Demo 7 Testbed Bugs and Comments

[Twinge]

Hmmm... Yeah that would work probably. If you could define your own provinces that might be idea, dunno.
Btw if you just go to Civ settings and set like Legions to 95% and army supplies to 5% on that map... watch out Carthrage! Heh.

[Mark_Everson]

Gotta fix the no-conquest thing. How does it always end up getting turned off??? Yeah, Laurent, I'd say until we have something better, please go back to the D6 approach. And I'm Ashamed I didn't even Notice

We need to give the AI side mil build orders so the player can't just do what you're doing Twinge I usually force myself to play 'fair'. I'm interested in a define-own-provinces thing too. I guess for D8 though.

[Mark_Everson]

We've got a bunch of bug fixes and some new features in the D7 code, so I'll be sending out a new version to you soon Twinge. We also need to finalize the exact D7 specs. This will happen soon in the D7&8 planning thread. Some of the ideas are already there if you want to take a look or make a comment. We're trying to push in the more-gamelike direction for the Dawn1 tutorial scenario, and I think we've now got enough stuff we can pull it off pretty convincingly!

[Mark_Everson]

I've sent out the new testbed 7.2 to Twinge, Richard, and Dale. If any of you didn't get it, or there is anyone else who thinks they want it, just let me know.

[Mark_Everson]

Updated Bugs and Features lists

These are the old lists from D6, updated. It seemed more logical to put them here as we will soon be putting more D7-related things in the lists.

I have now sent out the 7.3 testbed to the usual crew. If anyone that wants it didn't get it, please let me know.

As always comments criticisms and suggestions based on my ratings of what is important are very welcome.

The feature list now has a section at the bottom for manual/tutorial requests. I have put the feature list in the next post, since the two together were quite long...

I have not merged these lists with the D7 todo list, althoug some of the more important items IMO have been transferred to the D7 todo list, which can be found in the D7&8 planning thread. All new bug reports or small feature requests will go in these files as the new reports and requests show up.

Bugs List

Bugs and small feature requests file has been split into two separate files.

Amazingly, they are called Bugs and Small Feature Requests. Numbering from previous versions is retained for continuity, but the numbering will be independent between the two in the future. Frequently it is a judgment call what’s a bug and what’s a small feature, please just accept what I call it… Going forward all small feature requests will have the prefix f to make it easy to distinguish if it’s a bug or a feature ;-)

This is the Bug List current as of June 8, 2002

Most outstanding bugs are minor and will be addressed within the next few releases.

Bugs rated by Mark as important to try to fix before Demo 7 launch marked with ***

I have assigned priorities to all bug and small feature requsts they are noted in square brackets at the end of each item. Feel free to question my priorities. If there is enough clamor that something I rate low is of high importance, I'll change it...

-55. When there are too many enemy TFs on a square, right-click does not produce a pop-up window with the details. I noticed this when I let the AI grow huge armies (by turn 80). By that time also the power circle of those mega-concentrations vanishes, cause it's too large and it gets buried under tiles further away which are probably refreshed after that. [acknowledged long-term issue, low priority, D8]

-60 After having "worked" the game a while, in two consecutive efforts, the game turn computations were "stuck". Does the existance of oversized log files have anything to do with this? I deleted the files and started another game and the turn ended in a split second. Pathfinding seems to cause no overwork to the program, but perhaps opening and closing the large txt files might do that. (Of course this is a wild and uneducated guess, so I'm probably wrong)
[It doesn’t open and close text files. Don’t know what causes this.]

