[AI/bot teammate]

Hello @Rankerz,

you are right the technology back then wasn't so spread out, to make AI bots really viable, but it is right now. We added such option, to test the feasibility:

But these bots are available only on test server, because as you wrote with enough skill the maps can be done solo, so balancing such bot is no easy task, if all it would take to win a map would be to add a bot that would solo it, then players would just do that, instead of playing the maps, to get rewards.

Unfortunately making a bot, that will win a "PvE" map 100% of times, is so much easier than a bot, that would be only somewhat useful.

Balancing such bots would be a nightmare, so I do not expect them to be on prod server any time soon. 😞 

[Statement about antivirus programs flagging Skylords Reborn as unsafe]

9 hours ago, STM said:

Even if it said 0 after the update, it's a bad out-of-the-box experience for new users.

I guess you are not playing any game on steam, right? This is steam itself:

https://www.virustotal.com/gui/file/422bc4e4f5bdfe739670bdc6096bce2828eb98e7e62d3ca525199339bfd4494f
https://www.virustotal.com/gui/file/e7e706048790633368e5eb9f67e21e0194fc9b20d59f69fcb94ca01c492de449

[Primeval Watcher damage]

Why would it take a while?

Designers already choose to add new parameter, so the follow distance can be changed per spell.

And that is already implemented.

I do not know if for this specific case it would cause any issues, if the follow distance would be too big, and that is the only part someone else need to check. 🤔Maybe target next to tunnel, or other source of teleportation? But the window is quite short anyway.

[Primeval Watcher damage]

Thank you @Makaveli2989. I will write the explanation, of what is happening, but most of it, is for designers, so do not worry, if you will not fully understand it, but feel free to ask additional questions if you are interested.

Steps to reproduce:

Primeval Watcher stands outside of aggro range.
Relatively fast target. (Dreadnought for me have 100% reproducibility, when spawned in forge on horizontal line like shown in the video.)
Primeval Watcher is instructed to attack, so it moves to position, only barely enters the aggro range, so the target starts turning.
Primeval Watcher shoots the projectile.
Targets move to Primeval Watcher while the projectile is traveling.
Target moves by more than 2 meters (in my Dreadnought test about 3.8 meters), so the projectile stops following it and hits the ground with primary spell (3000944).
Second target is acquired for secondary spell (3000945), which does only 330 (base) DMG.
If we would have really fast runner I guess it could outrun the projectile even more. 😅

Possible solutions:

In code fallback default for "ProjectileMaxFollowDistanceOnTargetMove" is 100 meters, but EA later decided to decrease this number to 2 meters using config (gdbasevalues.xml), so we can easily tweak this number up, to eliminate most cases, but at same time increase damage to some other projectile based things, like arrows shooting at targets leaving the range.

We can do same tweak explained above on per spell basis, or as new parameter, to not affect anything else, that would be only little effort on my side to add new parameter.

What I do not see as a possible solution:

Fixing it so that the first spell will not hit the ground, because I do not believe there is an reasonable way, to specify when the projectile should continue following the target, and when to give up, to not create slow moving projectile following target indefinitely. I think some variation of tweaking the follow distance and hoping it will eliminate the issue in most cases, is the only reasonable solution.

[Better filtering of Cards in the forge]

"!(color=(neutral))" 

[Primeval Watcher damage]

Replay please, I can not reproduce it at all.

[Community Update - April 2025]

58 minutes ago, onedaxter said:

I don't know if this helps you at all. Probably not, because as i understand you need to know how the .exe works and not how the models are structured.

If you check the last 3 posts, you will notice, that it is not capable of exporting the models fully with everything...

So knowing the exact structure of the models would be enough to add new, but the emphasis is on exact for a reason, because a single bit incorrect might mean it will not work.

[Lost spellbreaker is dealing 0 damage.]

That is intended behavior, designer described it to me as an feature, instead of a bug.

