Speeding up battles

[Torvak]

How about a scrollable log of just the spellcasting then? Maybe with turn number and success or failure.

[Arryn]

Originally posted by johan osterman:
No you wouldn't, you just think you do, fortunately illwinter is not one of these modern everything goes companies that never says no to the players of their game. Illwinter with a firm and gentle no, much like the parent stopping its child from eating to much coockie dough, dares take the responsibility to decide what is best for you. And 400 pages of hit and miss statistics for a single battle is not good for you, no matter what you think in the matter. You might not appreciate it now, but as you get older, and perhaps make games of your own, you will come to see the wisdom of our ways, perhaps even smiling wistfully at your own scallywag ways, wondering at the saintlike patience and almost supernatural wisdom with which we denied the numerous and varied demands of the playerbase.

Despite being wrapped in a humorous tone, this is a rather patronizing reply. It's also a patronizing attitude for any company to assume they know better than their customers what the customers themselves want/need.

It's not like this request is particularly hard to code either. The logic is likely to already be present in the code for debug purposes. A simple switch (via command line, or preferably menu option) that enables logging, and all combats get dumped out to a file. All you need are a few strategically placed fputs. Yes, it'll slow the combats down dramatically when activated. I'm sure that anyone who turns this on will (or should) realize that they are creating an huge I/O overhead and a dump file that may get rather large in size. That's what readme notes are for: warnings.

But to simply tell us that we don't need it "because you say we don't need it" is poor customer relations at best. At worse, it's a disingenuous smokescreen to keep hidden the detailed mechanics of combat resolution, which would be odd given how open IW has been in the past about answering questions on the subject.

[Kristoffer O]

Despite being wrapped in a humorous tone, this is a rather patronizing reply.

Of course it is, we're swedes

[Pocus]

perhaps we can get back on topic... Has Illwinter any kind of priority list? Do you think that one day, the speeding up of battle replay will make a comeback?

Most of dom1 veterans really miss this feature. It dont hampers the casual gamer who dont care if the enemy lamia queen just ceased to cast because she collapsed from excess spell fatigue caused by the frost generated by an enemy ice devil... but its really a pain in the rear to have to wait (not that patiently) that the battle comes to the point where we want to scrutinize all parameters affecting our units.

If you allow me the comparison, its like when you want to debug something, and you dont have the option of making a step by step trace with your compiler, if you prefer...

[ March 07, 2004, 12:12: Message edited by: Pocus ]

[johan osterman]

If the battle replay bug is fixed, and stays fixed, there is nothing stopping the adjustable battle replay speed from being reintroduced.

[Arryn]

Originally posted by johan osterman:
If the battle replay bug is fixed, and stays fixed, there is nothing stopping the adjustable battle replay speed from being reintroduced.

I'm confused. Wasn't this bug recently found and fixed? Or was that a different replay bug?

[johan osterman]

One cause, there might be more.