Bad Ideas in 1.3?

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The Hidden Hippogriff
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Bad Ideas in 1.3?

Post by The Hidden Hippogriff »

I recently got 1.3.15 beta
And I think that alot of things have gone it the wrong direction.
From when I first found wesnoth at around 1.0 there always was the dead still of fear and war. knowing your next move could be your last. Now it seems full of motion and new animations. Is this what we want wesnoth to become?

Ok first, the bat.
The idle animation is annoying. On my computer the bat is flapping 3.5 times a second. The idle animations altogether are distracting and flow bad with the game play. I would love an option/control to stop them.

The bat image itself would benefit from a tweaking but I love how it looks more smooth and real.

I think the out of reach hexes should not be striped its honestly an eye sore.
There could be an option for this.

Too much scrolling makes me seasick. What was wrong with jumping when it is the next players turn. I liked that because I could passively watch and only look when it jumped, Leaving me free to daydream.

I feel like some of the ideas are bad and should be changed for the next stable.

Before you lock the thread I would like to discuss this. I miss the old charm that the game had... now it seems rather commercialized.
gotrek860
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Post by gotrek860 »

I think the out of reach hexes should not be striped its honestly an eye sore.

I actually like that. and use it to create a sort of mass feeling in my maps. because you can put a all line of houses for example, without unbalancing it and still make it a part of the scenery.The stripes make it obvious these are only there for show.
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Post by appleide »

Too much scrolling makes me seasick. What was wrong with jumping when it is the next players turn. I liked that because I could passively watch and only look when it jumped, Leaving me free to daydream.
I think you might be able to fix this in the preferences. Haven't played the latest yet, so not sure myself.

I agree the idle animations can get annoying.
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db0
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Post by db0 »

Ok, first of all, it is impossible to commercialize it. What has happened is that the game is more polished and almost feels like a commercial game, which imho is good.

The rest of what you state is strictly personal opinion and probably is an opinion that is held by a minority. For example I can't consider the scrolling to be bad.

However, if you feel that this is something annoying, perhaps you can work on the code to create this option (disable idle anims, scrolling etc), then you will not only help yourself but anyone else who has the same opinion as you in the future.
CIB
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Post by CIB »

db0 wrote:Ok, first of all, it is impossible to commercialize it. What has happened is that the game is more polished and almost feels like a commercial game, which imho is good.
Polishing a game doesn't mean adding commercial features and feeling to it, it means that the game can be played as intended. And what is intended is a matter of taste.
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Re: Bad Ideas in 1.3?

Post by megane »

The Hidden Hippogriff wrote:The idle animations altogether are distracting and flow bad with the game play. I would love an option/control to stop them.
It's in the preferences: the slider that says "Idle Animation Frequency."

I would like an option to turn off the autoscroll, though. Gives me a headache.
Last edited by megane on February 8th, 2008, 3:52 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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db0
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Post by db0 »

CIB wrote: Polishing a game doesn't mean adding commercial features and feeling to it, it means that the game can be played as intended. And what is intended is a matter of taste.
What is a "commercial feature and feeling"?
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Baufo
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Post by Baufo »

So the game feels commercial?

I knew covering up that we sold Wesnoth to Microsoft was not going to work... :twisted:
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db0
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Post by db0 »

Baufo wrote:So the game feels commercial?
Head. Explodes (Yeah you'd wish :P )
I knew covering up that we sold Wesnoth to Microsoft was not going to work... :twisted:
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Derekkk
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Re: Bad Ideas in 1.3?

Post by Derekkk »

The Hidden Hippogriff wrote:I recently got 1.3.15 beta
And I think that alot of things have gone it the wrong direction.
From when I first found wesnoth at around 1.0 there always was the dead still of fear and war. knowing your next move could be your last. Now it seems full of motion and new animations. Is this what we want wesnoth to become?

