Forged Alliance Forever

The community-driven lobby for Supreme Commander : Forged Alliance.

Developer Conference #10

Editor’s Note: If you prefer not to read English: Translations / Übersetzungen / Traduction — Duke

Hello Commanders! It’s been quite a while since the last devstream – #9 was on February 9th – and quite a few people were waiting for the next one to answer some open questions. This post is meant to provide a short summary of the most important talking points of the conference. The entire video is available on the FAForever Youtube channel.

  • EQ becoming ranked:
    • Mods becoming featured and ranked does not mean that the council endorses the mod.
    • Due to the statistical properties of Trueskill, EQ counting into global rank is not a problem. The Dev Team will provide data to prove that.
  • Rules that have to be followed for a mod to become featured:
    • The mod needs to be free of game breaking bugs.
    • The mod needs to be played by people.
    • The mod needs to be kept maintained.
    • The mod needs to be published under GPLv3 on Github.
  • Rule for a mod to become ranked:
    • As long as a mod doesn’t change the game to such an extent that trueskill cannot predict the outcome of a game reasonably well it can be ranked.
    • This also does not mean that a mod is endorsed by the council. It is meant to ensure that people are being judged by trueskill to ensure that they feed data to the global rating system.
    • Assuming that other mods (such as the 3650 balancepatch mod by Evildrew/Blackheart) meet the criteria they can also become ranked to ensure that the system keeps getting data.
  • New Patcher:
    • Brutus5000 is working on a new patcher called BiReUS to decrease the amount of data the server has to send/clients have to download.
    • Download size for a patch will decrease from 40 Megabytes to around 200 Kilobytes – an improvement of 99.5%.
    • This should also make watching replays from older patch versions a lot easier.
    • Only downside is that 6 GB of additional storage is needed on the server – which is not really an issue.
  • Discord:
    • Until now Discord has been in a test phase and was not officially endorsed by the council. This is no longer the case.
    • Discord will replace Mumble as our primary voicechat. Mumble will be kept online as a fallback since we have no power over the availability of the Discord servers.
    • Discord will operate under the same rules as the rest of FAF – which is already the case.
    • Discord will not replace Slack as a tool for developers to organize but Developer Conferences will be held on Discord.
  • Galactic War:
    • Brutus is making progress on the backend and speed2 managed to fix the lua code for galactic war and run a game successfully.
    • Frontend needs to be worked on.
    • If anyone wants to help with the development of GW ask any FAF mod for slack access and get in touch with Brutus5000.
  • Tutorials:
    • Speed2 and others are working on map tutorials and has finished a few already.
    • Needs client implementation but currently ICE and refactoring have a higher priority for the python client.
    • In the meantime quicktips for the loading screen will be made and added to FAF.
  • End:
    • Since time was running out the remaining agenda points – ACU-Customisations, Budget and Ladder – will be discussed on the next developer stream.
    • Next developer conference will be on the 27th of April.

A big thanks to all the Patreons that support FAF and will allow us to cover the costs for the server.