Demo 7 Download and Comments

[LDiCesare]

Feature requests comments (only a few ones, I agree or have no opinion wrt the rest)

f62: A right-click during pathmaking should suppress the last path, a single add a path, a double add and end the path.

f74: That is not a problem for me right now.
f108: Maybe highlighting the selected unit (instead of TF) would help understand what right click does. This is particularly interesting when you move units from one TF to another. A multiselection could even be useful.

f149: Militia is coded, but requires some input from socail model that I lack. City walls should be modelled too. I think a simple "prevent flanking" role could be done easily, but some details are needed.

f165: This one is quite serious in Jericho in particular. Automatic taking of a whole province under some conditions would help too (like controlling capital + opponent having no troops in the province). That would force AI to target capital and be a bit easier to intercept. Maybe it doesn't solve the problem. A "border patrol" order could also be implemented so that a TF with this order would move to reclaim territory lost in its protected province, or would move to a square of it sprotected province if there is an enemy in a neighbouring square. Note this is crude AI and is prone to abuse, but it seems feasible and could help reduce MM. Longer term, the TF(command) should be able to split so as to send only aht number of units is needed to do the task so it can better react if someone attacks from somewhere else. Priority as far as reclaiming territory would have to be set to either eliminate opponent units first or reclaim territory first. I think the former is better in order to avoid armies running around one another in circles.

[Mark_Everson]

Thanks for the suggestions Laurent, I think they're all pretty good. Probably we should have a dedicated discussion on the conquest micromanagement (f165) since, as you show, this area has a lot of "tentacles". And its a very important aspect of the game to get right! As you say, we need both shorter-term and longer-term solutions for this problem.

[Kull]

Great job! This version was easy to follow and fun to play.....Clash is certainly showing some real promise! So far I've played the tutorial twice, and here's some observations:

1) The "Wheat" icon disappeared the instant my two unit TF moved onto that square with the Barbarians (and won the first combat round). Where di it go? (I tried this 4 times, and the result was the same every time - wheat disappeared without a trace, never to return).

2) Economy Windows: I can see why there are two, but it would be nice to be able to close both with a single click. If information like this is going to be provided via windows, why not group "like" windows into a single tabbed window? Perhaps with a "pane" option if it's occasionally required to see more than one at the same time.

3) Task Forces: How do you take units in a single tile and group them into multiple task forces? It would be nice if you could use something like "Shift-click" to highlight multiple units and group only those selected.

4) Disappearing TFs: "Assign to Selected TF" appears to kill off any TF that's highlighted when you choose this option. They disappear from the Units Window and the remaining TFs don't appear to be any stronger (although, strangely, the Econ Support cost remains high).

5) Roads: Might be a good idea to put something in the tutorial that tells people how to "turn off" a road build order. (I know, it's a simple right click - but that wasn't mentioned in the tutorial - and it's VERY easy to place unwanted roads!)

6) Horse Icon: I'm pretty sure this was visible throughout my first game, but it just vanished when my guy walked onto the tile and the Domestication message popped up.

Despite these comments, there a whole lot more right than wrong in this version!

[Mark_Everson]

Hi Kull, great to 'see' you! I hope things are going great for you.

Originally posted by Kull
Great job! This version was easy to follow and fun to play.....Clash is certainly showing some real promise!

Wonderful, thanks for the feedback! And glad to hear you think we're doing some of the right stuff.

1) The "Wheat" icon disappeared the instant my two unit TF moved onto that square with the Barbarians (and won the first combat round). Where di it go? (I tried this 4 times, and the result was the same every time - wheat disappeared without a trace, never to return).

The wheat is supposed to disappear. The wheat and horses icons are not the economic Specials you're probably thinking of from before. Economic Specials are temporarily shut off in D7. The wheat and horses can be thought of as tech enablers. They give a boost to different technologies. Its mentioned in the tutorial, but you probably missed it amidst all the other prose.

2) Economy Windows: I can see why there are two, but it would be nice to be able to close both with a single click. If information like this is going to be provided via windows, why not group "like" windows into a single tabbed window? Perhaps with a "pane" option if it's occasionally required to see more than one at the same time.

The econ windows are still quite pimitive. We're going to work on getting something better for D8. If those windows are still around for D8.

3) Task Forces: How do you take units in a single tile and group them into multiple task forces? It would be nice if you could use something like "Shift-click" to highlight multiple units and group only those selected.

For now you can either: add all units of the same type (naval or land) "Merge similar units to selected TF"; or add units one at a time as in your #4. A multi-selection is a good idea, that has been suggested already, and with luck we'll get that in for D8.

4) Disappearing TFs: "Assign to Selected TF" appears to kill off any TF that's highlighted when you choose this option. They disappear from the Units Window and the remaining TFs don't appear to be any stronger (although, strangely, the Econ Support cost remains high).

