didn't expect to see you here ur channel is amazing btw

Science!

Exactly. I don't even play anymore but also found this beautiful. Funny how the mind works why is something so "useless" beautiful?

@@felipesuarez6564 brain love to solve fairly complex patterns. If they are too easy they not feel like innovative, and if they are too complex they are feel like too resource-wasting and just plain semi-random. And our brain long ago evolutioned to not throw off patterns as "useless" from the first glance because they actually may become relevant later so yeah brain capacity, apparently, expanded mainly to hoard information trash because there is no sure way to tell useful in future information from completely useless. Now humanity have better situation with this but motivation system inside our brain still rewards us for learning patterns that seems like potentially useful but not waste too much energy on their learning

I only ever play the campaigns yet I still show up for every video like learning the most minute mechanics will somehow help me

@KZfaqG How Ironic that someone with that username does not understand how youtube works.

Yup, agreed on that

@KZfaqG He has a patreon. The names mentioned at the end are just a few of his patrons.

Wonder more often please

It isnt a proof though

@@FullOilBarrel you don't need one though, if you can test a theory and it always works out, there is no need to assume it would suddenly or eventually change, that's why it's called scientific "theory" and new theories can always show up and defy what we knew

@@FullOilBarrel A rigorous, well-tested and undeniable theory as far as we're aware is almost as, if not as strong as any singular proof of a concept you could provide. Do you think we wouldn't use theories if they weren't as solid as proofs?

What's really cool as well is when he says "I don't think this is how it's actually implemented, but it explains every observation". Yea, that's quantum physics right there.

Same. Its the main reason i watch SotL

Beautifully said.

Age of Empires II in .5 a presses.

*"Fixed Point" Integers* was another staple of 90's games due to floating-point performance being non-deterministic at the bit level.

@@MichaelPohoreski they also just make sense in general, because you normally have a pretty limited range of values that a number can have.

In which game did it lead to parallel universes?

> farmers only use the top left four tiles This was fixed recently. It no longer matters what side of a TC you place the farm.

It doesnt make sense, that they only use the southern edges of a tile to detect elevation change though, as they seem to already have a perfectly suitable mechanism to detect elevation change, that is used for calculating the hillbonus. They could have just allow only for an elevation of 2, and therefore get rid of the different placing between the bottom and the top of a hill.

There has been a video about the farm thing I think

@@ucallmeschnitzel It makes perfect sense since their goal probably wasn't to only allow for a set amount of elevation change but rather to allow the player to place buidings anywhere it wouldn't look stupid.

After Spirit of the Law did show which parts of the building are relevant for the calculation I immediately understood it. Even with other buildings than town centers, too much elevation change would mess up the graphics. So for an isometric game with only one camera perspective that's 100% reasonable.

In all fairness, this probably happened a lot irl. Still does actually

Yeah a town center needs to be practical, so level ground is mandatory.

But just from this perspective tho

Villager: But your majesty, you were okay with this sort of placement on the south side, what is it about the north side that you don't like?

​@@fahimhoq3166🎉 King: Do you want the Normans to kill us all???

I had a similar thought but does this give the northern player an advantage/incentive on the attack as they will be biased to building on the southern/attacking sides of terrain. And does this dis/advantage either player in any other way...

@@sandmaster4444 That's interesting. I think it depends on playstyle. So it would be an advantage for a more aggressive player, but a disadvantage for a more defensive player. But maybe it could also be argued that being either aggressive or defensive is generally better no matter your preferred playstyle, but that would probably depend on elo rating I think, if that's the case

Also, what about units that are attacking or being attacked on a tile that has elevation difference?

That is likely because AoE3 was made using a different engine (also used for AoM, Engine: Bang!) compared to AoE1 and AoE2 (Engine: Genie). So the limitations are completely different.

In aoe3 the tc is just 1 building, while in aoe2 the tc is 4 buildings all together, he kinda showed this at the end of the video

Love how much niche knowledge you have about these games. Is that a DE-specific quirk? It sounds like the sort of curiosity that results from two different programmers working on the same script years apart from one another.

@@billdewall6152 It's like that in the original game.

The real question is how this will help in the next episode of AOE2 pacifist

Interesting question, and is something I also looked into. Units seem to be able to track their height perfectly, where even being slightly higher on a slanted tile gives the uphill attack bonus. Placing buildings is the only case I've seen where elevation is rounded so much.

