@redrum said in Autosave in Bots:

@prastle I think he's more asking if there would be a way to have the bot server send the autosaves to each player's local machine so if that bot freezes or the player wants to switch bots then they have the saves locally as well.

Yeah, that was the plan. No need to have them on the server, just local. And it could overwrite the previous save. And maybe only the player on turn will get it

@irontooth if you don't want a separate mod you can change stats by making a custom tech that changes the unit stats.

That would do the trick for me.

@cernel Not besides @ his username. Given that I already have the PR to address this posted, I'm sure he'll see it when he has some time.

@cernel I'd rather move towards being consistent with how the bottom bar displays it with the +/- right next to the amount in parenthesis. So other areas in the UI could probably use bold text as well but gotta start somewhere.

@general_zod Never tried, but I'm almost sure it should not. However, since this option was made many years before steps existed, it may be related to the name of the momement phase only; so, you can try to have a named non combat movement phase with the steps turning it into a combat movement one, see if it fools the option into working during CM.

Anyways, as I said, as it is, this option is really limited, as you can only use it for territories not touching two adjacent sea zones and only in case no other adjacent sea zones are touched by territories that touch other naval bases. I don't know if the issue of allowing keeping moving of 1 more again and again is the reason why it is years since any maps used it, if I've not overlooked some, but it would be an almost unavoidable reason for me to not considering it.

@redrum How about restricting it to apply only to games that have at least 1 same named unit, in the battlecalculator, shared between each and all selectable (not hidden, not null) players in the game?

While not absolutely safe, it would be a fairly consistent way to identify those games that have very different frontiers, and may just happen to share a few units here and there.

I can't think of an available game for which this would not be fine, as long as TWW never gets any of those shared units in the battlecalculator (as I assumed).

@redrum I think it woud be just better letting the mapmakers able to define if a movement 0 or cannot combat move unit should stay at the start or at the end or somewhere else in the list, by their order in the production frontier. Alternatively, I would go with the battlecalculator order (so, a 0/1 immobile unit would be first, and a 0/4 immobile unit would be last). For the problem of defence only units pushing the defence listing only down (like in the case of your first image, in which the alpine infantry is pushed down from 1st to 3rd position by the two immobile units), deteriorating simmetry, I've opened this f.r., that would cover that (the solution would be pushing down the attacking alpine infantry too, leaving empty spaces):
https://forums.triplea-game.org/topic/695/always-align-the-same-named-units-in-the-battlecalculator-if-any

@beelee might try "TransportC8 D1 (already available) " if subs get out of Line. Seems ok so far though, ( U-Boats just took a beating as I type this ) but
"Those Boys been in Dry Dock too Long". : )
With a C5 DD it'd no longer be the Fodder Unit. Also, just noticed, if a DD is fired on in CM while going to another SZ, You cannot move through that zone in NCM due to it have been being in a "Combat Zone".

Another boost for the DD : )

Oops ! Sorry just realized probably not the right spot for this : )

@redrum I would rather go with something like this:
0_1522170594050_20180327_alt01.png
Both side bars being shrinkable at will, also under the limits of the minimap and the writings.
The minimap shrinkable too, but keeping the X/Y ratio.
An option for forcing the two side bars to have the same wideness, in the menu.
The left side bar would be substituted by the history bar, when in history only.
Also, when you shrink the left bar (with the units), the units eventually zoom smaller when the sidebar is slimmed so much that they would otherwise be cut, so that you can have that left side bar, with the units, veeery slim (people don't like to lose board space).

Made some slight adjustments.

Here is the proposed grouping/sorting:

Unit owner: territory owner, not at war with territory owner, player order in XML Unit type: 0 movement, can't combat move, sea, air if sea territory, land, air if land territory Within each of those groups sort the units by XML order in UnitList

Reposting here, since it fits this discussion.

@general_zod said in Group and Sort Units onto Placements Logically:

@redrum

Can we have a mechanism that prevents overflow from being displayed completely in a given territory. (on map view only, but still displayed on territory tab).

So Instead of displaying the line of overflow units. It would display a single special unit depicting there is overflow. Ideally that unit would be clickable, to see the list of actual overflow units.

I'm leaning towards this being settable during the placement picker steps. Lets say a different color square or symbol (green) on last placement, indicating overflow wont display on map. Instead a special unit will display in the last position, representing that there is more overflow units.