-109 I got a unit killed out in the middle of nowhere. But its elimination of the fog goes on even after its dead! One of those “ghost” units I presume. [known non-critical issue will fix later]

-116 When econ orders frame comes up first the many little text areas appear with no frame around them then the rest appears. Not critical, but any ideas how to fix this? It didn’t happen in D5. [low priority]

-121 Sometimes Victory or defeat messages don’t come up as they should. Best guess is that ‘ghost’ units are preventing conditions from being fulfilled. [medium priority, D7]

-124 Units are announced to be built, but sometimes don’t show up on map or in Units box until the next turn. [high if easy to fix, not critical, D7] ***

-125 “Next TF” button doesn’t work if no TF is selected. Should go to some TF to start if none selected. Perhaps TF closest to current selected square? [medium priority, D7] ***

-129 Got message that roads were planned but none set aside even though I did have an order for road building, and was part way through building one. I had other orders that preempted it. [med D7] ***


---------- Post Demo 6 bugs Dec 20 on --------------------

-138 Pop-up box that says roads were planned but none set aside is really annoying, and for unknown reasons I sometimes get it nearly every turn even when funds are allocated and not all roads are built. Please change this message to an Econ Event [medium priority, D7] ***

-140 (Axi) One minor glitch: when you resize the units window, the sidebar refuses to adjust, so the active area either gets cut-off, or covers only part of the window. If you meant the units window to have a standard 2 unit rows width, why did you put a sidebar in the first place? [medium priority, D7] ***

-141. (Axi) Pathfinding doesn't seem to take advantage of roads. [high, D7] ***

-142. (Axi) Sometimes, when a TF is on the target square of it's previous path, the red dot is still there and the details window says that the unit "has orders", so they have to be cancelled before a new path is ordered. Perhaps the unit did not have enough movement points and it still "owes" some to complete it's path. If this is the problem, fix by crediting the "owed" points to the next move. [don’t know about this one]

-144 (Richard) The "Move to nearest enemy" should be recalculated every turn. Now they just go to where the unit was when tne order was given.[medium, D7] ***

-145 (Richard) Graphical glitches and slowness abound. Whenever I scroll on the main map it looks hideous and I have to move the window to make it look right. Can you code a refresh when the user scrolls? I have a Gateway pile of crap with a Rage 128 pro graphics card. Idea: Is there a way to code a screen refresh when the mouse leaves the scroll bar? [medium, D7]

-146 (Jorgen) Unit is drawn at the middle of the path like this :
0 - 0 - 1 - 1 - Unit - 2 - 3 - 3 etc. (or maybe it was 0 - 0 - 0 - 0 - 0 - Unit - 0 - 1 - 1 etc .. can't remember)
The unit was drawn in the correct physical position (judging from where it was last turn), but it was like old orders stayed behind.[medium, D7] ***

-147 Program bombs when “Move TF to Enemy City” is selected, but no enemy cities exist .[medium, D7] ***

-148 When I click "Next" in the Events window that pops up, it just disappears. I don't think it's supposed to do that. (there may be problems with previous also)
(Twinge) I'll go into a little more detail to clarify: When the events window pops up at the begging of the turn, you can hit previous to check the previous turn's events. If you press Next to go back to the current events, the box disapears.[medium, D7] ***

-149 (Twinge) One more bug I almost forgot to mention. There seems to be some sort of bug involved in clicking on the very bottom squares on the map. Sometimes I can click on them but Usually I can't. I try reclicking and it won't work. The bug is very inconsistant and hard to peg down; It seems to depend, somewhat, on what square you are on before you click the new square. I've only seen the bug on the 3rd scenario but it likely exsists on the others. To sum up: I can move the selected tile anywhere on the map with 1 or at most 2 clicks EXCEPT for the very bottom row, which requires a lot more clicks or sometimes don't select at all.[medium, D7] ***

-150 make education do something in terms of generating RPs [medium, D7] ***

-151 remove Econ Options item on toolbar, since it does nothing. [medium, D7] ***

-152 either eliminate Ruler button or mark gui as "Don't Touch, for Display Only" or some such [high D7] ***



Command line switches (Must be in command line mode (FE batch file) to use):
-ef = error logging to a file
-no = no AI movement
-seed = random numbers use constant seed for reproducible behavior
-800x600 = start in 800 x 600 res mode to simulate 800x600 screen
-allecon = allows access to economic orders/info for non-player civs
-riotsoff = turn off riots model (demo 7 feature, default is riots are on)

Full information on command line switch usage is in the testbed readme file

[Mark_Everson]

Feature List

Feature Requests. Frequently it is a judgment call what’s a bug and what’s a small feature, please just accept what I call it… All feature requests will have the prefix 'f' to make it easy to distinguish if it’s a bug or a feature ;-) Manual/tutorial requests (at the bottom) have an M prefix.

