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Topic: Some newbie ideas and improvements

Native
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Joined: 2020-03-04, 22:11
Posts: 11
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Pry about Widelands
Location: Bietigheim-Bissingen
Posted at: 2020-03-06, 18:12

Hey there,

I found the game just recently but played it quite some time now and I found some things to be annoying, missing or that I'd generally like to see in the game. In the 90s I already played settlers 2, so I may be a bit biased, but I think everything should be implementable without changing current things or are just additions to increase the UX.

My ideas (not in any particular order):

  1. Add a game mode/goal where a player is defeated as soon as the headquarter is down (like in the old settlers). This would remove the need to hunt down all warehouses when in most cases the player is kind of dead anyways as soon as the HQ is gone because normally the main economy is around it.
  2. Get a message as soon as an AI player is defeated or add a scoreboard of some kind... It's pretty annoying to not know for sure if a warehouse has been the last one...
  3. I'm not sure, but I think that when dismantling or upgrading a building all goods stored inside are lost... I find this to be rather unrealistic: one should get the stored goods back - I don't start renovating a room before moving my furniture out or throw away the fridge with food still in it...
  4. Show an indicator in the bulding window how much of each resource is needed to create one output product (helps beginners to faster get a feeling how "expensive" a good is)
  5. Indicate somehow (not really an idea how, but at least in the help pages) which resources are mandatory to produce the output goods: I still don't really know in which cases I need all goods a building accepts end when I need only one or the other (fish/meat in the tavern for example)
  6. Add a "windowed fullscreen" mode (aka fullscreen window without decorations) to be able to "tab out" without minimizing the game (e.g. to do sth on a second screen)

I'm sure I forgot something... I will add more posts when I remember them.

With some help I'd like to help implementing the stuff. But I've never really programmed a game or in C/C++, so I would need some bootstrapping help. I'm coding with python and webstuff daily, so that's not the problem. Only best practices for C and of course where to find what in the game code would be helpful.

Please tell me your thought about my ideas. Thanks.

Native


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Nordfriese
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Joined: 2017-01-17, 18:07
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Posted at: 2020-03-06, 18:37

Moin Native and welcome to the forums face-smile.png

1) As a rule, players should not center their economy around any single warehouse or HQ. Sometimes a good player will be able to fully recuperate if you destroy all his warehouses but one. So as long as a player still has a warehouse, he's nowhere near defeated yet and may still defeat you instead…

2) That's a feature I also miss very much face-smile.png

3) This suggestion already came up dozens of times, we never managed to really agree on a good solution though. https://github.com/widelands/widelands/issues/1431 contains some suggestions and links to a number of forum discussions on the topic.

4) Nice idea! Might be hard for buildings with multiple outputs with different costs though… Perhaps a box below the list of input wares with some icons for the production pathways?

5) The encyclopedia shows this in the wares help: E.g. F1 → Wares → Ration → Produced By → Consumed Wares → "1 smokedmeat or 1 smokedfish and 1 bread or 1 fruit = 2 rations"

Edited: 2020-03-06, 18:37

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Native
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Joined: 2020-03-04, 22:11
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Pry about Widelands
Location: Bietigheim-Bissingen
Posted at: 2020-03-06, 18:56

Nordfriese wrote:

1) As a rule, players should not center their economy around any single warehouse or HQ. Sometimes a good player will be able to fully recuperate if you destroy all his warehouses but one. So as long as a player still has a warehouse, he's nowhere near defeated yet and may still defeat you instead…

I know, and that's ok. I'm not suggesting to replace the current mode but to add another win condition. Would also be a possibility to speed up rounds if you have not so much time face-smile.png


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GunChleoc
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Joined: 2013-10-07, 15:56
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Posted at: 2020-03-06, 19:45

Adding another win condition would be a good first issue to work on face-smile.png

This will be Lua code, and the scripts are in:

https://github.com/widelands/widelands/tree/master/data/scripting/win_conditions

On how to compile Widelands, see https://www.widelands.org/wiki/BuildingWidelands/

Let us know if you need anything else to get started.

It would be great to have a new developer on the team!


Busy indexing nil values

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hessenfarmer
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Joined: 2014-12-11, 23:16
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Posted at: 2020-03-06, 21:48

for me 4) and 5) are related and the information is already in the encyclopedia. Adding this to the buildings display would clutter it especially for multioutput sites.

for the detection if the warehouse was the last one one could check the wares statistics, although it is not completely reliable in some corner cases (having some productionsites left and a lot of flags). Anyhow a new tab in statistics showing active and defeated players might be a good point.


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Native
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Joined: 2020-03-04, 22:11
Posts: 11
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Pry about Widelands
Location: Bietigheim-Bissingen
Posted at: 2020-03-06, 21:53

hessenfarmer wrote:

for the detection if the warehouse was the last one one could check the wares statistics, although it is not completely reliable in some corner cases (having some productionsites left and a lot of flags).

Yes that works, but it's more a hack/workaraound than a solution imho.


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Native
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Joined: 2020-03-04, 22:11
Posts: 11
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Pry about Widelands
Location: Bietigheim-Bissingen
Posted at: 2020-03-06, 22:59

GunChleoc wrote:

Let us know if you need anything else to get started.

Yes: Is there an ingame console or similar to try out lua commands in a game? Couldn't find anything about it in the docs...


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Nordfriese
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Posted at: 2020-03-06, 23:01

When you compile Widelands yourself, you can use F6 to open an in-game/in-editor console where you can type Lua commands. This feature is available only in debug builds.


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WorldSavior
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Joined: 2016-10-15, 04:10
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Location: Germany
Posted at: 2020-03-12, 21:23

hessenfarmer wrote:

for me 4) and 5) are related and the information is already in the encyclopedia. Adding this to the buildings display would clutter it especially for multioutput sites.

I'm also against adding this to the ware tab. But one could make a third tab (behind the worker tab) which shows this stuff, there it wouldn't bother anyone, I guess. Or one adds it in the building help...

for the detection if the warehouse was the last one one could check the wares statistics, although it is not completely reliable in some corner cases (having some productionsites left and a lot of flags).

Another indicator is the worker tab in the statistics, but it can be unreliable if there are many soldiers left. Maybe soldiers (and recruits) shouldn't count as workers?

Anyhow a new tab in statistics showing active and defeated players might be a good point.

One could also show it with the flags in the statistics instead and not with another tab. With a different symbol

Nordfriese wrote:

4) Nice idea! Might be hard for buildings with multiple outputs with different costs though… Perhaps a box below the list of input wares with some icons for the production pathways?

Rather not, the box would consume too much space


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GunChleoc
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Posted at: 2020-03-13, 06:00

I also think that an extra tab in the building window would be best if we want to show more help there.


Busy indexing nil values

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