Bug: Bug Thread: Discussion

[Edi]

lch said:

Devalas, you mean.

*whack*

Quiet, you! Nobody is allowed to poke holes in the illusion of my omniscience!

[lch]

Let's address something that isn't a bug per se but rather a feature request regarding the interface which has always bugged me:

The game should treat "errors" less severe. At the moment, if an error occurs, you crash down to the command line. Even if it is minor stuff like "game version too old". I'd like to suggest that the game should rather become aware of exceptions instead of bailing out. It would be better if you get the error message as ingame window and after hitting "ok" the game just cancels/ignores your last action, or backtracks. So if the exception involved generating a new turn, the game will stop processing the turn and drop back to the game window. Same for joining a network game. In the worst case, the game may drop back to the main menu, but not kill the whole process. There's no reason for it to have effects that are this drastic, and I think it scares users.

Further improvements of the UI: Always give a user the choice to cancel a menu. Most of the times, you can get out of a menu by pressing the "Escape" button. Sometimes the menu window has a tiny "X" on the top right to do that, too. But there are still times when you can't cancel an action, no matter what, for example when you have chosen to create a new game and are prompted for the game name. Until you enter something that works, you are not allow to do anything else.

I really think that it's important to make the UI more user-friendly to gain their acceptance, don't disregard it.

[Edi]

That's a very good point. Especially the part about game creation. There was some way to cancel it after that, by selecting exit at the game options screen, but it's not intuitive.

[lch]

Yes, you can cancel it afterwards, but it will still create the game directory first.

Another thing, regarding the current patch: At the moment, the game errors out as soon as a client receives a *.trn file with a newer version than it has itself from the server, or if a server receives a *.2h file with a newer version than it has itself from a client. This leads to what we all know as "omg, don't connect to my server when you have updated your game, or you will crash it!". Since the protocol to authenticate a nation and store/retrieve game data from a network server hasn't changed at all, apparently, since the error only fires upon inspection of the version tag inside the files, I'd recommend to make the error appear in-game for clients, like suggested above, and to let the server just refuse to host the turn (or crash) if a newer version *.2h file is present, but accept the files before that without any problems at all.

[Edi]

I'll bring this to Johan's attention. It's deep into his territory and even though it might sometimes seem so to some people, I'm not one of the developers. So I can't do anything else about that. I'm also up the creek without a paddle in a leaky canoe when it comes to the server side stuff (you for example have probably forgotten more about it than I know), so all I can do is pass it on.

[Kristoffer O]

Lady of fortune has a chance of adding an extra event that is dependent on terain and stuff, but is automatically good.

[Meglobob]

Kristoffer O said:
Lady of fortune has a chance of adding an extra event that is dependent on terain and stuff, but is automatically good.

Cool, I never knew that.

[Dedas]

Grand. I wonder if there are more of these unit related events. I remember reading about them a while back.

[Kristoffer O]

She doesn't bring unique events, just one mor event, that is good.

OTOH there are new events that are unit related. Skögu and some other heroes got some, as did a couple of other units.

[Dedas]

Aha, my misunderstanding.

(Skögu and other heroes got unique events! *runs off testing*)