This is the Feature List current as of June 11, 2002

I have assigned priorities to all feature requests - they are noted in square brackets at the end of each item. Feel free to question my priorities. If there is enough clamor that something I rate low is of high importance, I'll change it...

Features rated by Mark as important to try to fix before Demo 7 launch marked with ***
There are some add'l features, mostly ones with larger scope than the "features" in the D7 todo list. To be consistent, and yet limit the number of lists floating around, any further features we add for D7 will go in this list, and we will eventually phase out the D7 todo list.

f62 A partial cancellation order is also lacking, so that only the last step of a detailed path will can be cancelled. [eventually need, but low priority]

f63 The units are shown jumping from initial to final state, without me seeing their pacing. [actually there is an update by tick, but its fast on some machines] This is crucial for gameplay, so sliding of units (like in civ2 or civ-evo) has to be introduced. [IMO sliding speed of units should be selectable by player, with the choice included of no sliding (or very little), low priority]

f69 One thing that is needed is some way to know what units are projected to be created in each square and when. Put this in the details frame or the econ info window. Or rather make a city screen, like in the ole civ2! Integration is the key. [Seems like D7+ to me, nice to have, but not essential, wait for new econ gui to do it]

f72 Economic consequences of battle -- The two armies share the square, fighting every turn. But there seem to be no economic consequences to this raging battle. [medium D7 feature, mark will try to implement] ***

f74 One thing we could use when there are multiple TFs in a square is whether they have movement orders or not. Perhaps you could just put the same red circles you put on the path. So a circled 2 in a TFs box would indicate that it has moves for two more turns registered. This is not urgent, just thought I'd mention it.
[Click on the details in the popup menu to get this.]
[If I have to click on every TF to see which has orders it is just about a useless capability. I should be able to See from the TF box which ones have orders. This is not urgent for D6, but needs to be handled in some way to avoid player (read ‘Mark’) frustration. [eventually need, medium priority, D7?]

f101 Chariot moves are Waaay too restrictive. At a minimum they should have allowable but reduced movement in hills, and possibly broken terrain. Right now Chariots are only of any good if you move over completely flat land w/o forest. [eventually need, medium priority, D7? Check out whether this is still true, though I think it is.] ***

f108 Unit details issue. With two TFs in a square right-clicking always gives details for the one selected to move (white outline on box), not the one you rt.-click on. [Very counter-intuitive, but it is the spec for now. Selected TF is one right-click gives info for.] I (Mark) would like to make it a feature that the one you right-click on is the one you get move orders for. If the click is not identifiable as pertaining to a given TF or unit, only then would I have it apply to the selected (white box) one. [eventually want, medium priority, D7?]

f118 “hide events” should also hide the detailed description boxes associated with events. Actually closing them would be best so that we don’t end up with hundreds of little event boxes accumulated and hidden from view by the end of the game. [medium priority, D7] ***

f127 Minimum power circle size is a bit too large. I can’t tell from PC if there are one or two full-strength legions in a square. Suggest minimum be shrunk to about 2/3 of current minimum. [high priority, Mark is happy to do if you tell me where it is..] ***

f135 Events suggestion from Laurent -- Events should appear in reverse order. Currently most recent is on top. I had an army fight 4 times in one turn (poor they). The display should have shown events: Health
9->1.5, 1.5->0.8,0.8->0.6,0.6->0.4, but it was the other way round. [medium priority, D7] ***


f136 Combat Reports -- At some point there should probably be a breakdown of number of units of each type on each side, but its not urgent. Also unit power, health, etc should probably just be reported as integers. Health 23.4857392 is a bit disconcerting. [mostly fixed, but sometimes a long string of numbers seen]