That's fascinating and a a wonderful insight into the game design process. I love this Frankenstein's monster of systems and design ideas we call AOE2

@@justsammy2023 Lol

@@SpiritOfTheLaw How about the hill bonus for buildings? Which tile decides the elevation of the building, i would guess the tip of the v?

@@erikssonown I always wonder this when placing castles on lumpy terrain!

And a AoE 1 relic “Easter egg”

I think he did another video on hill damage, and if I remember correctly only the middle pieces/piece matters.

@@edwardblom2661 Thank you.

the reason it's the V is because those are the tiles that are actually visibley the rest is covered by the 2d graphic of the building.

not sure i would call this a glitch, I didn't develop the game however, but my assumption is that this system was made as it is to ensure the placement of buildings doesn't break terrain visually too much, would explain why its the 2 sides facing the camera that are the ones it considers for placement. the sides facing away from the player can mess with terrain more since the player doesn't see that side. Just a relic of the time. Then again i know nothing about this games development, so this is pure speculation on my part.

Buildings only consider their center for calculating elevation damage.

@@vagnerseibert1748 how do 2x2 or 4x4 buildings consider their center?

@@bigsmoke4592 They use the center vertex, not the tile. As it can be seem on SOTL's video, each tile has 4 vertices, of which each one has its own height.

Depends on where the elevation is. I guess if the elevation is around the bases, one of the players should have the advantage of having more TC spots in front of his base to grab more map control. On the other hand, the other player may have an extra spot to fall back on if he gets pushed. The elevation is super random though so this would be incredibly hard to calculate. Spawning to the north might give a really tiny chance of giving you a god forward TC though, so I guess I’d pick north, but really depends on the map and defensive/aggressive playstyle.

@@edwardblom2661 It'd be interesting to see the data. At least in terms of the TC, because it's so restrictive it should be pretty fair, but having castles naturally have more positions on the south side of hills may favor... the south I think? On golden pit or any map where elevation goes up or down towards the center of the map, the south player should have more places for a slightly forward castle on their side, since the 'V' shape might match the south ring of elevations more. (it might be too negligible to notice, except in a huge sample of matches though)

@@ClairvoireBut If the height of the V determines the hill bonus of the castle it would be bad to place it on the south side of the hill.

@@Clairvoire You could be on to something, given the winrate delta for blue (southwest) vs red (northeast) side in League of legends is ... not huge, but far from zero.

the buildings in category 3 actually do that in Age of Empires 2 - once built the terrain is flattened to whatever the game thinks was the building's elevation.

@@rcillo you get a plain surface where the building used to be

@@mathewperryfan yeah that was good i remember that, looked a bit weird though haha

Professional game dev here. Make sure you *play* classic RTSs so you can avoid the mistakes of the genre. * Age of Empires 2 & 3 * Command & Conquer * Warcraft 2 & 3 * StarCraft 1 & 2 * Total Annihilation * Rise of Nations You’ll also want to watch WinterStarcraft’s reaction video: _The next major RTS will fail. This is why_ Good luck!

@@MichaelPohoreski yea i played all of these and watched the video already :) thanks for your input! do you have a feature you definetly want to see in an rts game? :)

@@marv8107 Yes, several! ALSO, pretend a user has carpal tunnel. How could they play the game? * Auto-group joining. Why do I manually have to keep adding a soldier when he gets sent to the front line? They should automatically join their buddies * Free-to-Play to make it more accessible * CO-OP maps. Archon mode in Starcraft 2 is great but LACKS MAPS. * GOOD replay tools that let viewers always see the important stats * Easy to find and watch replays. Path of Exile had a large amount of success due to it being an early adopter of Twitch integration. * Fine grained AI difficulty. My group of gaming buddies usually default to Starcraft 2 for PvE because we can control the individual level of difficulty for each AI. This allows for more granularity to match AI to each human player's skill. AoE3 has an all-or-nothing difficulty which is horrible. * No stupid dichotomy of campaign having X units but multiplayer having Y units. /me glares at SC2. * Ability to customize our colors. * Multiple monitor support. Let me use my 2nd monitor to see the ENTIRE battlefield * Allow me to have "sub-windows" and assign "Camera Follow Unit" so it is easy to keep a bird's eye view on the important events * Allow more than 8 players total. I want to play 6 humans vs 6 AI with my buddies. * Custom max population. 200 max population is piddly. There are times we want far less, and far more. * Training modes where I can focus on a specific build order. Let's say I want to focus on streamlining building 3 barracks. Give me a game mode that times and rates how well I do. * SHOW me my build order as an overlay * Show me a one line from my build order

"Populous 3: The Beginning" panheathu