DFD: 924 vs. 999, 685 vs. 725

[Renegade]

DFD: Daily Feature Deathmatch

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The Cruel Fight For Implementation

This is a Daily Feature Deathmatch post. If you are unfamiliar with the background of this event, please read the announcement, the adjustment and the schedule.

Fight 1

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[0000924] (Ares 0.X) EMP-Like Temporal vs. [0000999] "Resurretion" super weapon (Building to Unit SW)

Fight 2

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[0000685] Directly Selecting Occupants of IsTrench=<identifier> vs. [0000725] Single-click Chrono Sphere

After the fight is over, two of these issues will be suspended, while the other two move on to the next round.
Remember that the coders will not take part in the discussion, so make your arguments complete, concise and convincing - when it's over, it's over.

Part of that is clearly marking what outcome you support for which issue.
There should be no ambiguity in the issue you're talking about, and it should be clear what outcome you support. Feel free to put your stance in bold, and use simple terminology like "kill #69" or "I want #42 to survive".
This use of simple terminology should be part of a larger argumentation - if this is all your post consists of, it will be ignored. We are interested in argumentations and details to consider, not votes.

A decision will be made either way, a lack of discussion will not cause all issues to live.

Be friendly, be civil, be logical.
You are allowed to try to deconstruct the arguments of those arguing against your candidate, but remember that they don't make the call - there is really no point in getting personal.

The discussion should be contained in this thread, argumentations elsewhere will be ignored, but you are allowed to transfer and adapt points made elsewhere in the past.

We want a good, clean fight.
Let's get it on!

These fights are largely automatically generated - if an issue turns out to be unfit for combat, it will be disqualified and the opponent will go into the queue.

[Blade]

The only feature I even like the sound of here is the EMP like temporal weapon. I would suggest it like if the weapon hits a unit it freezes the unit for a certain amount of time, after which, the unit returns but has taken some damage due to the "aging" it suffered from the temporal attack. If it would be dead after the damage was applied, erase it instead. Then again, maybe that is what all that pseudo code means

[Beowulf]

I agree with Blade on this one. There's not a lot here that looks useful except for the EMP-like Temporal superweapon. I support #924 and that's all. I don't even want to touch Fight 2.

[Drogan]

Oh hey, it's one of my issues (#999).
There's not much I can talk about for the second fight.
For the first fight, It would be cool if a player can transform a super weapon building into a unit, much like the thor in SC2 or CABAL in TS.
But, I've wanted to implement EMP-Temporals into my mod for a long time because of the ability of an EMP weapon with chorono legionaires' weapon's behavior.
so, I support #924 and kill my own issue.

[Blade]

I suppose another way to implement it would be like the desolator, have the unit deploy or fire and everything in range at that time starts getting erased unless the unit is undeployed/given a stop order or is destroyed.

[WoRmINaToR]

from my first post in issue 999:

Maybe someone would even try bringing You-Know-Who... back as a superweapon

you mean we are going to transform a building... into Lord Voldemort?

While that sounds very interesting, it would probably be a bit more practical to just make this unit buildable or perhaps be summon-able using the UnitSW.

Seriously. If someone made a UnitSW that summoned Lord Voldemort, I would use it in my mod.

That said I have to support 924 for fight 1.

For fight 2, I think it would be best to keep 685 alive because while it would be a lot of work and it's not certain what gain we would get from it, it was discussed in the bugnotes that this issue would be left for future implementation. 725 is quite limited in usage and while nice, it's really not much different from the regular chronosphere. I understand the merit of limiting the chronosphere in this way and it would be a cool effect actually but I'm not particularly interested in it.

[MRMIdAS]

[0000924] seems more useful, more people would potentially use it too.

Out of the other 2 issues [0000685] gets my vote, as the single click chronosphere isn't really that useful IMO.

[Nighthawk]

Hmm, four meh-ish issues where I'm concerned, but oh well, here goes.

For fight one:
I'm a little confused about this EMP Temporal weapon. It sounds like it's basically the same thing as EMP, except with a transparency effect on the target. Wouldn't some sort of warhead tag to cause transparency combined with regular EMP work just as well?

As for the second issue, I like the sound of a super weapon turning its host structure into something else - could make for some interesting ideas if people want to go down the whole "epic unit" route. However, I wouldn't see it getting as much use as this EMP temporal stuff.

So while I personally prefer the super weapon idea, because I like new super weapon technologies, logic tells me to support the EMP temporal issue. Ergo, support #924, kill #999.


For fight two:
This is a bit of a meh issue for me as well, given that I don't use trenches, and don't have any plans to use them any time soon, but anyway.