f138. (Axi) The movement path of the units is drawn on a layer below the units and the power circles, resulting into it being hard to see sometimes. It should be always drawn on top. [medium, D7]

f139. (Axi) A unit that is on the top row of squares of the map gets cut-off by the edge of the window. Perhaps you should leave some black margin above the map area. [medium, D7] ***

f140. (Axi) For users that do not use the same colors as the windows default appearance, the area where you can toggle between traditional and market economy bears the color of the window, while the surrounding area bears the color of the windows default appearance. (I am using a blue-gray tone which makes the thing rather ugly). [low, D7]

f141. (Axi) The TF box around a single bowmen unit is too narrow. [generally there should be a minimum width for the box around a unit regardless of its power. As it is sometimes box shrinks to unappealing size. Low, D7+]

f142. (Axi) The TF box does not need to have a gray background. In demo 4 it had the flat ground for background. Please bring that back and make it so that the background copies the tile which is currently selected. [Low, D7+]

f143. (Axi) Isn't there a way to rearrange the TFs that are in the unit box? Units can be arranged at will inside TFs by assigning them one at a time, but when the TF is disbanded, they get scrambled again. [This doesn’t seem important to me, any feedback either way? ]

f144. (Axi) Since we can save window settings now, how about adding the general settings (fog of war, hidden map, TF selection and whatever is added next) into that file? [Low, D7+]

f145. (Axi) Shouldn't there be "back" buttons in all the launch screens, along with the "exit" ones? [Low, D7+]

f146. (Axi) The [econ orders] reorder button seems to be reordering infraclasses by groups. Perhaps the expandable list idea mentioned somewhere above should be implemented, providing us with a much nicer representation of expenses. [Good idea, but only when econ interface completely redone IMO]

f147. (Axi) I feel that it would be ergonomically better if we could have a merged window for both civ, province and square orders, where we could give orders side by side. Also an option to clear all orders on each level would be swell. [Hmm, not sure what I think about this, but it’s a long way off anyway]

f148 (Richard) I think that issuing a new move order should cancel the previous one and not get stacked on the end. [stacking seems to work fairly well, this idea would need large
support to change it]

f149 (Richard) There should be some kind of home field advantage. Cities fall over way too easily. Maybe in city battles we should generate free horde units to represent militia. When the city is attacked, the units join the defending TF. Then they return to civilian life when the battle is over. [medium priority d7, we have talked recently about an auto-mustered militia]. ***

F150 (Richard) The "Move to nearest enemy" should be recalculated every turn. Now they just go to where the unit was when tne order was given. [med D7] ***

F151 (Laurent) I have trouble with road building: First order is OK, but if on the following tuen I order roads, I get a message that there are no finds to build the road, but I let the econ orders at 30% so why does it complain? Also, road-building is pretty fast for me (again, I always put LOTS of kapital in it but even then, 12 squares including 2 hills and a mountain in one turn, it seems a lot).
Mark said: But part of the reason its so fast at 30% road building and above is that 30% is an Enormous amount of resources to put in roads.
What real 'civ' spends more than a few percent of revenues on road-building? There are so many other competing demands...
Laurent said: Yes, but in the game, which is not a simulation, it seems weird. There are so many things the player doesn't see, that roads, which are something he sees (and not in a lost menu but on the map), should have more importance than in real-life.
Anyway, players need feedback on how much money to put in the road-building (so I don't put 30% where 5% is needed), and they can stage it over several turns.
My suggestion, maybe put in an arbitrary delay for road building so it happens over time. This would also prevent flash-building of roads during an invasion. [low D7]
F152 (Blakis) Why can't I just use the arrow keys to move a unit one tile at a time? [low D7]
F153 (sas) Make it possible to remove a planned road. I pressed the wrong tile a couple ot times, and couldnt remove it. Mabie i'm missing an option here. [low D8]
F154 (sas) *Make it more easy to know when the next unit is made/finished. [med. D8]
F155 (axi) Roadbuilding should have an undo option just as troop movement has. Roadbuilding could use the same code as pathfinding to show on the map the number of turns in which each road segment will be built, with priority based on the order with which the orders were given. Cancelling an existing order should alter the numbers for all consecutive orders. [Great idea! Med. D7]
F156 (Axi) There should be an option to make visible all friendy TF paths on the map. It would also be nice to have a preview of where each unit should be next turn, if nothing intervenes. This is in anticipation of future major wars. [med D8]
F157 Make it so pathfinding into the black doesn’t give away terrain info [med D8]
F158 LARGE number of detailed suggestions by stickdude on the interface. Not high priority but useful to go over, maybe for D8. Some of the nonfunctional things he specifies should probably be taken out before D7.
---
First, I double-click the ClashD6_12.jar file, and I see the ...

