Demo Bugs / Problems

[Nims]

Well, I have a heavily nlited XP installation and modded sound drivers, there's obviously some space for potential trouble.

Your army from Gloim doesn't disappear. It moves to IronPort

Well, I don't see it there.

I guess you often order units to move more than one province away, right?

I recently stopped that Didn't seem to work that good. Trying to move them one at a time now and yes, that works better.

[Solver]

At any rate, at least the problem that causes that army to run away from Gloim can be reproduced consistently and fixed

[Solver]

By the way, what video card are you running? That's not relevant to anything that you've reported, I'm just curious. There's been near zero variety of those for us so far

[Nims]

Ok, another nice one, really long error message Without sound this time. Think I was casting a binding chant somewhere around Iron port.

[Nims]

Nvidia Geforce 7900 GS

[Nims]

Yay, next crash.

Moving Troops from North Shore to Brigglund and merging them-> crash.

[Solver]

You have a bit too much of geschützten Speicher That's the weirdest one yet - .NET components failing to initialize in that way? I've heard of the problem happening on Vista 64-bit, but not otherwise

[Velociryx]

Nims, if you have Skype, join Solver and I in our ongoing conversations. This will make us more efficient, overall, I think. What say you?

-=Vel=-

[Nims]

And a new error message, this time an external component

[El_Cid]

It's the same issue already mentioned but i got a 'captured from player 2' a few times when taking neutral provinces.

And the smac inspired voice overs are .........in need of slightly better recordings! there i said it! and i know just how tricky getting the balance levels can be outside of a professional sound studio. But yeah i like them and i can see them fitting in very well when the turns last a bit longer(as you have more to do) and the overall turn pace slows a little.

On that i did have a slightly odd(just in the sense of "oh whats that?") voice moment when i had one start playing over another info pop up screen that came first in the turn, then when i clicked to clear that pop up i saw my building report screen that the voice recording belonged to. I'm not sure how you would go about tieing in the voice recording to the exact screen info being visible in the system you have? It could be tricky?

Edit: sytem specs(for interests sake):

Amd Athlon64 2.2 Ghz
2 Gig ram
Nvidia 128 mb 7600GT(running old 84.56 drivers(DX9.0c))
XP pro latest sp.

[Velociryx]

A GREAT point re: the voice overs and the specific screens...maybe when that one pops up, AND it's the first time you've built an (insert building here), it could be forced to display first (or last, in this case, so it'd be on top). Don't know how feasible that is...I shall defer to the master of coding on that one!

And no worries...we knew going in that the voice recordings were a bit of a rush...just placeholders (except tavern, which turned out really well!)

-=Vel=-

[Solver]

We definitely hope to get better recordings with time. At the very least, redo these recordings with better quality. Ideally, get people with better voices

And the voiceovers will be changed to appear when the building complete popup appears. Currently they just start playing when the turn begins.

[El_Cid]

(from other thread)............As for invisible armies, we have now received reports that Mourngrym sometimes has those. Looking into that issue!

Mine belonged to Castillar. It might be simply a graphics display thing?(lol duh! but i mean rather than some code issue/conflict in general).

I'm trying my next game in fullscreen GL instead of windowed Direct X(just to see if it makes a difference).

[Solver]

Nah, that particular issue isn't a display one, not coming from the engine. It's the result of a recent army code rewrite, probably.

[El_Cid]

Next batch of stuff after a fun past midnight session last night

1. graphic glitch: title screen becomes visable over the game-map screen when manipulating the various pop-up/info screens. e.g open 'spell' list drag menu and see the opening title screen. OR windows box leaves trace over screen in pattern dragged.

2. fullscreen mode defaults to top left of screen(my desktop res = 1280x960(32bit)), and gives no option to shift the screen as in windowed mode, and does not run as full screen in effect!(using OpenGL/fullscreen option, will try DirectX/fullscreen later/).

3. on the build list, where you get a description of what you want to build e.g. click on watchtower: "watchtower
Construction cost: 240
Gold cost: 1000
Siege counters: 2
etc"

why not show how many turns it will take to build also, before you action it? This could also be applied to the 'train' army list - keep a tally of the build time as the player selects the units to train.

4.[Possible suggestion] when armies attack a province(especialy/only? your own) give detail from where they have attacked. helps build up the strategic pattern in the players minds eye, although being 'blindsided' is part of war - maybe include options to allow that info if invested in by player(espionage?).

5. On initial province invaision something seems a little off. You can loose a large army as likely as a small one(it seems?) - it makes me throw small(dispensable) armies(100 infantry) at the province before sending in my precious siege army. deliberate or just part of the maths? It just feels a little odd/random? less a calculated risk anyway(from player perspective). This may in part be due to not knowing what kind of defences the province contains(with or without an army banner in it).

6. ref my comments about army management, i didn't realise you could right click on a unit to bring up further controls for all the units in a province! I do like to play without reading instructions first time!(helps with initial user friendliness/intuitive testing) Sorry, although the mouse sensitivity to allow you to right click on the army and get that screen is a bit tricky as i had tried before but not getting the screen just thought right clicking armies did nothing.

