy to collect "neutered" data if the community doesn't want their handles to be linked to the metrics. Obviously, no other personal data (such as emails or personal names) would be collected either way.
Since we need players, we're perfectly willing to bend over backwards to keep them happy. If they want it anonymous, we'll make it anonymous. We'd prefer to link it to handles - it makes for data that is more fun for the community and the readers if we say "BoomBlaster uses heavy intercepters to defend the miners" rather than "Subject 394 tends towards heavy intercepters for miner defense".
Pkk noted our web site. Which is ugly... no artists on staff. /tongue.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid=":P" border="0" alt="tongue.gif" />
-Craig
Last edited by craigp on Tue May 15, 2007 2:27 pm, edited 1 time in total.
1) before you dive into the source code you want to know what Two Weeks means.
2) The most influencing factors in deciding a tactic are, in my extremely humble opinion, game size (= no of players), game map and tech rocks available. Little sized games are going to be longer and have ending tech researched earlier because bomb rush works well against small teams and basic tech, as far as I know. Game map is also important: it determines the resources the team is going to have and thus the choice of tech. Finally rocks influences most directly the tactic used because they determine the what type of tech (stealth, etc.) a team is going to have. Also faction choice has its importance: you rarely (cannot?) see bios bombrushing. This is also affected by the core.
So, you see, by just looking at the most important variables we already have five degrees of freedom, not counting game type, settings, skills, kill bonus, boot number, mood of the commander, opponents, stack, connection quality, friendship, controller used, roles, knowledge, amount of chatter in All channel, battery status of wireless mouse of the htt pilot, alcohol level, moon phase, birthdays, blessed amulets of luck, time, space, jimmynighthawk, drama level, @Allegs, humour.
So you see that you have too many variables and so little time.
3) What would then I suggest?
Well, rumour has it tech wins game. Track what tech is bought, when, with how much miners/mines are alive at the moment and the previous major event (eg: if you lost a miner will you buy another one?). This data will give you a rough idea of the strategy employed (eg, if yes, the comm is being cautious and game end is far, or he is short of money; if not, either there isn't enough money or there is enough money and the game is pretty much won...).
4) Another adagio has it that a team is as good as its commander is. If we want to believe in common wisdom again, track the chat. Ask teams not to use teamspeak for this purpose. See how he communicates with the team. Make sure you grab a comprehensive voice chat pack. How often does he type? How often does he issue orders? Especially, how many times does he issue the same order to AI in a quick sequence? does he Use voicechats? Does he use words like "wimp", "gay", "retard", "$#@!tard"? Or words like "good", "nice", "ok", "perfect"? Does he type in all caps? Does he use expressions like, "$#@! this", "resign this @#(!" or "this is pretty much over anyway"? And how is the outcome related to this?
5) MrChaos was not meaning to be a troll, but was giving you an headsup on the level of difficulty of the task you are going to face. I sure wish you good luck, but I have to agree this is a very hard task.
6) I am no maths man, but the leaderboard is a nice start for number crunching. From it, eg, I can say that an average game has 11 players per team; each player plays a game for an average of 40 minutes; people start podding more than they are podded at Inter 5 skill level; et caetera. If you need some ground for number crunching, the leaderboard can be much more useful than it looks like.
7) Keep in mind I pretty much suck at this game anyway so what I say can be easily proved wrong.
EDIT: Posting from mobile, I lost count of my 4)'s /doh.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid=":doh:" border="0" alt="doh.gif" />
Last edited by badpazzword on Wed May 16, 2007 2:40 pm, edited 1 time in total.