"Select the option" screen
1. No splash screen, or opening movie... That's ok. The opening screen looks pretty good, and it works.
2. I know this is picky, but "Select an option" sounds better to me than "the" option.
3. The logo is a button, which seems odd.

I click on "Select a scenario" and up comes the ...

"Select the scenario" screen
1. Should this be resizable, or a fixed size? I vote for fixed, since it's acting like a dialog box.
2. Again, the logo on the left size is a button. Should something happen when I click it (right now nothing does happen)?
3. "Carthago delenda est" is the title of the first scenario. What does that mean?
4. I can delete all the text from the scenario descriptions. Should they be read-only, or better yet, not text boxes at all (see below)?

Here's what I'd expect to see on this screen:
1. All the scenarios are listed, but in a bigger font, and without descriptions. They aren't buttons, either.
2. The logo is still on here somewhere.
3. As the user moves the cursor over the scenario name, the scenario name is highlighted somehow, or a box drawn around it, or something to indicate which scenario you're about to select; and the description is displayed in a different part of the dialog.

4. If the user moves the cursor off the scenario name, the description disappears (basic mouse-over behaviour).
5. If the user clicks on the name of a scenario, that scenario is selected.

Ok, I click "Select" next to the first scenario, and I see the ...

"Select the civilization" screen:
1. Logo = button...
2. While typing this, I forgot which scenario I chose. It would be nice to have the selected scenario and the description displayed here so I can make an informed civilization choice.
3. It would also be nice to have a short description of the differing goals of each civilization in the scenario. Again, this should be a roll-over type effect.
4. If I selected the wrong scenario, there's no way to go back and choose something different. I have to exit and restart.

I click on "Computer Only", and after a little while, up comes the ...

"Clash Demo 6.1" screen
Impressions:
1. The map itself looks very cool. It's not a cool as, say, Age Of Kings, but I can live with that.
2. I'm not sure I like having everything in different frames, like it's set up now. That could be because I'm used to having one main window partitioned into different setions, instead of different windows.
3. On the menu bar, "Options" and "Econ Options" don't have any options below them. They should be grayed out if there's nothing to select.
4. Since the toolbar simply presents the exact options as the menus do, one of them feels redundant.
5. I have to click on a square/unit for them to show up in the Units/Detail Frame windows. It would be really cool for this to happen automatically as the mouse moves over a unit/square.
6. When I click on a unit and it appears in the "Units" window, it's nearly impossible to read the text above the units. Yellow and Green on a grey background doesn't work too well.
7. Also on the "Units" window, scrollbars keep appearing when they aren't necessary.
8. It would be nice to have more information about the units in that window. Simply knowing that the horse icon on the map is really two horse icons doesn't tell me very much. What are the capabilities of the individual units, how healthy are they?
9. Ok, I just right-clicked on one of the units and saw the little pop-up box that lists what I was wondering in the previous comment. It's not intuitive, though.
10. I restarted the game and am playing as a human player, so now I can see how to create/disband Task Forces.
11. I just disbanded a group of 4 units into separate armies. The last unit is halfway out of the "Units" window, but there's no horizontal scrollbar so I can scroll over to that unit; only a vertical scrollbar, which I don't need.
12. I'm getting the hang of giving orders. Pretty cool, once you get the hang of it. I like the "nearest friend/enemy" idea.
13. If I have a number of different units in a square, and I want to form them into two different task forces, is there a way to do that, other than move half the units to a different square?
14. Can we rename the armies?
15. Can we change the "martial attitude"? Does everybody just attack for now?

