This is nonsense; Travis employees are the polar opposite of "codebros".
Lighthearted team profiles are absolutely not an insight into the employees' "mentality". If anything, your insinuations are in extremely bad faith and you should know better than to slander people you don't know, especially those whose livelihoods got snatched away.
Very lazy and bad stereotyping, 0/10 points, try again.
So why bother having a team page then? If want to contact someone in sales, do I go for the mermaid or the avocado? A technical question, the hot dog or the tortilla?
So the only purpose of that page seems to be to prove that the company employs actual humans? As opposed to all those AI run software companies?
I know, I'll use the contacts page. If there was any. Which there isn't. Just a twitter handle at the footer, which would be insane to conduct any sort of serious business, and a generic support email.
I have nothing, absolutely nothing against any of the Travis employees or the company. I never used their product. But in all honesty this does strike me as unprofessional.
Yes, you're not alone. Oddly enough, it's been repurposed to mean something akin to value alignment or strategic cooperation. It used to mean thoughtful kindness, and this change seems to have suddenly happened in the last five years.
It's usage now makes me vaguely uncomfortable because it feels borderline sociopathic or manipulative.
Looks like they want to avoid changing gameplay as much as possible.
Considering their focus on preserving even minute details of game dynamics... I wish they'd made an exception for pathfinding - the algorithm in the original AoE is extremely bad.
In particular, I really wish they'd introduce some improved ways to command groups of units. IIRC the Rise of Rome expansion introduced double-click group selection of all similar units, so it's not without precedent.
If they change nothing else, my number one wish would be formations like in AoE II. I can't stand the way units just swarm like ants when told to move together.
It's really hard to change something like pathfinding without revamping the entire game. A game's balance is like a hanging mobile. Change one aspect, and the whole thing becomes unbalanced until you adjust all of the other weights in the system.
For example, if you make the pathfinding smarter, then there's a good chance you've made all AI enemies effectively more powerful and now all of the level difficulty is too high. You may also affect the strategy of levels — levels that used to have carefully crafted chokepoints that the player must notice may no longer be chokepoints with smarter pathfinding. That in turn might lead you to want to tweak the design of the level...
Except this is a RTS and when players want a unit to get to a place it should get there without taking a detour across half of the map, especially when the player can visually see an optimal path.
So no, there are no downsides to better pathfinding.
In a battle between melee and ranged units the ranged units want to maximize their surface area touching the ranged units so that all the melee units can attack at once and quickly change targets once an enemy unit has fallen. The ranged units want to minimize their surface area so that only the outer layer of the group will be attacked while every unit on the inside can freely fire on the melee units.
In an older RTS with poor pathing this meant constantly jockeying your forces around trying to either get a good surround or keeping rank. Moving your forces in certain ways could unpredictably change the formation of your units so great care had to be taken when engaging the enemy. Getting this to work out was a skill in of itself that took strategy, positioning, the ability to predict the enemies move, etc. All of this depth could take place between very small groups of very simple units.
In an RTS with perfect pathing the ranged units always move in a perfect sphere (minimizing surface area and maximizing volume) and the melee units perfectly synchronize their movements so they don't trip over each other when surrounding the enemy. Once it is decided that a group of simple melee units and ranged units will fight there really isn't much for the player to do except tell them to get on with it.
As real time strategy games have evolved along with better pathfinding, we've found out that with all things being equal, perfect pathing makes for very very boring fights. Active abilities had to be added to give the player something to do during the fight. Rock Paper Scissors type unit counters had to be added so that positioning mattered again. More AOE spells and debuffs had to be added so that another thing would force players to jockey units around.
Study the design of Starcraft BW and Starcraft II and you can see this very clearly. Certain fundamental unit matchups were completely broken by improved pathfinding such that more and more complicated mechanics had to be added to the game to give them balance and dynamism again.
Of course, this only really applies to C&C, SC, and AOE style RTS games. More modern RTS series like Men of War and Wargame don't follow this pattern because the range and lethality of the units typically far exceed their movement speeds and terrain and cover play a much larger role, but that is a whole different topic.
It can break the whole game balance, have you ever read about Starcraft and how its wonkey pathfinding was a big part of why it was a esports success (allegedly)?
The replies in this chain are just joking around in a geeky and pedantic way (which is one of my favorite ways), but the original comment is serious and has a point.
The point of the original comment is just that we've entered a period where people are aware (perhaps hyper-aware) of any evidence that conflicts with other people's interpretation of events. This often happens to both sides of an issue, and they both denounce the others as hopelessly misled.
This doesn't mean there is no good way to view the overall events in question, and that facts are dead, just that we need to step back and try to view it all from a wider angle, with more facts in general.
Basically, think about history books for semi-recent US history. While they may still be biased in many cases, they generally have a good idea of what both sides thought and their motivations, and can describe them, and have the benefit of seeing how what they were arguing about turned out. That's obviously a hard or impossible view to get during most events, but it is something we can strive for by widening our view to encompass more information and points of view.
Question: Is it Engg because it is suppressing the middle characters of the word, like Eng...g ?
That's really amusing from my perspective (having lived in an Asian country) because for us Westerns, most abbreviations come from using the first few characters of a word.
I've seen the same pattern in Japanese: The word "OSU", which people usually conjure to salute each other in the morning or as they enter a dojo or fight, is actually an abbreviation of "Ohayou Gozaimasu", built in the same way as I imagine the Indian English's "Engg" was built: Taking only the first and the last parts of the term. O(hayou gozaima)SU.