[Independent Voice Acting & UI Language]

On 3/1/2025 at 1:13 AM, MisterFreeze said:

I’d love the option to change the voice acting to a different language but keep the UI and menus in another. I really enjoy voice acting and would love to experience it in other languages, but when the UI text changes too, it makes things a bit harder to follow

Do you mean voice lines of squads, like they say hello, when spawned, or jokes about other squads spawned nearby? or also storybook?

[windowed mode fix (~borderless)]

10 hours ago, vargata said:

it does work perfectly. yes it has a flaw

Either I am stupid, or this is an contradiction, I do not think there is any room left for misinterpretation.

If you consider it so easy, why don't you just add it?

When you at it, you can add changing settings without needing to restart the game too, that would be about the same difficulty.

Or you can join the team, and support the changes yourself: 

As I said I am not going to support any such changes, unless I have reasons to believe I can make all the needed steps, to make them complete, and correct.

Any pixel on another monitor is incorrect for me, so that is a dealbreaker, and editing the renderers is too hard for me, so I can't make everything.

Alternatively just post all the patches for the game (please patch on instruction boundaries and nop out to next one for simplicity), and I will review them, and if I will believe it is complete, and it will pass testing I will include it.

[windowed mode fix (~borderless)]

2 minutes ago, vargata said:

too hard? how? i gave you the code lol 😄 😄 😄 like there are few easier things to solve, on the rest i just dont care. i did my part, shared my code and the app, it works, use it or not is up to you, though if you are not willing to do such easy thing that even the old dev in this thread considered before he retired, at least pin it so those who want to can find it. im out, not willing to fight ignorance, i have better things to do 😄 
 

Code that does not work correctly and leaves the window on another screen.

And yes there are many way easier things like reverse engineering the networking code, or how are cards rendered, or how the inventory is sorted an filtered, those are 1000s of times easier things, than editing the multiple renderers to work correctly on all platforms.

[windowed mode fix (~borderless)]

11 hours ago, vargata said:

why is it so bad giving an option?

I did not say it is bad, but too hard, and that is big difference, you like making small problem worse for some, but I do not, so if I have no chance to make it correct I will not make it. I am not going to support something that have so many edge cases on so many supported platforms which include Windows 7, and Wine on Linux an Mac.

11 hours ago, vargata said:

no it does not, it goes through directdraw

Can you give me address from which is it called, and the image it draws? DirectDraw as far as I can tell is used only to enumerate devices.

11 hours ago, vargata said:

thats about the games "thats why so many are flipping today"

I really wonder why you think developers have any say in what will go into the game. That is for designers and higher executives to decide. And we disagree on that point, because I think companies where are developers make games, that they would like to play, and leadership that supports that, because they want to play the game as well consistently produce good games.

[windowed mode fix (~borderless)]

1 minute ago, vargata said:

if you dont like it dont buy it

Are you aware that it is free? 🤣

 

1 minute ago, vargata said:

directx renders the 3d window, it does not render the image overlay like chat market menu etc

It does, maybe you should check the calls to see it. 🤣

[windowed mode fix (~borderless)]

23 minutes ago, vargata said:

yeah, that just shows how bad of a choice you are for a community development lol. selfish people do not even fit AAA development and it shows nowadays

So you prefer no game at all? Then I am totally lost why you are complaining.

24 minutes ago, vargata said:

the ui does not have anything to do with the directx and its not being scaled with it

Either we are not talking about same UI, or you have no clue, how Direct X works.

25 minutes ago, vargata said:

there isnt even any connection, one is about my app the other is about the game lol

On that point you are right, my mistake, I have no clue, why I did think that you called BattleForge "simple as hell win32 api application". 😢

[windowed mode fix (~borderless)]

7 minutes ago, vargata said:

in many cases when alt tabbed back into the game it bugs out not allowing multiselect and sometimes even mouse clicks are not working

18 hours ago, vargata said:

this is a simple as hell win32 api application, it only uses standard win32 modules

Don't you consider these two to be in contradiction to each other?