I clicked on "Economics" and "Civ Econ Orders"
1. Gasp! What is this? Text boxes everywhere!!
2. I can delete/change any of the text anywhere. I don't think I'm supposed to be able to do that.
3. I've read some of the discussion about completely re-doing these screen to make them more user-friendly, so I'll just wait to see the new and improved econ screens before commenting further.
Other thoughts:
1. I don't know how far along the economic model is, but it would be nice to see some highlights in the "Information frame" at the end of each turn, like income, spending, and current cash balance, units to be produced next turn, etc.
2. When I click "Next" in the Events window that pops up, it just disappears. I don't think it's supposed to do that.
3. I'd probably just use round numbers for the army attack/defence/health stats in the "Information frame". It looks kinda odd to see that my armies health is down to 5.2000003. Or better yet, why not just display them as percentages - i.e. "Health: down to 52%"
Ok, I've played 20 turns now, and the bad guys keep capturing my cities, so I'll probably end up losing. That's ok, though, because it's just a demo.

Overall, I'm quite impressed. The game clearly has a ways to go, but I can definitely see the potential.
---
f159 (stickdude) I don't know how far along the economic model is, but it would be nice to see some highlights in the "Information frame" at the end of each turn, like income, spending, and current cash balance, units to be produced next turn, etc. [med d7] ***
f160 (twinge) Another irksome style you use is how the menus work. When you click on a menu that has more than one option associated with it (IE, almost every single menu) they pop up somewhere else on the screen. I find that pretty annoying; If it was done similar to standard windows submenus (where you move the mouse down to the menu target, and the submenus pop out--like the start menU) that would be ideal. Something close would be good too; right now it's quite odd =) Perhaps having that fixed by D8 would be good.[thoughts on this?]

---------------- Requests for manual / tutorial topics -----------------------
M1 (Gar) Fourth time I realized that I didn't seem to get much effect (as in numbers other than 0 to the right of unit % spend) unless my taxes were 9 or 10%. Not sure I understand what I was taxing or why some numbers would go up and others down when I changed tax rates. Eventually I got some different units to pop out and sent them off to battle and explored and conquered and won. About halfway through no more units were popping out and don't know why. [Explain better that spend % is as a fraction of taxes, med D7].
M2 (Gar) When exploring couldn't figure out why sometimes I could go deep into the black areas and others couldn't get anywhere but an adjacent square.
Mark said:
On the not being able to move into the black sometimes... The issue is terrain prohibitions for units, the most obvious being that land units can't move into water squares! So if in the black there is a water square, well, you get the idea. [high D7]

M3 When in move mode, if you right-click on the target square, movement path shows as normal, but moves are not executed. It's a feature allowing you to see path before locking in move that we should explain it in tutorial.

[Richard Bruns]

Bugs

I still have the graphics problem. Whenever I scroll on the main map, it becomes horribly choppy, but the choppiness goes away when I move the map window and it refreshes.

Feature Requests

I noticed the settings.xml file. It would be great if there was an option to "Save Screen Layout" and write the current layout to this xml file. That way I wouldn't have to rearrange the windows every time I open the program.

Overall comments

I played Rome and won way too easily. I opened the civ econ orders window and set Legion production to 60% of the economy. Legions started sprouting up all over my empire like mushrooms after a spring rain. I stomped Hannibal and cruised into Carthage. I wasn't able to take Sicily, however, since I couldn't get any troops over there.