7. agree with comments from Nims that the mouse scrolling the screen as you go to the bottom right controls(miricles/spells/espionage) is a little frustrating. suggest making that area a 'dead' area for the scroll effect, you have the rest of the lower map screen for that(and the cursors)?

8. Actualy the voice recordings are better than i first thought. I think i just had a lot of the lower sample quality ones in my first game, you will know which ones need more work so all i'll say is that as a design choice they are a good option and fit well with the game and i hope you keep and expand on them.
In indie games you need to use every trick in the book to make your game seem as high budget as possible. Gamers are just used to hearing recorded speech in games these days so having some that fits your particular game is a good idea.

9. Going back to the lightning strike spell as is in this demo. ok the maximum amount of units i can build at one time is 3 in a single province. The maximum amount of units able to be destroyed by the spell in one use is 4.
So for a player/ai with enough focusing sigils you can in effect destroy any resistence that could be raised against you. Probably as the game goes on and you survive to have enough decent army producing provinces you could level the playing field a bit. but for the ealry game, just for the cost of a few focusing sigils(which you/ai will have built by turn 50 most likely) you have a weapon that can beat army production, not all the time, but enough to be a bit heavy in effect.

Add in that it destroys the most expensive units as easily as the cheapest and I still think for an early game spell the power level is too high on lightning strike. hmm have a look at a first level lightning strike being able to destroy just 1 unit(or 1-2 units, something less than normal max unit production per province) then as you upgrade the building(focusing sigil) that could increase the power of the spell, something like that.

10. In demo as is, there is definately a 'rich getting richer' diametric. Once one of the Ai's has got ahead it's very hard for anyone to pin them back. I know you have many event things lined up that dont seem to be in the demo, so maybe you are aware of this, and this is all in hand(in the same way the gold issue i raised before).

11. The province icon(coloured circle on game map) for Brom seems to be outside the boundry for the province.

12. FIRST CRASH! After trying to combine armies(300 Seige added to 1300 infantry and 200 archers). This is from loading a saved game situation, rather than starting a clean new game(if that makes a difference) - turn 118(save game at turn 115):

" Exception caught: Attempted to read or write protected memory. This is often an indication that other memory is corrupt.

at IrrlichtNETCP.GUIElement.GuiElem_GetID(IntPtr elem)
at IrrlichtNETCP.GUIElement.get_ID()
at CandleBre.GameGUI.device_OnEvent(Event ev)
at IrrlichtNETCP.IrrlichtDevice.OnNativeEvent(IntPtr evRaw)
at IrrlichtNETCP.IrrlichtDevice.Device_Run(IntPtr raw)
at IrrlichtNETCP.IrrlichtDevice.Run()
at CandleBre.Program.Run()"

Update: exact same error report when combining 2 armies from clean game start(so not a loaded game). Are there limits on how many unit numbers you can have in a single army? I've seen the ai have an army of 3300, and i think my combined army this time would have been about 1600 - 1000 inf/200 seige/100 cav/300 archers.

13. On the invisible army thing - i had an attack on Iron Port by an invisible army(Mystics this time) but when i saved and loaded back that army was visable.

14. province mouse over info: population numbers sometime hard to see as mouse cursor can obscure that info.

15. say when you build a shrine in a province and part of the shrine info is "mana: -5" does that mean -5 for that province or as an overall mana calculation? so if i build in a province a shrine is it better to build a focusing sigil in a different province to avoid the -5 mana? or does it matter not and these are global(rather than provincial) calculations? And could there be a way to let the player know this on the build screen rather than dig through the manual: like "mana: -5(global/provincial etc)"

16. playing as Mourngrym: text event with missing text displayed;
"thanks to shrewd political maneuverings, you have a unique opportunity to bring the province of NorthShores to its knees. If you attack within the next three months(12turns), you have men inside the walls who promise to make your job"[the rest is missing/not displayed]


You don't have to reply to each thing i may come up with, to save you time in your replies(when you should be fixing/balancing/coding etc!)

When i got into PotC(akella/Bethesda's "Pirates of the Caribbean") - i first played the game on xbox(so non moddable) but liked what i saw so much i wrote a whole bunch of 'what if/how about that' posts then kinda left as i was xbox, and came back about 2 years later now owning the PC version and lo and behold a whole buch of talented guys had modded much of my suggestions into the PC version mod and the 'Build Mod' became a great mod - they are still working hard at it and really pushing what they can do, it's probably my favourite 'old ship/pirate/rpg' simulation.

So yeah just take any good stuff i blurt out and if it helps i'm more than happy - at the end of the day i just want to play a great Candle'Bre tbs game

I dont have time for serious testing sadly.

Oh can any of you guys 'win' against the AI's? I've only tried two factions so far(Council of seven + Mourngrym) but i fall behind quick in terms of the territory grabs and then it's just a matter of time before the huge armies of doom descend!