 

9 minutes ago, vargata said:

what decorations?

The borders, title bar, and rounder corners.

11 minutes ago, vargata said:

the problem is that the d3d renderdevice stretches out the content to the full window size, no matter what, so if there are no borders it increases the game with 6 pixels horizontally and 29 pixels vertically, which would still not be an issue if i could also scale the ui with it...

Ask Microsoft, but I am pretty sure they describe it as a feature of Direct X that render space (view port) is 2x2 from -1,-1 to 1,1 area, that is re-scaled by windows to the window/screen. So everything is scaled, including the UI.

15 minutes ago, vargata said:

are you developing it for yourself or for the playerbase?

Myself of course.

[windowed mode fix (~borderless)]

8 hours ago, vargata said:

but you do or did play ark, its in your library and it also have built in borderless window, but yes, some really have the 1 pixel hanging over to the second screen, which again, nobody cares, its worth the comfort of having a borderless window

Well for me it is quite the opposite, I would not trade the comfort of exclusive fullscreen, for even a single pixel on another screen. With exclusive fullscreen I have much easier control what is on the screen.

8 hours ago, vargata said:

btw, do you really think all the major gameengines like unity unreal lumberyard and all modern AAA titles include it becuase people dont want it? :D 

Well as I said, their implementation is terrible, for me the pixels on another screen are way worse than other side effects like other applications being able to easily draw on top.

I hate TAA and other upscalers (yes I consider TAA upscaler) because it looks ugly, and makes things blurry, but most people does not seem to care either.

8 hours ago, vargata said:

Now you clearly arent reading. Ive said if i create a custom resolution AND remove the titlebar and borders to make it a real borderless window, THEN it will mess up the UI

I tried removing the decorations, but there is too many things to change. If we would have the source code, to be able to find all of them, I might have tried it as really hard challenge, but like this there is no way for me to have any confidence I find everything with so many renderers, and unlike you I will not be OK with solution that is wrong, even if 99.99999999999999999% of people would not care about it.

[Viewing mode]

4 hours ago, vargata said:

well, other than the obvious "excitement" for what people watch live football over recorded one

I guess that is something you will not be able to explain to me. 😛 I do not see any advantage of watching live, only disadvantages.

The only thing that could be even remotely considered watching live I did in last 10 years (or probably even way more), was SR Bot tournament, and even then I think I was like a minute behind.

Find someone to do the UI, and it might be part of next patch. 

 

[windowed mode fix (~borderless)]

5 hours ago, vargata said:

no, they are not wrong, again, this is for the 1080p settings of battleforge client, im using this code since about 2009-2010 and it works perfectly. if for some reason the game client would not fit this way then it wouldnt fit the screen anyway....

Change window's font size, or any other setting that affects the size of the decorations, and you will see that it does not work, even for 1080p. Are you on same Windows version since 2009? Otherwise did you manually reconfigure windows settings to get decorations sizes to be same, or are you missing few rows?

5 hours ago, vargata said:

sure, if you have a monitor above the current one would show the titlebar.

I would care, because I have a monitor there. And same for the -3, if I would have monitor on the left.

5 hours ago, vargata said:

wrongly stretches the UI and also messes up the mouse coordinates,

Never had that issue with any custom resolution, but I am exclusively using the DX9.0c single-threaded renderer for other reasons, so no idea, if that is issue with any other renderer.

5 hours ago, vargata said:

you cannot run 2 battleforge clients

I quite often run 2 clients, but sure my use-case is special.

5 hours ago, vargata said:

and what about your steam? if you are asking which game has a borderless window ark se is one of those, kcd2 does not even have an exclusive fullscreen lol its borderless window when set to fullscreen. unity3d now defaults to borderless window as well, no exclusive fullscreen, bethesda games also have borderless window mode (at least fallout4 does but i bet the others have it too)

I do not have Kingdom Come Deliverance 2, so can not test that. All unity games I can think of was doing ugly overdraw of 1 row of pixels on the other monitor. But maybe they fixed that recently, did not play any Unity game in a while.