Basically, it seems that military units are too cheap and easy to build. After I built up the empire, I could have made over 100 legions per turn. That's excessive. Also, the upkeep for all of my units didn't seem to drain the economy at all. I think that military units should probably cost about five times what they do now, and upkeep should be raised by a factor of about thirty.

I noticed while playing that, while economic management was really easy, I spent a lot of time pushing units around. That was because I had to manually move an army to conquer every square individually. I had to send units into all the squares that Hannibal rode through, and I had to send units into square of Carthaginian territory. While the move command helped a lot, it still reminded me of the tediousness of unit-pushing in civ 2.

Other than that, the game played quite well. You guys have made a lot of progress. Would it be possible for me to poke about in the xml files myself to make military units more expensive, and see how the game plays then? Or would that crash something?

[Gary Thomas]

I still have the graphics problem. Whenever I scroll on the main map, it becomes horribly choppy, but the choppiness goes away when I move the map window and it refreshes.

There has been no optimization of the graphics system yet. Emphasis has been on getting the whole thing going, and fighting off the importunities of a certain Individual OF Influence who is only interested in adding more models and more features, and who is not interested in the program infrastructure at all.

I noticed the settings.xml file. It would be great if there was an option to "Save Screen Layout" and write the current layout to this xml file. That way I wouldn't have to rearrange the windows every time I open the program.

That is exactly the way it is supposed to work now.

I played Rome and won way too easily. I opened the civ econ orders window and set Legion production to 60% of the economy. Legions started sprouting up all over my empire like mushrooms after a spring rain. I stomped Hannibal and cruised into Carthage. I wasn't able to take Sicily, however, since I couldn't get any troops over there.

There has been no play-testing tuning of the scenarios at all. I have been more or less assuming that that would start in earnest when we have a real AI.

I noticed while playing that, while economic management was really easy, I spent a lot of time pushing units around. That was because I had to manually move an army to conquer every square individually. I had to send units into all the squares that Hannibal rode through, and I had to send units into square of Carthaginian territory. While the move command helped a lot, it still reminded me of the tediousness of unit-pushing in civ 2.

Alternative suggestions are welcome. There has been pretty much no feedback on how this sort of thing should be handled.

Other than that, the game played quite well. You guys have made a lot of progress. Would it be possible for me to poke about in the xml files myself to make military units more expensive, and see how the game plays then? Or would that crash something?

Don't see why not. There is a partly written manual on how the xml files work. I will attach a zipped version.

Cheers

[Mark_Everson]

Originally posted by Richard Bruns
I noticed the settings.xml file. It would be great if there was an option to "Save Screen Layout" and write the current layout to this xml file. That way I wouldn't have to rearrange the windows every time I open the program.

Hey Richard, I've gotta get off the comp in a second, so this will be brief. If you exit the program Normally, through the Exit button, or the x at upper right, the screen layout settings Will get saved as you have them. If you exit a different way, or suffer a program crash then they won't end up saved.

The rest, as Gary said, we're either working on, or need to defer till later.

[Gary Thomas]

In another thread, Mark said:

On crashes in the econ code, l just sent you an email about that. I'm assuming your crashes are the same as the ones I experienced! I don't think its the econ code itself, but rather a bug in the xml init for delenda. That's becuase I fixed the initial econ crash, and then it crashed this way instead:

java.lang.ArithmeticException: / by zero
at game.geography.gui.OverviewMapPanel.calculateTileS ize(OverviewMapPanel.java:130)
at game.geography.gui.OverviewMapPanel.setPreferredSi ze(OverviewMapPanel.java:73)
at game.geography.gui.OverviewMapFrame.(OverviewMapFr ame.java:52)
at game.geography.gui.OverviewMapFrame.getInstance(Ov erviewMapFrame.java:34)
at game.gui.Start.game(Start.java:37)
at game.manager.Game$ScenarioFileSelection.execute(Ga me.java:154)
at game.manager.Game.(Game.java:72)
at game.manager.GameMain.main(GameMain.java:10)

This is different from my one (which occurred in the new Attila scenario). It occurs in the pre-game turns.

