LOUD AI & Game Speed Improvement Project

[stashrider]

@Paxton676: I will certainly pass it along to the group, I can only assume that the music was taken out for either performance or download size of LOUD (or both). Hope you are enjoying LOUD nonetheless. If you don't mind sharing, what set up have you been using ( Map, unit cap, cheat level etc...)?

[Sprouto]

Indeed -- the primary music file was removed to reduce the download size, but -- there's more than one way to skin a cat, so I'll look into restoring it.

On the subject of aggression -- we've had more than a few players indicate that LOUD is too difficult, even at 1.0 cheat levels. There is a 0.9 option which will make him soft and chewy, along with a non- cheating AI which gets no bonuses whatsoever.

LOUD is quite sensitive to low unit caps and small maps at this point, and he will be quite vulnerable in either of those situations. In general, he plays best on 20km (and up) maps, with unit caps of 875 or higher. At present, I am focused on his naval performance, since while his options are certainly more varied than previous AI's, his overall performance on the water is not nearly as good as that on land. Tuning LOUD takes lots of observation, and repeated simulations, so it's an ongoing task.

[paxton676]

Thank you for reply. If you do decide to restore music will you add support for this mod to game? It adds vanilla music into the game with the FA music. It adds 20 tracks to game. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Pps6yF-jr8 it is also in FAF vault. Also, is just UI mod so I think you can play multiplayer with others who don't have it turned on.

@Paxton676: I will certainly pass it along to the group, I can only assume that the music was taken out for either performance or download size of LOUD (or both). Hope you are enjoying LOUD nonetheless. If you don't mind sharing, what set up have you been using ( Map, unit cap, cheat level etc...)?

I have mostly just been testing the performance by watching the AI battle and monitoring game speed for any slowdown. I did get on teamspeak one time about a week ago and played with some people. I did not play well because I played turtle style. I need to learn how to play offensive. In addition, i wasn't managing my resources properly.

[Mofunkles]

Okay so I just played another game... used the LOUD mods this time, bumped up to cheating 1.1x and I got completely felt

[Sprouto]

Join the club....he routinely clubs all of us baby seals.

[IanC]

Hi there, my friends and I have always played co-op versus AI and Supcom was one of the best for that apart from the dismal slowdown. It's really great to see people still working today to make this game what it should have been! LOUD really piqued my interest as it sounds exactly like what we need, however I might have done something wrong as my experience with the AI seems rather different to that of others on here.

I've tried AI vs Ai free for alls, team battles, different maps and sizes, and gone up against it myself, but the behaviour is always the same - it potters around building one factory and a few units, doesn't attack anything, and behaves generally like a training tutorial on easy difficulty setting. It took me one platoon of about 25 T2 units to roll up the entire base and commander, and his score was 2,000 to my 30,000+.

I've got FaF installed as well, could that be interfering? Is there a built-in mod I have to enable to make it work properly?

I'm happy to share replays, screenshot etc. if needed. I really want this to work and be a challenging AI with no game slowdown, it'll resurrect SupCom for us

-Ian

[Sprouto]

Greetings Ian.

It sounds as if you may have an installation issue. Have the installer check for updates again, and view the log when it completes. It will let you know if it's encountered any errors. Insure that the installer is telling you that you are currently using the LOUD installation, and not your original installation.

If you still have issues, I'm sure that HTK will be along later today to get you over the issue.

We look forward to hearing about your LOUD experience.

[IanC]

Thanks for the welcome

I realised that I had some units turned off (air, game enders, nukes) so turned them back on and ran up an 8-AI game. Things got a bit busier due to aircraft milling around but really it was still just scouts and a couple of bombers getting killed by base defenses that made up the bulk of the reported kills.

Here's the updater result:

updater result.jpg (33.09 KiB) Viewed 2806 times

The error was to do with a map, nothing showstopping:
20/03/2017 09:26:50 - SCFA Updater & Configuration Switcher version 3.02
20/03/2017 09:26:52 - Connected to primary FTP server
20/03/2017 09:26:53 - Downloaded SCFA_UpdVer.txt, Size = 6 bytes
20/03/2017 09:26:53 - 'root' directory cleanup complete
20/03/2017 09:26:56 - --'Check for Update(s)' selected
20/03/2017 09:26:57 - Connected to primary FTP server
20/03/2017 09:26:59 - Downloaded fciv.exe, Size = 84784 bytes
20/03/2017 09:27:01 - Downloaded fciv_Check_Auto.bat, Size = 54 bytes
20/03/2017 09:27:03 - Downloaded fciv_Main.xml, Size = 159449 bytes
20/03/2017 09:27:42 - Comparison of local and remote files complete
20/03/2017 09:27:43 - Connected to primary FTP server
20/03/2017 09:27:43 - Number of game update files to download: 1
20/03/2017 09:27:46 - Downloaded gamedata/lua.scd, Size = 1129575 bytes
20/03/2017 09:27:46 - GameOptions check/update complete
20/03/2017 09:27:47 - Connected to primary FTP server
20/03/2017 09:27:49 - 'gamedata' directory cleanup complete
20/03/2017 09:27:50 - Connected to primary FTP server
20/03/2017 09:29:39 - *** Error *** 'Maps\losttemple' cleanup skipped, unable to download array from FTP server
20/03/2017 09:29:40 - Connected to primary FTP server
20/03/2017 09:30:07 - 'maps' directory cleanup complete
20/03/2017 09:30:07 - 1 required update(s) successfully downloaded
20/03/2017 09:30:07 - 0 required update(s) failed to be downloaded
20/03/2017 09:30:07 - 1 other error(s) occurred during this update
20/03/2017 09:30:07 - Rerun the updater to complete the failed updates

After 40 minutes the map looked like this:

game view.jpg (510.48 KiB) Viewed 2806 times

And the stats:

game results.jpg (459.56 KiB) Viewed 2806 times

With vanilla FA + Sorian AI back in the day we'd be fending off experimentals at 40 minutes in

-Ian

[IanC]

Here is the replay file:

[Mofunkles]

Looking at that map screenshot I'd say something is definitely wrong.. looks nothing like I would expect from my experience with LOUD, at that point the map would be utterly caked in units. That almost looks like vanilla AI, although it says it's LOUD.