Release Wars - public test

[bzar]

Your Basic Game already feels very well, I mean the way it works, the "internals". I'm also for focussing on stuff like a better UI first, the graphical eyecandy can wait but it sureley could improve the game experience/playability alot imho. I not even need animated tiles but for better overview what is happening on screen, some visible unit transitions would be nice some day. I just suggested this for a better gaming experience, not because I need better visuals, I think visible Movement really can help in this kind of game.

I agree that it helps keep up with what's happening in the game, especially on someone else's turn. I'll probably at some point gradually implement animation with options to turn them off (for the less powerful clients). It's not a high priority feature since it doesn't actually add any information to the game (at this point path taken is irrelevant) or make the turns easier to play, but I've been thinking about it.

Besides that, before I can include my tiles, I have to make some. I'm not a pixel artist so it could take a while to make it in 3D first and then pixelate it (yes, this is easier for me ) Or maybe we just "borrow" some Sprites from Advance Wars? ^^

Someone else running a server may host what themes he wants, but I'm not hosting copyrighted material, especially from a company known to run down web-based recreations that do so

However, I could try to improve some of your pixel-theme tiles and see if it is really an improvement. Just tiny things like water under the ships or a half Infantry sprite when moving in water or so.

Water under ships is ok, but the infantry submersion would require using a different sprite based on the terrain type. This would require changes in the client and the data that the game has about terrain types. It's a bigger amount of work than what it probably sounds like .

I also wonder, if the "Engine" could handle "Tile-over-tile" stuff like buildings going higher than 1 tile and covering some parts of the tile behind. Useful for Forrests and Mountains but not that important of course. ^^


Simple Editor would be fine but I guess I can test this easily in Photoshop.

I've planned adding this to wars-gamenode. Basically the tiles will be aligned from the bottom (not from the top as they are now) and allowed half a tile or so overheight (this needs to be a fixed amount because of how the sprite sheet system works).

P.S.: could you test my map please? I have no clue if it is a good map for your game because I designed it for Advance Wars. I guess your Wars skills are much better than mine so you can see weak spots or so. ^^

Took a look and that looks like a really nice map . I can foresee heavy use of light tanks (at least some defense even on road), attack copters (for flanking the light tanks and artillery), light artilleries (for getting through tight spots and defense) and aa vehicles (against the copters) . Because the tight passages are all road, there's no real problem with infantry spamming either (since anything with full health and a machinegun takes out infantry in one shot on road). No mentionable first player advantage, which is always good. It's also nice that the tight corridors often have a secondary attack vector through rougher terrain, makin it suitable for a flanking stream of infantry to break up the enemy defense lines. All in all, I think that map would work just fine . Nice job!

 

[fusion_power]

Someone else running a server may host what themes he wants, but I'm not hosting copyrighted material, especially from a company known to run down web-based recreations that do so

Yo, I still wonder, why all the MUGEN based Fighting games with their "borrowed" Sprites never had problems. Pretty lucky I guess.

Water under ships is ok, but the infantry submersion would require using a different sprite based on the terrain type. This would require changes in the client and the data that the game has about terrain types. It's a bigger amount of work than what it probably sounds like .

Wow, I didn't knew this. ^^" How about: "If Terrain tile = Water, use Infantry-in-Water Sprite..."

I've planned adding this to wars-gamenode. Basically the tiles will be aligned from the bottom (not from the top as they are now) and allowed half a tile or so overheight (this needs to be a fixed amount because of how the sprite sheet system works).

Cool, a maximum tile height of 1.5 Tiles is more than enough I guess (so 0.5 tile height over the tile itself). For a possible HQ or Towns 'n stuff.

Took a look and that looks like a really nice map . I can foresee heavy use of light tanks (at least some defense even on road), attack copters (for flanking the light tanks and artillery), light artilleries (for getting through tight spots and defense) and aa vehicles (against the copters) . Because the tight passages are all road, there's no real problem with infantry spamming either (since anything with full health and a machinegun takes out infantry in one shot on road). No mentionable first player advantage, which is always good. It's also nice that the tight corridors often have a secondary attack vector through rougher terrain, makin it suitable for a flanking stream of infantry to break up the enemy defense lines. All in all, I think that map would work just fine . Nice job!