Cheers

[Richard Bruns]

The windows settings seem to be saved now.

I'll take a shot at making the scenario more balanced. I did see the xml instructions. I read them and they were very good, although the text size in some parts is enormous.

[Mark_Everson]

Hey Gary:

Actually the bug I saw starts in pre-game also. In Economics.startUp a TurnId.getCurrent() returns null. But I kludged around that, and then it showed as the one in the quote above. They still may not be the same bug, but I just wanted to make sure you knew what mine looked like.

[Richard Bruns]

I went through the military.xml file, adding a food cost of 10 to each unit to represent food used during training. The big change was to multiply every production and services cost by 5. Then I went into the economy.xml file and bumped the cost of each unit of military supplies to 10 food, 1 production, and 2 services.

The game was a lot more interesting then. Hannibal actually got into Italy, like he did in real life. I was having trouble holding him back. But then the game froze with the "still running last turn" bug.

I noticed the bug where Hannibal splits up, but each part is shown as the whole thing. I would like to note, however, that in my game, this worked quite well. While Hanibal's ground troops were fighting my legions in the alps, the horsemen slipped through my lines and took over a citiy in central Italy.

[Mark_Everson]

Hi Richard, sounds like a good experiment! I'm not even sure where the cost numbers we're using came from, but it sounds like you've improved things a lot in the scenario with your changes.

We're trying to make it fair for the opponents to the humans by giving them military build orders too. That will make it into the testbed fairly soon.

Just a few points that should help a bit:

1. The econ xml file isn't hooked up, so no point in making changes in it yet.

2. There already is 20 food withdrawn for a standard size unit as food cost, though putting it in the xml is a better idea than the hard-coded way its done now.

3. You can provide valuable bug-hunting info if you report the stack trace when you get a "still running last turn" bug. I'll reproduce the bug-related part of the readme from the testbed release below, since it has all the info.

Bug Reports

To report a bug, please use the format already in use in the current bug report file as shown in the second post of the D6 thread. When the program crashes, you will get a diagnostic output in the Dos window. Please copy this, if relevant, and attach it to the bug report. Unfortunately these outputs frequently overflow the screen buffer. If you have an error message that overflows the DOS window you can redirect the error output to an "error.txt file that will appear in the ClashTestbed\class directory. To do this you must us the -ef flag. ("ef" for error file) Send the file or its contents as the bug report. It is probably best to by default run using error logging. To do that you can use the RUN_ClashTestbed_ErrorLog batch file. This file also has the -seed flag set so that behavior that lead to the bug, if relayed precisely, will duplicate the bug when one of the coder runs it.

For twitchy but non-fatal behavior where something appears to be wrong, you can check out the various text diagnostic output files for individual models. FE "economics.txt" has some very detailed output on selected parts of the economy. (These files all appear in the ClashTestbed\class directory.) Look especially for lines that begin with "Error". For these non-fatal bugs please give a good a description as possible and email the model output text file to the coder. Bug reports should be posted on the forum. For now the one with the first bug can start a "Demo 7 Test Reports" or some such thread.

[LDiCesare]

Good testing, Richard. It is nice to see that it is possible to tweak figures and have gameplay changes.
I wonder whether I should put a global military cost multiplier somewhere, so that all costs are changed and one doesn't need to change every element by hand. Either a global one or, for each element, implement the "default" behaviour for costs and allow a multiplier. This would mean "a light spear element inherits from a warrior element and costs X times as much". It would provide two ways of defining costs for an element, either define all the values or multiply from a default. So you could have for a light spear production = twice warrior price, services = twice warrior price, food = unchanged.

The existing cost values come from early tests in D5. They are quite low considering in D5/6, you had really little population in comparison with D7, and thus much weaker economy.

I had forgotten the food part in the xml. I will change the code and remove the food thing from it. I will change the xml file, but will deliver it only when I am sure that I can get both Dawn and Delenda working fine.
(I don't want Dawn to take forever to build a unit.)