Opposing reliever in bullpen?

[Sweed]

Originally Posted by md40022

the runner then only begins his slide when he's several feet past home plate and almost back in the dugout

Sorry, a bit off topic but this is the second post I've seem mention the late slide issue. You've seen this in v25?

I did see it a lot in v24 (sometimes an on-time slide and a second on the way to the dugout) and wondered about v25. In my first v25 ST game there were two times a player slid into home, neither was late. Fist thought was appears they fixed it, but keep an eye out. Small sample size and all.

I'm now 13ish games into my first spring training, managing every inning and have yet to see this happen. I will keep watching, but it is pretty hard to miss when it happens.

[md40022]

Originally Posted by Sweed

Sorry, a bit off topic but this is the second post I've seem mention the late slide issue. You've seen this in v25?

I did see it a lot in v24 (sometimes an on-time slide and a second on the way to the dugout) and wondered about v25. In my first v25 ST game there were two times a player slid into home, neither was late. Fist thought was appears they fixed it, but keep an eye out. Small sample size and all.

I'm now 13ish games into my first spring training, managing every inning and have yet to see this happen. I will keep watching, but it is pretty hard to miss when it happens.

Yes, definitely still part of the game. I'll try to snag a screen shot next time it happens.



And I truly am not complaining here. I love the game and just take the visuals for what they are. Only brought them up to back my preference for any added features in next year's game be geared more towards things other than the visuals.

[Sweed]

Originally Posted by md40022

Yes, definitely still part of the game. I'll try to snag a screen shot next time it happens.



And I truly am not complaining here. I love the game and just take the visuals for what they are. Only brought them up to back my preference for any added features in next year's game be geared more towards things other than the visuals.

Totally get where you are coming from.

I have seen the throw get to a base, way before the runner, and the fielder having to wait for him so he can tag him out. I just hadn't experienced the past home plate slide yet.

I take the animations as the glass being 3/4 full figuring over time they will all eventually get tweaked. It's not ideal, but as long as the result is right I can be patient on the presentation.

[md40022]

Yeah, I'm with ya. It's nice to have them, don't get me wrong. Things would be a little bit dull if it was strictly text-based, but they could obviously use some clean up.The overall engine and depth of the game make it very easy for me to overlook the choppy play-by-play visuals. But to re-iterate what I said a few posts back, I have no need to see umpires or coaches on the field

[Syd Thrift]

Originally Posted by tonnage

Are you? If so, please explain the difficulty, and I don't mean this with any disrespect. As somebody that isn't a programmer, I'd like to know what the difficulty is?

Sure, I'm one. You're acting like this is one option when in fact it is a whole load of decisions:

- when to get a guy to start throwing in the 'pen
- when to tell a guy to sit down
- how often to warm up any one pitcher in a given game (given that if you warm them up too much or for too long they'll tire out)
- when to start, and how judiciously, to warm up a guy who's technically ready to pitch to 2 or 3 batters but isn't near 100%
- related to the second point, but how long do you have reliever A going before you rest them in favor of reliever B... like, if it's a tie game, the closer is warming up, and then the guy on the mound gives up a grand slam and it's suddenly not a closer situation... do you leave the current guy in for long enough to warm up a new pitcher?
- when determining who to warm up, when and for who? Warming up a guy during the offense's half of an inning is the easy part... what do you do to warm up guys in the middle of an inning? Does the AI need to go in and look at the lineup in advance? Does it need to also look at the bench and who it thinks can/should/will be used as pinch-hitters?

The AI has to go through enough decisions just to determine who to bring in to pitch on a batter-by-batter basis. Adding all of that logic in to make them also have to deal with warmup logic is a. just going to create even more unrealistic/sub-optimal and exploitable conditions for humans, and b. won't actually get you all that much more than what you get now, quite frankly.

Sure, it'd be nice to have this as a rule. This is kind of far from a must-have and even as a person who likes to play out all of my games, I think this is not a priority compared to all the other things the AI could/should be doing.

[Syd Thrift]

Originally Posted by md40022

Yes, definitely still part of the game. I'll try to snag a screen shot next time it happens.



And I truly am not complaining here. I love the game and just take the visuals for what they are. Only brought them up to back my preference for any added features in next year's game be geared more towards things other than the visuals.

Even better, hit F10 to replay it and then paste the text that the game puts into your clipboard into the Movement thread in the Bug Forum. This is how the devs learn when a particular animation doesn't work right.

[tward13]

It's more of a must have for "immersion" than socks or umpires.

[Syd Thrift]

There's no AI that goes into socks.

[tward13]

Originally Posted by Syd Thrift

There's no AI that goes into socks.

But there's developers time spent on all this peripheral stuff.

[Syd Thrift]

Originally Posted by tward13

But there's developers time spent on all this peripheral stuff.

Y'all asked for a developer to speak on this and while I just do it in my regular job... there's next to no time spent on socks by developers. They get a new mesh for the uniform, they hooked it up to use the team background color for the mesh, and boom that's it.

Socks are a tiny lift. Modeling AI for the warmup rule is a much, much bigger lift.

[tward13]

Originally Posted by Syd Thrift

Y'all asked for a developer to speak on this and while I just do it in my regular job... there's next to no time spent on socks by developers. They get a new mesh for the uniform, they hooked it up to use the team background color for the mesh, and boom that's it.