Well, that sucks. Can you state exactly what steps you go thru and at what point in what scenario this happens? It generally works fine for me, so I suspect you've found a bug caused by trying to assign the unit in a way we didn't expect .

5) Roads: Might be a good idea to put something in the tutorial that tells people how to "turn off" a road build order. (I know, it's a simple right click - but that wasn't mentioned in the tutorial - and it's VERY easy to place unwanted roads!)

I thought I'd already put it in the tutorial! It'll be there next time.

Great to hear from you again!

Cya,

Mark

[MacHatter]

Mac comments

I've run through the dawn scenario several times. I haven't managed to finish it any of the times due to time limitations or system glitches. Most of the notes are from my most recent run.

All these comments came from testing on a mac. I saved the logs and can forward them if desired.

Reword references to close box being in upper right corner of popup. Most users know how to close a window, and the close box is in the upper left corner under OS X.
Can't use right mouse button to activate pop-up menus (even with 3 button rodent), need to use apple-click. (This is probably a system limitation)

Buttons in population transfer dialog are too narrow (text on the "transfer xxxx" button is truncated)

May be leak in econ order dialog. Refresh times seem to get progressively slower.
Column alignment in econ order dialog is off. Can data be cached and refreshed after new turn?

Things start to slow down around turn 60-70 (I usually have ~12 warriors then). This is worse if the econ order dialog is left open between turns.

Turn 60-java (clash) is using ~70% of the system's memory. System has 378 MB ram (physical). Stats say 1,433,220 kbytes (=~1.3GB!) virtual and 282,424 kbytes(=~275MB) resident memory.

(For comparison, turn 1 is .2 % of memory, 34,920 kbytes virtual, 729 kbytes physical)

Path finding problems-units don't use roads, even if it would be quicker
TF at 11,12 goal is 5,8
Road from 7,14-5,11-5,9
Default path (5 turn)
11,12-9,8-5,8
better path(4 turn)
11,12-10,14-7,14-5,11-5,9-5,8

TF at 3,12, goal is 7,14
Road from 4,12-5,12-5,11-7,14 (arrives 2 (first))
Default path (arrives 2 (2 turn 2 markers))
3,12-5,12-6,14-7,14
Better path (2 turn, (1 turn 2 marker))
4,12-5,12-5,11-7,14

visual glitch-lost all overlays when switching in and out
-any tile with an overlay became black
-came back for a moment (during new turn), but lost again
-when chariot became available, can't read text of message, popup menus blanking.

[edit: fixed thinko, converted numbers]

[Mark_Everson]

Re: Mac comments

Hey Andy, thanks for the detailed comments

Originally posted by MacHatter
May be leak in econ order dialog. Refresh times seem to get progressively slower.
Column alignment in econ order dialog is off. Can data be cached and refreshed after new turn?

I think this is tied in with the general slowness problems on running java/clash on your machine. Econ can be slow to come up on some older systems. Based on what you say about memory usage, I wonder if the garbage collector isn't getting run, because I don't think there's any way the game should use that much memory (but I'm too dead right now to calculate what is should be.) However my system has 256MB of ram, and never hits the disk while playing Clash.

Path finding problems-units don't use roads, even if it would be quicker
TF at 11,12 goal is 5,8
Road from 7,14-5,11-5,9
Default path (5 turn)
11,12-9,8-5,8
better path(4 turn)
11,12-10,14-7,14-5,11-5,9-5,8

TF at 3,12, goal is 7,14
Road from 4,12-5,12-5,11-7,14 (arrives 2 (first))
Default path (arrives 2 (2 turn 2 markers))
3,12-5,12-6,14-7,14
Better path (2 turn, (1 turn 2 marker))
4,12-5,12-5,11-7,14

I will check on this later. The road bonuses are nowhere near as large as in Civ, so it could be that the roads are working ok, and just not meeting your expectations.

visual glitch-lost all overlays when switching in and out
-any tile with an overlay became black
-came back for a moment (during new turn), but lost again
-when chariot became available, can't read text of message, popup menus blanking.

Bizarre. Hopefully, Pierre, a programmer who uses a mac and has expressed an interest in coding for clash, can look into some of the mac-specific bugs.

Cya,

Mark

[MacHatter]

My system isn't too old (about 2 years old-dual 500 MHZ G4s). The visual glitch showed up around turn 75-80 in that run. I haven't looked at the code, but I suspect the cause is an off screen buffer may not have been working and when the program copied the buffer onto the screen, an effectively blank buffer was copied. At the same time the glitch showed up, some warrior units that I had attached settlers to weren't being drawn in the units window, probably for the same reason.

[Mark_Everson]

Thanks for the further info MacHatter... I have no idea what may be causing it, unless its an OS-specific java implemenation thing. I can send you the code if you like, just email me. Failing that maybe Pierre can look into it.