I can see the logic behind controlling individual trench occupants, but it's bound to be somewhat fiddly. Half the time, the player would probably end up selecting the trench building rather than the infantry, especially if mods have the increasingly popular shrunken infantry graphics. Additionally, I'd might create some overlap issues for the game. How does the game know what parts of the building to draw the infantry over, and what to show it behind?

As for the single-click Chronosphere, I actually like this idea. People keep saying about how there needs to be more strategy in the game. A mod using this kind of super weapon would add a good level of it. Units having to gather in a certain point before teleportation sounds quite good to me. You could also reverse the polarity, so to speak - anything you teleport by this Chronosphere clone could only be warped to your teleport pad.

Since I'm all for new super weapons, and the trench issue just sounds complicated to me with little gain, my stance is support #725, kill #685.

[AlphaBravo]

Hmm, four meh-ish issues where I'm concerned, but oh well, here goes.

For fight one:
I'm a little confused about this EMP Temporal weapon. It sounds like it's basically the same thing as EMP, except with a transparency effect on the target. Wouldn't some sort of warhead tag to cause transparency combined with regular EMP work just as well?

As for the second issue, I like the sound of a super weapon turning its host structure into something else - could make for some interesting ideas if people want to go down the whole "epic unit" route. However, I wouldn't see it getting as much use as this EMP temporal stuff.

So while I personally prefer the super weapon idea, because I like new super weapon technologies, logic tells me to support the EMP temporal issue. Ergo, support #924, kill #999.

No. The "EMP-Like Temporal" is essentially a Temporal weapon except it's not linked. So you can use Temporals with CellSpread weapons.

[Renegade]

Administrative Notice:

Given that there have been no new posts in the past three days, it is assumed this discussion is finished; we will proceed to consider the arguments.

[AlexB]

Fight 1
While it seems sensible to have a very powerful unit that undeploys only after some time has passed, why does this have to be a superweapon? Ares could just disallow the building to undeploy for some minutes. Ok, you get a timer on the screen. What if there are more than one of these buildings or should that be disallowed? I'd implement it as non-SW function with an optional Auto-Undeploy SW when SW Autofire actually works. But currently it's not working.

The CellSpread Temporal sounds like a good idea and the pseudocode looks sensible. It looks like it's backwards compatible to the original Temporal weapons and it isn't overly complex. In the tracker it has gathered some followers. Temporal weapons really lack the ability to have cell spread.

Fight 2
The trench occupier selection sounds crazy. It would be hard to implement just to move single units around in the trenches.

The single click Chronosphere would disallow to chronoport enemy units, allow the enemy to destroy the building while the units to be chronoported are still inside. I like this idea as well as the backwards one Nighthawk200 mentioned.

[Renegade]

Fight 1

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#924 is the kind of bullshit I'd kill instantly these days. As if I have nothing better to do than interpret wacky source code because the requester thinks he's cool or helpful if he makes his suggestion look like code.
Either provide real code, or no code at all. Providing code that's not usable helps no one and only makes the request unreadable.
I haven't actually waded through that crappily indented, un-<pre>'d, badly named and unresearched piece of code, simply because it's way too annoying to read and "provides" an "implementation" that is completely detached from reality, while, at the same time, it doesn't express what the fuck the requester actually wants, but this:

I suppose another way to implement it would be like the desolator, have the unit deploy or fire and everything in range at that time starts getting erased unless the unit is undeployed/given a stop order or is destroyed.

sounds awesome and I want it.
Go go gadget time hole

That being said, let me emphasize again that #924 is, text-wise, an utterly crappy request and that I will close such requests in the future. If I can't actually read your request, there is no reason to keep it around. If you're unwilling to invest the 30 seconds to write "I want a feature that does...", then we're unwilling to invest the weeks it takes to get it to work. It's as simple as that.

As for #999, it's a cute idea, nothing bad about it, but it doesn't seem to have much support, and the mental image of Blade's Time-Sucking Black Hole Desolator of Doom is just way cooler.

Kill: #999
Support: #924

Fight 2

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I was about to slam the single-click Chronosphere as a pretty worthless request, but looking at it again, it's not so much worthless as that it is very badly named. The summary makes it sound like it's basically the normal Chronosphere without selection, while it's really more like Dawn of War's Space Marine Orbital Relay.
And I the Orbital Relay. ^^

Yes, one can argue if the difference between the summary and my words is all that different, the point is, the summary makes it sound way less interesting and more worthless than it really is.

Add to that that I dread the work and the prerequisites involved in #685, and the choice is clear.

Kill: #685
Support: #725




Given that Alex's selections were the same, these are also the results of the fight.