Socks are a tiny lift. Modeling AI for the warmup rule is a much, much bigger lift.

Socks, umpires, coaches, and there are other cosmetic things. People ask for all kinds of things like this for "immersion" purposes. Yet something that actually affects how the game is played can't be done. It's been many years now that this has been brought up. Surely in 10 years or whatever this could have been worked out rather than, "no, too hard".

[Syd Thrift]

Originally Posted by tward13

Socks, umpires, coaches, and there are other cosmetic things. People ask for all kinds of things like this for "immersion" purposes. Yet something that actually affects how the game is played can't be done. It's been many years now that this has been brought up. Surely in 10 years or whatever this could have been worked out rather than, "no, too hard".

These other things are small lifts. This is a big lift. Complain about it all you want, it's a big lift.

[uruguru]

Originally Posted by Syd Thrift

These other things are small lifts. This is a big lift. Complain about it all you want, it's a big lift.

Also, it's not something you can fix. When it comes to AI, all you can really do is make it slightly less bad than it was before.

[Syd Thrift]

Originally Posted by uruguru

Also, it's not something you can fix. When it comes to AI, all you can really do is make it slightly less bad than it was before.

Well, I mean here you'd be introducing the game having to "think" about a situation it currently doesn't have to "think" about, so, like, it wouldn't be "less bad" than before, in terms of exploits it'd be worse than before, probably significantly worse until people mapped out the flaws in the programming and got things up to speed. It'd likely take several iterations for that to happen, during which time I suspect most people would just turn the "AI uses warm-up rule" toggle off, which in turn would mean a smaller base of people complaining, which in turn would mean an even lower priority.

Like, I get that this is a nice to have. It'd be really cool if AI managers behaved like real managers in all situations, and this is if nothing else a neat bit of flavor. Maybe you could even just, like, remove the fatigue hit for the AI warming guys up so that you could have a general idea of 2 guys who might be warming up at the time you decide to bring in a pinch-hitter. Even that would take a good bit of extra coding and, if I'm being honest, I just think it's a much lower priority than a bunch of other things I personally would like to see fixed (the deal with errors at first base is one I'd like to see prioritized for example).

I guess if I wanted to relay any one thing it's that the things you might personally think are small are often very much not small at all (although conversely some things you might think are gargantuan tasks are relatively quick easy to fix - I don't know that OOTP has anything like that left after 25 years but they do pop up).

[md40022]

Originally Posted by Sweed

Sorry, a bit off topic but this is the second post I've seem mention the late slide issue. You've seen this in v25?
.

Yep

[Sweed]

Originally Posted by md40022

Yep

Just curious, how often have you seen it? I just finished my 28 game spring training and finally saw it in game #27 (earlier this afternoone), that is the only time I saw it. Was going to post but you beat me to it.

[uruguru]

Originally Posted by MitchU

Fair enough, and thanks for finding that comment. Maybe its something that can be done for OOTP26? Meantime, I'm going to enjoy the game all season and not sweat it.

ok, I am a programmer. I wrote a strategy game and I wrote the AI for it.

AI programming is very challenging because a complex strategy game like OOTP will have an almost infinite number of edge cases to write AI around beyond the standard "here is how you play the game". In other words, no matter how much time they spend on it, players will always say, "hey this part of the game has a bad AI please fix it."

Plus you can't really properly write an AI until your feature set is stable. For a game like OOTP that has to meet hard deadlines every Spring for a release, this means a lot of proper AI development would have to wait until after the game is released.

Developing AI requires a lot of playing expertise and you might be surprised to learn that developers are generally not the most competent at playing their own games. And once you have a basic AI, it costs a lot of money (i.e. developer time) to make it better and it doesn't generate extra revenue to justify the cost.

And then when you add new features, you have to write more AI on top of it and fix any existing AI that was broken by the new feature.

And to kick it all off, most strategy gamers don't really want an AI that is too good. Most just want to steamroll and an AI that can outplay players is bad business.

I spent 6 years with an open alpha and beta and wrote a functional AI that could play the entire game somewhat competently. I thought it was fine but all of the experienced gamers thought it sucked because ultimately they were just a lot better at playing the game that me. So I did something that OOTP can never do... I just opened the source and let the modding community change the AI... multiple gamers with thousands and thousands of gameplay and testing I could never spare, and I had the luxury to move to move other projects (obvsly something the OOTP devs can't do)

TL;DR. Good AI is hard, it delays releases, it can drive away players, and it is not profitable. This is why all good AIs in strategy games are from player mods after the fact.

The best thing you can hope for is that someday the OOTP devs find a way to open up the AI to modding. I don't know what their code looks like so that might be an impossible task for them.

[md40022]

Originally Posted by Sweed

Just curious, how often have you seen it? I just finished my 28 game spring training and finally saw it in game #27 (earlier this afternoone), that is the only time I saw it. Was going to post but you beat me to it.

41 games in for me, I'm gonna guess I've seen it maybe 6 or 7 times.



I just take it for what it is. It's fine. No problem with it, but it's definitely there lol.

[Syd Thrift]

If you see stuff like weird slides that are too early and/or out of the basepaths, I would hit F10 to replay it and then paste the data the game puts into your clipboard into the Movement thread. These kinds of things are potentially easy for the devs to fix once you track them down.