Pierre, if you read this, do you see this same bug?

[PGrignon]

Hi guys,

After re-playing several time the Dawn Scenario on my small machine (iBook, 128Mb, 800x600) here are some features that would be great to introduce.

Features:
- Ability to choose a different font.
- Hot Keys and shortcuts for switching windows
- Contextual menu on Units in Overall map.
- Using keyboard arrows to scroll/pan.
- Settings for not storing traces ?
- Overall view of all the units/task forces. (maybe organized in a tree view).
Civ:
- Province1
-- U1,
-- TF2 (#Units)
- Prov2
-- TF4
-- TF3
- Is it necessary to get all the econ indicators ? Hide show some of them ?

=================================
Now about bugs:
I confirm several bugs found by Andy.

>Can't use right mouse button to activate pop-up menus (even with 3 button rodent), need to use apple-click. (This is probably a system limitation)

- Confirmed.

> Buttons in population transfer dialog are too narrow (text on the "transfer xxxx" button is truncated)

- Exact.

> May be leak in econ order dialog. Refresh times seem to get progressively slower.

Here are some figures:

Order ResidentSize (Mb) VirtualSize (Mb)
Start16.1 212
Colonize 16.1 212

> Things start to slow down around turn 60-70 (I usually have ~12 warriors then). This is worse if the econ order dialog is left open between turns.

- For me it is earlier. (turn 30-40) but I have much less memory (128Mb).

>Turn 60-java (clash) is using ~70% of the system's memory. System has 378 MB ram (physical). Stats say 1,433,220 kbytes (=~1.3GB!) virtual and 282,424 kbytes(=~275MB) resident memory.
>(For comparison, turn 1 is .2 % of memory, 34,920 kbytes virtual, 729 kbytes physical)

>Path finding problems-units don't use roads, even if it would be quicker
>TF at 11,12 goal is 5,8
>Road from 7,14-5,11-5,9
>Default path (5 turn)
>11,12-9,8-5,8
>better path(4 turn)
>11,12-10,14-7,14-5,11-5,9-5,8

- Confirmed!

[PGrignon]

Oops,

I pressed Ok before finishing last posting. So here are again the memory consumption figures:


Order RS VS
Start 16.1 212
Colonize 19.2 216
Econ 1 (build warriors 80%) 15.3 218
4 turns 14.3 222
Econ 2 (+End Turn) 24.5 224
Econ 3 (+End Turn) 25 225
Econ 4 (+End Turn) 29.2 226
Econ 5 (+End Turn) 25.3 227
Econ 6 (+End Turn) 30.7 228
Econ 7 (+End Turn) 29.3 229
Econ 8 (+End Turn) 35.7 229

I got very long responding time of the econ window due to garbage collection (I guess) i.e. when the Real Size of the process drops.

[Mark_Everson]

Thanks for all the suggestions and info on the bugs Pierre! I'll put both the requests and the bug info into the relevant docs in the bug or feature list as appropriate. Hopefully some others will comment on the relative importance of the different issues.

Originally posted by PGrignon
- Is it necessary to get all the econ indicators ? Hide show some of them ?

I think we can put in an option to skip the info screen. Gary was going to take a shot at a more limited econ gui. Dont know when he'll be at it though... I could put in a command-line switch to not show the info part of the screen. More on the econ-related slowness below.

> May be leak in econ order dialog. Refresh times seem to get progressively slower. (snip)

- For me it is earlier. (turn 30-40) but I have much less memory (128Mb).

>Turn 60-java (clash) is using ~70% of the system's memory. System has 378 MB ram (physical). Stats say 1,433,220 kbytes (=~1.3GB!) virtual and 282,424 kbytes(=~275MB) resident memory.

First thing to look into on this is if somehow the default is to have no garbage collection for the mac. Perhaps Laurent can see what the similar memory benchmarks are for a wintel machine? That would be a start. I'd do it, but I don't remember how. If Laurent can't, I'll take a shot at it. This weekend I'll also take a look and see if there are some quick tweaks that would make the econ menus run quicker.

>Path finding problems-units don't use roads, even if it would be quicker
>TF at 11,12 goal is 5,8
>Road from 7,14-5,11-5,9
>Default path (5 turn)
>11,12-9,8-5,8
>better path(4 turn)
>11,12-10,14-7,14-5,11-5,9-5,8

- Confirmed!

There is a bug, but it may be in the little red circles that show turn numbers. I duplicated the results posted by Andy, and verified by you, but they Don't Match actual movement times, which are 5 turns in either case. I will put this up on the bug list, and Gary, who did that code, or someone else, can look into it.

Thanks again for Andy making the original comments, and Pierre adding more info! We'll work out some way around these problems!