Red started and blue won in my testmatch. However I'm a bad player against myself but I know from intense AI fights in AW that each side can win, big advantage in a mirrored map. ^^


There are 2 Shortcuts for Vehicles in the Center of the Map, the tactics can change completely when these shortcuts are sealed with mountains.





I also found out another tactical difference to Advance Wars, a critical one IMHO: In WARS you can pass between enemy units without problems, this is a disadvantage actualy. It would be more interesting if an enemy unit blocks your way 1 tile around these unit in each direction, so you can't pass straight through 2 enemy units for example.


EDIT: I made some quick and small changes to the current Pixel Sprites.


-Ships now swimm IN water


-Air Units now fligh higher


-Shadows under the Air Units


-outlines are now a tiny little bit brighter.





should look a little bit better now ingame, please test it.

 

[bzar]

I also found out another tactical difference to Advance Wars, a critical one IMHO: In WARS you can pass between enemy units without problems, this is a disadvantage actualy. It would be more interesting if an enemy unit blocks your way 1 tile around these unit in each direction, so you can't pass straight through 2 enemy units for example.

This is how they do it in weewar, another web-based TBS. I think it doesn't work as well in square-based system as it does in a hex-based one. In square-based system you're already a bit strapped for movement options. I'm not just sure it would be a good addition to the mechanic. Hold your lines

EDIT: I made some quick and small changes to the current Pixel Sprites.


-Ships now swimm IN water


-Air Units now fligh higher


-Shadows under the Air Units


-outlines are now a tiny little bit brighter.





should look a little bit better now ingame, please test it.

Nice! I tried it in wars-gamenode and it's an instant improvement. The shadows gave me an idea about vertically offsetting the rendering of all units by 1/4 tile. It looks a LOT nicer, as the vehicles drive on the road, air units look like they're flying and water units look like they're in the water


A small adjustment, make the water line a little less consistent in the boats. Just a little dithering should do the trick


I'll post a screenshot tomorrow

 

[fusion_power]

Little things can have a big effect. I'm glad you like it.


Of course the water under the ships and the shadow effect can be improved, maybe it could also be a separate sprite, also possible to have Planes near the gound when "landing" on a Airport. Feel free to improve my rough sketches.


Another possible graphical update could be a different indication of deployed units, the white frame is a little bit hard to spot. I imagine that a different looking unit sprite could be possible, like different angled rocket packs, not sure if this makes sense or not, just a quick idea ^^ A small Icon in the corner of the tile would also do this job of course.

 

[bzar]

Put the screenshots to the dev thread, since this is more related to it than the public wars-django server

Another possible graphical update could be a different indication of deployed units, the white frame is a little bit hard to spot. I imagine that a different looking unit sprite could be possible, like different angled rocket packs, not sure if this makes sense or not, just a quick idea ^^ A small Icon in the corner of the tile would also do this job of course.

The white frame was always supposed to be a quick temporary solution, but I've just never gotten around to making a better indicator . So much to do.

 

[fusion_power]

OK, I am still a little bit confused what is what here. :lol: So this Game Version here is "wars-django", check.

 

[bzar]

Check post #27

 

[bzar]

Wars-gamenode is now in public beta at http://wars-next.ewlan.info


Try it out, tell me what you think. Mainly looking for bugs and stuff like that. Be sure to check out Fusion_Power's awesome "fusion" theme


Before suggesting features, check the roadmap. I'll start working on 1.1 some point in the future. I'm concentrating on panorama now.


If the beta goes well and my server can take more load, I'll replace the current wars-django (at wars.ewlan.info) with this new version when there's a good spot (no ongoing games etc). You can transfer your maps from wars-django by using the import/export feature, since both use the same format (except wars-gamenode has more tiles).


I've tested this version on most of the browsers available for Pandora, and the most compatible ones seem to be Chromium and Midori 0.4.1. Firefox has some weird issue with scrolling the map using the d-pad. Fennec and Arora have some problems with socket.io (which gamenode is based on). Babypanda works nice but a bit slow. Well, the UI is mostly optimized for desktop use anyway, but should work on most mobile clients too.


Have fun!

 

[fusion_power]

Nice.


I already included my own Map again. ^^


Is it normal that the pages are loading so slow? Not ingame but switching through the Menus takes ages.

