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Topic: Widelands Tournament 2015

Kristin

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Joined: 2009-04-05, 19:28
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Posted at: 2014-12-17, 19:09

Dear Widelands Players!
There will be a tournament in the new year! It will be a Team Tournament, so every game is a 2 vs 2.
All information are listed on the wiki site WLTournamentTwentyFifteen.
Please registrate until January 4th.
For questions please contact me: Kristin
I am looking forward to many exciting games as in the past tournaments!
Greetings! Kristin

Edited: 2014-12-17, 19:17

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einstein13
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Joined: 2013-07-29, 00:01
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Posted at: 2014-12-17, 22:25

One point is not fair for me:

The game version should be build 18 or a newer develeopment version. Take care that every 4 players of a game use the same game version.

I understand that some players (especially developers) use only dev version of Widelands, but in my opinion equal chances are connected to the same conditions for everyone. I propose to use only Build18. Ships are enabled, lots of features are tested and it is stable one. What features are included in newest builds? Major thing for me it is unification of all worlds. That produce lots of bugs and tweaking that need to be done before we can use it as a feature, not problem face-smile.png

If you have other idea, I would like to hear that face-smile.png


einstein13
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SirVer

Joined: 2009-02-19, 15:18
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Location: Germany - Munich
Posted at: 2014-12-18, 06:49

I understand that some players (especially developers) use only dev version of Widelands, but in my opinion equal chances are connected to the same conditions for everyone.

There is a misconception there. Developers do not play the game - ever. All of us have day jobs, hobbies and family. Widelands development eats tons of time (~20 hours/week for me). I do not have the time to play Widelands :).

And few people keep up with the daily builds, so most people play b18 anyways.

Fairness is another point here.... Widelands is probably not super fair of a game. To properly balance a game you need data about player strength, games played, who won and lost and tons of details from the individual games. We simply do not have the data - compared to big studios like blizzard that get 10k games per day worth of statistical data that they can use to tweak their games. So yea, we try our best, but Widelands is probably pretty unfair anyways.

I propose to use only Build18. Ships are enabled, lots of features are tested and it is stable one. What features are included in newest builds? Major thing for me it is unification of all worlds. That produce lots of bugs and tweaking that need to be done before we can use it as a feature, not problem face-smile.png

That is actually a great argument to play dev versions. In the past, the tournaments have been done traditionally directly before a new release and they helped us to find and fix tons of bugs, so that the releases are better balanced and more stable. This tournament will help in the same way - if you play the dev version, you will find bugs, learn about broken features and form an opinion on how to fix them. That will help Widelands in the long run.

So +1 for playing dev versions from my point of view. The games will be fun anyways and since there is no price pool to win, fun is the most important thing. The players have to agree on a version of course - in the past that has not been a problem in tournaments though.


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fk
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Posted at: 2014-12-18, 11:53

Developers do not play the game - ever.

It would not be a bad idea to play the game from time to time. Most changes are on the language and buttons and constitute hardly an improvement. A good scenario has been wasted, all translations had to be reentered while many are lost, attempts to improve the language are simple and cause new errors, and in exchange we have received a too big font with traffic light colors. Seafaring is left unfinished. One positive thing: lots of bugs have been fixed with r18.

Major thing for me it is unification of all worlds.

Have all maps become obsolete? (I can't check this.) Map- and scenario builders may not follow these developments if everything they produce is thrown away every time.


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GunChleoc
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Posted at: 2014-12-18, 12:27

fk wrote:

Developers do not play the game - ever.

It would not be a bad idea to play the game from time to time.

I do my best to playtest all my changes - this doesn't mean I am playing a real game though, where I would get a feeling for game balance or learn strategies or anything like that. I only check of things look OK and don't blow up. Of course, some bugs do still slip by, which is why user testing and feedback is very important face-smile.png

Most changes are on the language and buttons and constitute hardly an improvement.

What exactly troubles you about the buttons?