[LDiCesare]

Memory

I tested memory consumption a bit yesterday. Here are the results: I played Dawn on WinXP PIV 1,8GHz 256Mbytes RAM, for 61 turns in 1024 x something resolution. The size is that of java.exe (sun jdk 1.4):

Turn 1 - process is 21 Mbytes. Turn 60 - 41 Mbytes. (Was at 29Mbytes by turn 11, 38 at trun 24 - difference between turns 24 and 61 is almost entirely due to 15 econ order interactions on turn 48).

What is interesting is:
A series of 15 open/modify/close of Civ Econ Orders added 2,5 Mbytes to the size, which never shrank.
5 successive End Turns without doing anything don't increase the process size. Actually, a 12-turn "EndTurn" interaction grew from 37,488 to 37,564 Mbytes but there was a new populated square in the middle of the sequence.
The GC does work (after fights + settling, process size shrunk to what it was before). Note this is hotspot implementation, so it is supposed to be efficient. I don't know the Mac algorithm used.

I opened econ orders about 22 times, so it must cost around 3Mbytes for my scenario. The increase in memory was quite constant in time, with some boosts when barbs appeared and warriors were built and fights fought. There may be leaks in fights. Actually, the information stored in the events panel might cost a lot of memory, but this is not the issue here, I believe.
I think there is indeed a leak on econ orders windows, but I didn't experience real problems with it as teh process size remained low. I'll try to check with Pierre if we can think of something.

[Mark_Everson]

Thanks Laurent, that's a really useful set of metrics! Hopefully it's something relatively easy to fix to make the mac implementation work right. BTW did you ever do a comparison between hotspot and the jit compiler that comes with the sdk? I'd be interested to see how much hotspot helps.

[Running Water]

Hey Mark (and the rest of the Clash team),

I just downloaded 7.1 today. Haven't played any of the eariler demos, but would like to comment on the game in general. I only played the Dawn scenario so far. But it played fine for me (Win98 64 RAM(I think)). And the tutorial was easy to understand.

Overall, I liked it.

More specifically, I liked:
--The Civ Expansion model. I think it's a great idea to have your civ slowly sprawl and take up new tiles.
--Battles: The thing I like most here, is that the attack values are based on the number of people you have in the TF, so that as your TF's "health" goes down, so does the attack. Also liked the concept of having the health being tied to the number of people in the TF, and that the armies drew from the population when created. Very nice touch of realism in my opinion.
--Simotaneous Moves: Very interesting. I think it's a great idea, but might need some tweeks. I noticed that sometimes it's hard to engage someone if they didn't want to be engaged. Or that the enemy would attack a square that was unguarded instead of one that was (to get the population). I like these ideas in general, but one thing I would suggest is to possibly have faster units be able to try to engage the enemy (if they are slower) in two different squares instead of trying to guess where he's going. For example, say the enemy is at 6,12 and you've got a unit at 6,11. Could you add some "engage enemy" commands, where if your unit is faster, it can just follow the enemy and engage? Or something simliar? I think this would be a good idea, but haven't thought it out enough probably. Overall though, I think simoltaneous moves a great idea, and more realistic (and quicker for possible MP play)


One thing I did see that I think definately needs to be corrected is that (at least in the Dawn Scenario) the Population figure at the bottom of the screen didn't display the current population, but the population (according to all of the province tiles) of the last turn. So that you wouldn't see the pop growth of one turn until the next turn. Also, when the barbs took over a square and some of my pop it didn't show at the bottom until the next turn. Same thing with me taking my pop back. I first noticed this when I created my first settlers at like turn 3-5. But it kept up after that.

One thing I was confused about, was in the econ window when I'm building say, a warrior, and it will say .2/turn or whatever, but then I'll have a warrior built in like two turns. Or sometimes I'll have a warrior built in each province. I didn't quite understand how to make sense of the /turn on the econ window, and how to determine when and where they will be built in general.

Another thing I was confused about was the farm and resources numbers on the map. The areas with more farms didn't seem to grow faster (maybe they did) and the areas with more resources, I couldn't really tell if they produced more, because of my above confusion.

Anyway, I don't really need these answers, just want to let you know they seem confusing.

Overall though I think the game's got a lot of promise, and I definately intend to check out the other scenarios when I get the time. And I definately look forward to the next demos and final product.

Dave
aka Running Water

[Mark_Everson]

Dave:

Thanks for taking the time to tell us what you liked and what you didn't! Both are important. We know that the simul movement needs some tweaking to remove the tedium of hunting down troops. This is waiting for a better AI so that you can FE give an army "pursue Hannibal" orders. You can check out the most recent Military thread to see some of the discussions on this. Comments Solicited!

The econ specs are just plain off due to a bug I haven't been able to track down to date. We will work on getting them right when the newer econ gui Gary was going to work on comes out.

Thanks again for the comments,

Mark