Ok first, the bat.
The idle animation is annoying. On my computer the bat is flapping 3.5 times a second. The idle animations altogether are distracting and flow bad with the game play. I would love an option/control to stop them.

The bat image itself would benefit from a tweaking but I love how it looks more smooth and real.

I think the out of reach hexes should not be striped its honestly an eye sore.
There could be an option for this.

Too much scrolling makes me seasick. What was wrong with jumping when it is the next players turn. I liked that because I could passively watch and only look when it jumped, Leaving me free to daydream.

I feel like some of the ideas are bad and should be changed for the next stable.

Before you lock the thread I would like to discuss this. I miss the old charm that the game had... now it seems rather commercialized.

Firstly. as megane has said, there is already a preference option for disabling the idling animation. Personally, I have the idling animation off all the time since I find it rather distracting too.

For the strips on screen for showing where a unit can and cannot move to, you can remove those by replacing the darken.png file in the image folder by whatever you like. I have downloaded almost every single version of wesnoth from 1.3 onwards and until about 1.3.10, I kept replacing the darken.png by a plain grey half-transparent hex, coz I couldn't stand the strips at first either. But now I seem to have got used to it.

I don't like the scrolling either :) . It slows down the replays a lot, especially on big maps.

As for the commercialization issue, I think that where wesnoth is heading is a more user-friendly style of play, and a more attractive layout. These things are not unique to commercial games, but commercial games in particular have done quite well in these aspects.
borsook
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Re: Bad Ideas in 1.3?

Post by borsook »

megane wrote: I would like an option to turn off the autoscroll, though. Gives me a headache.
Such an option would be great, we have seemingly unimportant options like the way the sun travels (how can this matter?) so why not disabling the autoscroll?
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Re: Bad Ideas in 1.3?

Post by ulissesroc »

borsook wrote:
megane wrote: I would like an option to turn off the autoscroll, though. Gives me a headache.
Such an option would be great, we have seemingly unimportant options like the way the sun travels (how can this matter?) so why not disabling the autoscroll?
Isn't it an option on the Advanced Options pane?
maxy
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Post by maxy »

Hi, I'm the developer responsible for your sea-sickness ;-)

I have just changed the behaviour to always jump-scroll in accelerated mode. You can do what you want (in the next release) by enabling "accelerated speed" and setting speed=1. Also hopefully the code can be changed to do less scrolling.
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Re: Bad Ideas in 1.3?

Post by Dave »

The Hidden Hippogriff wrote: I think the out of reach hexes should not be striped its honestly an eye sore.
There could be an option for this.
There's a very good technical reason for us replacing gray hexes with striped hexes:

With the toolset we're using, it is infeasible to convert colored images into grayscale in real time. So instead, we had to cache grayscale copies of all of our images.

However, keeping a cached copy of so many images eats up a lot of memory -- an unacceptable amount. So, we decided to come up with a way of representing out of reach hexes using a transformation that can be applied in real time, to avoid memory overhead. The striping is such a solution.

We would perhaps consider an alternative if someone suggested one that could be computed efficiently.

I don't think we would consider making the striping vs grayscale an option, however, since it would be too difficult to communicate to users the tradeoffs involved.

David
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zookeeper
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Re: Bad Ideas in 1.3?

Post by zookeeper »

Dave wrote:
The Hidden Hippogriff wrote: I think the out of reach hexes should not be striped its honestly an eye sore.
There could be an option for this.
There's a very good technical reason for us replacing gray hexes with striped hexes:

With the toolset we're using, it is infeasible to convert colored images into grayscale in real time. So instead, we had to cache grayscale copies of all of our images.

However, keeping a cached copy of so many images eats up a lot of memory -- an unacceptable amount. So, we decided to come up with a way of representing out of reach hexes using a transformation that can be applied in real time, to avoid memory overhead. The striping is such a solution.
Also, merely grayscaling isn't clear enough on castles, snow, caves, etc. A pattern of some sort overlayed on the hex is much more clear.
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