A good scenario has been wasted,

I'm not sure what you mean - we have merged the first 2 Barbarian scenarios into one. All the dialog and story are still there. Or have I missed something?

all translations had to be reentered while many are lost, attempts to improve the language are simple and cause new errors,

Since I'm a translator myself, I know that losing the translations is a pain, but if you use a translation memory like Virtaal or Poedit, they can be recovered fairly quickly. Some strings have been split up so the translation memory won't find them - but you can still download the old po files from Launchpad and do some search/copy/paste. With the initial big changes, I actually did this work for a good number of languages myself to reduce the load on translators.

We are still in alpha and you can't expect a string freeze forever - this would block any improvements. We have had to do some radical changes after Build18, but from Build 19 on, the strings should be a lot more stable. What we really could use would be a native speaker to do regular proofreading with a fine-tooth comb.

There are still some changes to come before the next release, because we plan to improve the in-game help. If you can't afford the time to keep up with changing strings, maybe it would be a good strategy for you to wait until we announce a feature or string freeze?

and in exchange we have received a too big font with traffic light colors.

Which changes are you talking about now? I have only become familiar with Widelands from Build 18 on, and the font hasn't changed since then. Do you mean changes from Build 17 to Build 18 here?

Seafaring is left unfinished.

I think I can set your mind at ease here: Tibor is busy giving the first version of the Seafaring AI the final polish.

One positive thing: lots of bugs have been fixed with r18.

Thank you face-smile.png

Major thing for me it is unification of all worlds.

Have all maps become obsolete? (I can't check this.) Map- and scenario builders may not follow these developments if everything they produce is thrown away every time.

No, maps have not become obsolete. We have implemented a function that maps the old map elements to the new ones face-smile.png

Edited: 2014-12-18, 12:49

Busy indexing nil values

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fk
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Posted at: 2014-12-18, 13:36

What exactly troubles you about the buttons?

That is not my point, there are large discussions about buttons and translations while the game is still not able to build up a good economy and/or army.

I'm not sure what you mean - we have merged the first 2 Barbarian scenarios into one. All the dialog and story are still there. Or have I missed something?

No, but maybe misunderstood.

but if you use a translation memory like Virtaal or Poedit, they can be recovered fairly quickly

That has already been done thanks to the efforts of many translators, but what I mean is that many translations will never be uncovered. It was both an improvement and a deterioration. But this was just a side note, saying: why do we focus on that?

Do you mean changes from Build 17 to Build 18 here?

Precisely.

I think I can set your mind at ease here: Tibor is busy giving the first version of the Seafaring AI the final polish.

That is good news. But there is no seafaring AI. Polish?

Thank you

I meant the bug fixes.

We have implemented a function that maps the old map elements to the new ones

Great. Unfortunately both the PPA and the compilation failed completely and I won't be able to use it.


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SirVer

Joined: 2009-02-19, 15:18
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Location: Germany - Munich
Posted at: 2014-12-18, 20:05

fk wrote:

Developers do not play the game - ever.

It would not be a bad idea to play the game from time to time.

It would make little difference. I played the game some with my wife and I played in most tournaments. So I do not know the difference between b17 and b18, and I will not know the difference between b18 and b19 - only the one between yesterday and today. Of course, the changelog is written, but that is a poor replacement of experiencing two versions for hours.

Most changes are on the language and buttons and constitute hardly an improvement. A good scenario has been wasted, all translations had to be reentered while many are lost, attempts to improve the language are simple and cause new errors, and in exchange we have received a too big font with traffic light colors. Seafaring is left unfinished. One positive thing: lots of bugs have been fixed with r18.

I have the feeling that you are criticizing, but I cannot quite understand what you are referring to. This hurts me quite a bit - putting so much time in Widelands and then seeing efforts brushed over as "hardly an improvement" is demotivating. All changes have been done with either the player in mind (primary) or for technical reasons (secondary). Yes b17 seafaring was very rudimentary, b18 seafaring introduced expeditions and b19 seafaring will have less bugs. Of course its not finished - nothing is in Widelands. There were a ton of new features in b18 over b17. Not sure which scenario has been 'wasted'. Could you elaborate?

Generally speaking I feel that widelands development has been and is very healthy. If you feel that we prioritize the wrong things, you should help out and work on the stuff that you find more important.