 

8 minutes ago, vargata said:

anybody wants borderless window on bf just download this app

That exe does not have all dependencies, so I can not run it. I wanted to try it, to show that it is drawing on other monitors, which I find way worse, that exclusive fullscreen.

[windowed mode fix (~borderless)]

9 hours ago, Yuuno said:

id'd have to say thats usually old games that did not come with this option, which i do know this game is part of that category, but its not like there is not the possibility of getting a qol update that i do think most people would like to use.

Well the code base of BattleForge goes back at least to 1994. So by that metric it is quite old game.

And I can not think of single game that would implement borderless fullscreen flawlessly, even for my configuration, and I do not think that 4K primary screen, and 1080p secondary screen above it is something crazily unusual. Reasoning being that any game released before Windows 11 can not implement it correctly for Windows 11 without an update, same for Windows 10, 8.1, 8, 7, and XP. All 6 of these come with new changes that affect perceived screen space, or what configuration parameters need to be considered, or how to do native window rendering without decorations.

[windowed mode fix (~borderless)]

2 minutes ago, vargata said:

then movewindow to -3 -26 (at least for 1080p these are the border sizes)

These numbers are wrong, there is at least 10 settings, that can affect that like text size, text padding, font, window padding, text scaling, desktop scaling, per monitor scaling, window decoration configuration have ton of settings that affect size....
Also just moving the window would show the top bar on the other monitor.

6 minutes ago, vargata said:

about half an hour work at worst

I would bet you can not even find all windows settings that will need to be involved in that time. And how to correctly read them for everything from Windows 7, to all the different versions of Wine, and Proton.

The launcher is written in C#.

Looking window up by title, is terrible idea, because what about all the other windows with same title, and what about the cases, when game opens two windows?

And the code you showed, even if it would work (which I did not test) would cause terrible artifacts, because windows would be re-scaling the image, because the render resolution and displaying resolution would not match.

Can you check my steam library and tell me one game, that does it correctly in your opinion? https://www.lorenzostanco.com/lab/steam/u/XXXKubik I will install it and try it. I am willing to bet, I will find an issue with it, because my multi-monitor setup and settings aren't the most common I guess.

[windowed mode fix (~borderless)]

1 hour ago, Yuuno said:

basic functionality

Can you explain me, what exactly is basic about it?

1 hour ago, Yuuno said:

i dont want any 3rd party program

Well you install at leas two 3rd party programs to play the game.

[Ingame inventory question or sugestion]

Just filter for the colors you want: https://forum.skylords.eu/applications/core/interface/file/attachment.php?id=11412

[** "The Ethics of Digital Necromancy: Should We Revive Dead Games?]

@Metagross31 I think you missed my point about "the artists" and "right owners". In case of art like painting it starts as same person, and then it is sold, but in case of game, or a book, you have multiple parties, and the terminology gets messy quickly. In case of bigger games artist/developers/designers/... was never the same people as the right owners.

So people that made the game might want to see the game thrive, but are forbidden to provide any help by the contract they had with the right owners.

[** "The Ethics of Digital Necromancy: Should We Revive Dead Games?]

Maybe a controversial take, but should we burn all books, and paintings, destroy all statues, and so on for all other forms of art, that was sold, and the author did not explicitly stated that his art is intended to survive him?

And even better question, why you think it have anything to do with intention of developers? Did you asked them? To stick to the book analogy, it is like private collector buying all the book rights and putting a lock on each copy, so people that "own" a copy of the book can no longer read it, because it is locked, they can look at the cover, but they are not skilled enough to remove the lock.

Can I ask you for your definition of words "buy" and "own"?

[Small units with spears attacking XL units from the walls.]

I doubt anyone can answer that before finishing and testing the implementation of it.