Improvement suggestions

[GeneralFrost]

Hi.

First, a great thanks to the developers of open RA to create this amazing game for free, excellent work!

I have a few suggestions to improve the gaming experience:

1) reloading of air units:

If I have 5 air units selected and right click on an empty air field, they should all fly there and reload, one after another. Also if there is another free airfeeld in proximity, they should use that as well. That would make commanding of big air-groups way easier. But probably hard to implement that...

2) show the current availabile and needed energy in actual numbers over the energy bar. Currently it only shows up when you hover over it. Maybe make this optional.
Also make an indicator for each building in the list, that indicates if you would have enough energy after you built that building.

3) auto attack for air-units, speaks for itself

4) better unit target selection AI
For example I have 2 rifle-man and 2 rocket soldiers, and attack-move them to 1 enemy tank and 2 enemy rifle-man.
The rilfe man shoudl attack the other rifle man, and the rocket soldiers the tank
Maybe just make a priority list for each unit.. which target it will attack first ?


I'm a C# developer myself, and I might be interested in contributing... how hard would it be to implement those changes ?

BR, General

[Hiro]

Hi there,

Having looked at the code in the past (mainly the match start/end stuff) I can say some things are pretty funky, but if you're confident I'm sure you'd be able to add in some of those ideas.
Most of the UI aspects were basically set with layout files so adding a permanent energy display should be fairly easy. Unit AI such as intelligent targeting and reloading might be more difficult though.

For auto attacking air units, is that not already possible? It could be that they are just set to hold fire by default, but maybe it's disabled. Either way it is probably possible to put that in just by changing a flag in a properties file somewhere but I think it was intentionally turned off for most aircraft because of their limited ammo.

[Matt]

1) reloading of air units:

That is completely doable. There is already https://github.com/OpenRA/OpenRA/blob/b ... ervable.cs but it seems broken.

2) show the current availabile and needed energy in actual numbers over the energy bar. Currently it only shows up when you hover over it. Maybe make this optional.
Also make an indicator for each building in the list, that indicates if you would have enough energy after you built that building.

I think the build palette tooltips and C&C ingame chrome already have that.

3) auto attack for air-units, speaks for itself

Already done https://github.com/OpenRA/OpenRA/pull/4478 coming for the next release.

4) better unit target selection AI
For example I have 2 rifle-man and 2 rocket soldiers, and attack-move them to 1 enemy tank and 2 enemy rifle-man.
The rilfe man shoudl attack the other rifle man, and the rocket soldiers the tank
Maybe just make a priority list for each unit.. which target it will attack first ?

Yes, we definitely want this. It will make the AI smarter and base defenses less annoying to manage https://github.com/OpenRA/OpenRA/issues/3581

I'm a C# developer myself, and I might be interested in contributing... how hard would it be to implement those changes ?

Join the IRC channel #openra on FreeNode. We can help you get started.

[foul_owl]

GeneralFrost,

Thank you for wanting to contribute to this project! Once you fix the issues that you personally have prioritized, I would suggest checking out the list of issues with bounties posted on them:
https://www.bountysource.com/trackers/36085-openra

As I am not a developer on this project so I'm not sure how things are coordinated between developers with regard to bounties, but there are definitely some good prizes there for fixing bugs and implementing feature requests!

Edit: Looks like bountysource has a flag to indicate if a developer is currently working on an issue.

[GeneralFrost]

Next day I plan to teach myself GIT (only soure control systems I used so far are TFS & subversion, and I heard git is quite different, because its distribvuted)... anyone knows a good tutorial for it ?

[Matt]

www.vogella.com/articles/Git/article.html

[Speedy]

Now THAT's useful. I may not be that good as programmer, but this may still be a good read nonetheless..