 

[bzar]

Has this problem appeared just now? Which browser are you using? Hmm. Is the time longer or shorter than say 30 seconds? A few seconds is possible, depending on your connection. Some pages need quite a bit of data (like the map browsing views) and latency can stack up (several requests to the backend). If it takes longer than 30 seconds your browser is probably trying to negotiate a websocket connection and reverts to XHR after it times out. On the server log the longest delays are <200ms and the server is behind a 100/100Mbps connection.


I think it's either a) connection speed, b.) connection latency, c) failed websocket connection, d) javascript speed, or e) something I have no idea about


Anyone else with similar problems?


EDIT: darn smileys

 

[Blue Protoman]

Sorry about those old games of mine in Wars-Django. You can go ahead and scrap those when the time has come.

 

[fusion_power]

Has this problem appeared just now? Which browser are you using? Hmm. Is the time longer or shorter than say 30 seconds? A few seconds is possible, depending on your connection. Some pages need quite a bit of data (like the map browsing views) and latency can stack up (several requests to the backend). If it takes longer than 30 seconds your browser is probably trying to negotiate a websocket connection and reverts to XHR after it times out. On the server log the longest delays are <200ms and the server is behind a 100/100Mbps connection.


I think it's either a) connection speed, b.) connection latency, c) failed websocket connection, d) javascript speed, or e) something I have no idea about


Anyone else with similar problems?


EDIT: darn smileys

It's only a few seconds but it is every time. The Site doesn't seems to cache anything when I switch through the Options and sections so it always loads everything again from 0. Maybe because of this it feels so incredibly slow. Normaly, Opera caches a Site so it is usualy nearly instand on, when I reload it. But your WARS Site doesn't need 30 secs to load, no worries. It is around 5-10 secs. Maximum, especialy in "create game", I guess because of the Map graphics.

 

[bzar]

Wars-gamenode does not work like a typical web site. The game is divided into a client and a server. The client is static content (HTML, CSS, JavaScript) and connects to the server using gamenode to populate the views with data (like game lists, maps and stuff). The server is accessed more like a traditional game server than a web server, with persistent client connections. Every time you load a page, the client on the page connects to the game server and gets all the necessary information to display the view. Then the javascript adds the dynamic content to be shown on the page.


On one hand this should actually diminish the page loads, since all pages are static and thus can be efficiently cached. Only the changing content is fetched every time for each page. On the other hand, the page is less prepared serverside and thus requires more processing in the client. The total number of requests made can also be higher, though the data transferred is smaller.


Creating a game is a heavy operation requiring lots of database inserts, processing and stuff. Also the next view, pregame can be quite heavy with all the map data, especially if the connection is slow.


I did a little benchmarking. Since the server is in London I should have no proximity advantage. Using chromium, the longest page load I could get with random browsing was under three seconds (2.97s). It was a tie between loading a game (using map "the big picture") and starting a game (using map "spiral"). Most pages take under a second. I'm not saying "it must be you, then". Obviously work needs to be done if it's painfully slow, and I can't judge the performance solely on how it works for me. This is how I perceive the site's responsiveness, however, so you can see why I have never seen a problem with it.


If the delay is too big, the web client could be streamlined to always stay on the same page (jsut changing the content) and thus keep the same connection, and possibly share information between the views, like the used theme (that's one request down for many views).


Anyway, this is nothing I can change very quickly, so it'll have to wait after I get back from panorama. I'm sorry if this makes the game less enjoyable for you . Your theme has been a great motivator to keep pushing the game toward a release.

 

[fusion_power]

Again, Ingame is not that bad, but just switching the Menus, loading a map or going to another Menu like Settings or Map Editor, Manual, Infos... could be faster. My general Ping is only 60ms and I have a slow Internet (768kbit), this also could be a reason.


And like I sayed before, I actualy don't "play" this game but I didn't this with other Games I made graphics for. Maybe I test it with my buddy, now that everyone can join. But I'm more the "offline" player against AI and without such a big delay in between the moves of me and my opponent like WARS has by design. And I really can't imagine to play a turn based Strategy game without seeing any enemy Movement (replay) on screen. You have the "history" window but a actual visible on screen movement ( I don't mean animated) of every single opponent Turn in the right order would help me more, I'm just not good enough to play this all in my head. ^^""