Major thing for me it is unification of all worlds.

Have all maps become obsolete? (I can't check this.) Map- and scenario builders may not follow these developments if everything they produce is thrown away every time.

That notion is just unfair. Widelands has been very, very good about backwards compatibility. We never broke map compatibility and tried very hard to keep savegame compatibles - more so than any open source game I know. Only in b19, as we switch our persistence layer out will we break savegame compatibilities - but we keep maps compatible. As for scenarios: there are no scenarios for Widelands in the wild that I know of, so this has not been a priority. Even though it has not been, there is no incompatibility with scenarios that I know of reaching back for the last 3 or so years.

Edited: 2014-12-18, 20:05

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GunChleoc
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Posted at: 2014-12-19, 09:04

fk wrote:

What exactly troubles you about the buttons?

That is not my point, there are large discussions about buttons and translations while the game is still not able to build up a good economy and/or army.

Tibor has actually put a lot of work into improving the AI this year. Maybe this is less obvious because of the lack of discussion on the forums about the subject, but any discussion on this subject is very technical and mostly done in the bugs and merge request over on Launchpad. It makes no sense to discuss heuristics, algorithms and the finer points of C++ with people who can't code, while everybody can have an opinion on buttons or translations. Tibor has occasionally asked for testers on the forums though, so there has been some communication. Also, I can afford to spend more time, so I communicate more often about the subjects I am working on, which has been translations and buttons.

I'm not sure what you mean - we have merged the first 2 Barbarian scenarios into one. All the dialog and story are still there. Or have I missed something?

No, but maybe misunderstood.

Probably. Do you wish to explain further?

but if you use a translation memory like Virtaal or Poedit, they can be recovered fairly quickly

That has already been done thanks to the efforts of many translators, but what I mean is that many translations will never be uncovered.

This is up to the individual translation teams, if they can keep up. If a translator has abandoned his/her translation, it would slowly deteriorate anyway. The only other option would be to stop developing the game. It was both an improvement and a deterioration.

But this was just a side note, saying: why do we focus on that?

Because that's my skillset and it needed cleaning up. But I think you have the wrong impression here. We are not focusing on that by the amount of new code that has been contributed, but it might appear that way by the amount of communication that's been done on the forums.

Do you mean changes from Build 17 to Build 18 here?

Precisely.

I personally wasn't around then. Did you voice your concerns at the time? Also, your comments on this are a bit vague - if you have a concrete suggestion on how we might improve something, please post in the Game Suggestions forum. If there sufficient is community consensus, somebody will open a bug.

I think I can set your mind at ease here: Tibor is busy giving the first version of the Seafaring AI the final polish.

That is good news. But there is no seafaring AI. Polish?

https://code.launchpad.net/~widelands-dev/widelands/seafaring-ai/+merge/242271

Thank you

I meant the bug fixes.

I know face-smile.png

We have implemented a function that maps the old map elements to the new ones

Great. Unfortunately both the PPA and the compilation failed completely and I won't be able to use it.

Yes, the PPA started to fail this week due to some changes in the file structure, and hjd hasn't had time to fix this yet. The One World change is already a couple of months old now though. If you should have downloaded Widelands during that time, you could try out old maps with it.


Busy indexing nil values

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LAZA
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Joined: 2010-05-22, 12:34
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Posted at: 2014-12-21, 09:33

Hai all,

i got a other thing about the tournament:

IF we want to reach a lot of people, it is of great importance, that the Facebook site is actual and get regular updates!

The last entry is form February, the release of the new version. It is a but of a shame, that this good game/site, which has the chance to reach a lot of more people, is handled so stepmotherly. face-sad.png

If there is help needed, i will do things and look after and write posts. The informations on the homepage and the FB page should be on the same status.

LAZA


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SirVer

Joined: 2009-02-19, 15:18
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Posted at: 2014-12-21, 10:01

I am not on facebook and I think nasenbaer, who did the facebook page (iirc) is busy with other things these days. Do you need any kind of permissions to post on the page? I got some credentials from somewhere, so I am likely able to grant you these.


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