Re: Digest for warpath-for-android@googlegroups.com - 2 Messages in 1 Topic

[Arman Schwarz]

Sounds like some interesting changes ahead, i'll stay tuned. Unfortunately I can't participate in the multiplayer stuff because I just play on the ferry to work...

Oh and one more thing before I forget; how about replacing the ms counter at the bottom with time until next tax day? Would be a simple adjustment, and I'm sure many players would like to have this info on screen, we can still get a good idea of performance from the fps counter. Just an idea.

Thanks again for this game, I love it!

On 11/05/2011 8:07 AM, <warpath-for-a...@googlegroups.com> wrote:

  Today's Topic Summary

Group: http://groups.google.com/group/warpath-for-android/topics

• bribe bug [2 Updates]

 Topic: bribe bug

Jason Sale <armans...@gmail.com> May 09 04:13PM -0700 ^

 
you probably already know about this, but it is possible to continue
bribing ai characters once you have run out of money.
thank you for bringing this classic to android!
 
p.s. will you be integrating all features of the original game in
future releases, such as wormholes?


 

Dan Samuel <d...@synthetic-reality.com> May 09 05:15PM -0700 ^

 
No, I did NOT already know that, so thanks! :-)
 
I have been doing a frighteningly major re-write to make the game tablet-friendly (just got a Xoom and I love it), and
found similar bug in that you could toggle your radar on and off, even if you hadn't actually purchased a radar yet :-)
 
Speaking of that rewrite....
 
So, if you HAVE a xoom, you will have seen that the game wanted to run in a postage stamp window on the xoom, which is
just an awful sort of experience. And considering all the work I put in to make the panels adapt to different screen
sizes, this was quite irritating to me.
 
And this is where the tale of woe begins. I started out with the game compatible with android 1.5 (and there are a
handful of players out there now with 1.5, and they can't be having a very good time with the game for various reasons.
Unfortunately they are going to hate this next release, because I had to bump the minimum version up to android 1.6 to
get past this "virtual screen" behaviour where android would lie to me about the true screen dimensions and give me this
'fake' screen to render on, which it would then stretch to fill the 'real' screen.
 
So, now, with 1.6 support, I get the real screen size (and hence I can now fill the xoom screen) but there are just
plain a lot more pixels to push around than before, so there is probably a performance hit. Plus there were some
graphics I was rendering at 'native size' which now I have to scale. Plus a million little hard-coded pixel values I
should have known better about, but never really considered that the dpi could vary over such a large range
 
So, anyway, once I converted to 1.6, the game became completely unplayable (mainly because buttons were suddenly way too
small). I spent all Saturday working through it screen by screen (about 40 screens) and fixing all these little snafus.
And now I think it's playable again and back to looking a lot like the original. Arguably it looks a little better
because of the higher pixel density on the 'real' screen.
 
But I had to change a LOT of stuff, so there is a very good possibility I will have broken something in the process. So
I am not in a hurry to release this new version (eta a week or two). Which is sad because I see from the player
comments I have already lost at least one xoom-user sale :-) (every dollar counts!). But I think it would be worse if
I released it without more testing.
 
Still, I took the opportunity to improve, I hope, the appearance of several screens (like the Shopping screen), so
that's nice.
 
So, to recap:
 
* next release will support Xoom (honeycomb, in general) with full-screen support and properly formatted panels on both
phones and tablets.
 
* but next release will NOT be compatible with android 1.5 users (if I can figure out how to do it, I would cheerfully
refund to anyone stuck with a 1.5 phone. I'm not sure how google handles this sort of change. Ideally they would just
not offer the update to 1.5 users, so they could continue to use the old version, if they chose)
 
* next release will be pushing more pixels, on the same old phone (because of this 'virtual screen' phenomenon) and that
SHOULD have a negative impact on frame rate, but depending on how hard the phone was working to stretch the virtual
screen to the actual screen, maybe that will be a wash. I still get 20 fps in Tactical Panel on my Droid classic.
 
BACK TO RAMBLING
 
Just to respond here to another player comment. Barney the Bot will jump in on a multiplayer game, if there is no other
human to play with, rather than let you just sit there waiting (because experience shows no one likes to wait). We need
a lot more players before we hit the critical mass that gives you a good probability of hooking up with another human in
a reasonable period of time. But since Barney is so eager to please, it can actually make it hard to hook up with a
friend with whom you have actively scheduled a game. In that case, do this:
 
* start a multiplayer game, with Barney
* Have your friend start a multiplayer game, which will then wait (since Barney is busy with you)
* abort your game with Barney and restart multiplayer immediately
* Barney takes awhile to come back, so this should hook you up with your patient friend.
 
This will be automatic once there are more players, but for now I apologize for the difficulty in finding real humans to
play against. I'll turn Barney off eventually, but if nothing else he is a test case for the network code.
 
---
 
WRT WormHoles
 
I didn't add wormholes until I extended the PC version to 8 players. At that point the Galaxy got fairly large and the
wormholes made sense to me (plus I was eager to code a 'flying through the tube' animation :-). I'm not sure if
WormHoles make sense in WPA or not.
 
And I still have an open promise to add 'Zombie Armies' :-)
 
I'm hoping I turn the 'tek level' support on in this next release, that's been waiting a long time (though I will have
to add an option to default the starting tek level, or people who like having all the tek immediately available will
have cause for complaint :-) The design goal is for your investment decisions to influence the availability of high-tek
items.
 
blah blah blah.
 
It's nice on the xoom, by the way, less squinting required :-)
 
- Dan
 
On 5/9/2011 4:13 PM, Jason Sale wrote:


 

[Dan Samuel]

Good idea (time till tax info). I will add it to the HISTORY panel and move the tax info there from the PLAYERS panel
(which was overly crowded in the first place, and the taxes are per-path, not per-player, anyway, so it makes more sense
to put it on HISTORY).

Thanks!

- Dan