@redrum kk Japan and NewJersy bots run the latest pre and have maps updated

@ssoloff

Thinking on it some more. I suggest the confirmation checkbox should always be next to the button (done/ok) as a pre checked or not checked box, depending engine preference.

If the engine preference is activated then confirmation is required by placing a check the box.

If the engine preference is deactivate then the confirmation box is a pre checked.

This disposition might be helpful if one wants to remove the pre check from the box to be safe (if desired) , while still in normal game mode.

@redrum said in Map to Engine Compatibility Problems:

This idea would have to be flushed out a lot to see if its viable. Map makers and players still want to see versions of the same map especially when the map is newer so it would mostly have to be under the covers IMO.

There is a question of how to link such maps. We already have a database of maps, it is a yaml file. To get to the immutable suggestion, every version would be a new entry. We'd convert the version and download link to a list. In this way we have an under-cover implementation for the most part. A good chunk of the benefit is from the assumptions we can make about any given download location. If we know a map version, and they are immutable, and we know the download link for a given version, we can always download that XML. Today with updates to maps, we lose that capability with the overwrite of new data, and we lose the information for the old location. I suspect there are more simplifications once things are immutable by convention. Basically, we would be optimizing for the 'copy/paste' and update strategy for maps : )

So there is already an engine version in the map XML. Its use could be expanded so that say the downloader reads it to avoid older engines downloading new maps. But you'd also have to ensure map makers are actually specifying the min version XML field properly.

Indeed, but:

usability problem as you mention introduces a bulk update problem, we have to bulk update engine versions tracking engine versions in map XML, I think the two concepts should not be fundamentally related at all. I'd like to see the game engine depend on map parsing, not the other way round in a circular dependency. we'd have to parse every map XML to show the 'download maps' window, this is likely to be too slow. it's not known where a game XML will be, and there are multiple. We'd have to scan the entire file directory of a github repo to find the XMLs, and we'll find multiple.

It would help if games and maps were 1:1, then we would know the map XML location and maybe could parse the actual file on the fly. That would be nice as we could put other items like download description and map title all in the same file.

So if we add back in including past jar versions of TripleA then this could be useful but without those most players don't want to have multiple engine versions sitting around so any maps not upgraded are effectively dead. Also developers would most likely have to manage the max version since map makers would know what to set it to.

Good point, I've considered the same. But:

old jar was not a complete/good solution. It did not work for the 1.8 to 1.9 upgrade. We also had to do work to maintain it, it made path loading very whacky and was hard to keep working. non-upgraded maps are already effectively dead, it's something of an existing problem I suspect developers will need to manage min-version even. Max version likely would be easy, it'll match to be the next version that is not going to be compitible. WE'd have to discuss what kind, if any mapping there is to the game engine version. So I'd envision this being set to 'version 2' everywhere. When we have a new incompatible engine, we would add a bunch of maps with min version '2' and max version '3'.

Would need a lot more detail on how this would work to determine if its feasible and worthwhile.

Should be feasible, we can introduce some logic to upconvert objects. I'd personally lean on the open-close principle when designing it. 'Worthwhile' should be pretty obvious I would hope. My experience of a player for a decade plus, I've heard a number of endless tantrum's from players before, during and after upgrades. I would tend to agree from experience that destroying a save game is one of the worst things that can happen. If we can lessen the need for a non-compatible release, we get a pretty good win-win where save games are not trashed, and developers can do their work with less effort, which means more work done per unit effort 🙂

Fixing save-game compatibility I think is the best thing we can do for this project. At this point, with the code and maps out of SVN, individual owners converted to teams, I think that is probably the highest impact thing we can do now.

I wonder if "activateTrigger" and another effect within a basic trigger, fall into bad practice category. Or political actions and user actions that fire multiple effects via "activateTrigger". Actually Political action can't even use "activateTrigger".

@cernel I understand how the renaming of the Techs work, and it is a good thing. It would be nice if this type of renaming worked for other elements like:

<option name="Infantry" unit="germanInfantry"/> <option name="Infantry" unit="russianInfantry"/>

In this manner the purchase window, tool tips and other displays to the player would IMOA be a little cleaner. But this is something just for looks.

Cheers...

@General_Zod I think this would be better as a bug report in github with some examples and save games. As really auto starting battles is not intended as the player should be able to choose which order they are fought in.

@crazyg yup it would require each map maker to set the default but a great idea!