AA-fire/casualty selection issues in Revised (and other versions)
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@Cernel said in [Open] AA revised minor bug:
for something that maybe will be just closed off in 6 months.
Ice box is harsh, but compare that to this bug which has not even been looked at... Which would you prefer, for a tactical decision of "we're not going to get to this" compared to "whoops, we did not even see this."
The other aspect is about maintainer efficiency. We're few and very stretched. It used to be the full time job of multiple people to keep up with the project. So that we can make progress and not just tread water with responding to issues but actually fix issues, there are some efficiency gains needed.
It is also hard to say who will and can pick up the bug. If the "cost of entry" is to spend 45 minutes reading to then figure out this is something you can't work on, that is 45 minutes that could have been spent actually fixing something else. It is the case that new dev's come along and they need projects that are easy to pick up so they can become engaged with the TripleA codebase. Having bugs to require so much background hinders that.
In my professional experience and learnings, bug tracking where you have this situation is a project anti-pattern. It leads to these long bug queues that never get solved and you spend a lot of time curating bugs not actually fixing any.
So yes, we need a summary if there are items that need to be fixed, and ideally they would be placed in the official bug tracker so that the maintainers do not have to spend time bouncing between a set of forum posts and the bug tracker
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Well, to be honest, for me there is also the issue that I believe how it works now is more realistic, or anyways I prefer it. Of course, this shouldn't matter, as nobody asked me about that, and I'm not saying I like bugged stuff, as I realize a bugged behaviour is not reliable.
And, as I said, we still have to get around clarifying v1, as I believe the official rules and clarifications there are unclear. We might have to get back to someone official there, actually, meaning moving to another forum.
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@Cernel Okay, if there is something that needs to be fixed, we need a bug report. A bug report has four elements (it's actually kinda formal):
- status: is it open or closed
- reproduction steps: minimized list of actions to create the problem
- problem description: typically a "notice" line that says, notice this behavior, that is the bug
- expected behavior: a description of instead of the 'notice', what should have happened.
Of course, the more terse and to the point the bug report the better, short and sweet. Forums perhaps dovetails here as identifying the actual problem and discussing what the right fix can be difficult. Typically I've seen that best handled by simply re-creating bug reports to be concise summaries of longer threads, so one closes an old bug and opens a new short one (in this way the 10 pages of text is then converted to a proper bug report that then has a better chance to be picked up and fixed). The open/close status is just for efficiency, you need to be able to answer "what are the open bugs? What should I look at?". The repro steps and problem description is so the dev can create the problem and know they are looking at the same issue. The expect fix is explicit so we know how to fix, it can be not obvious what the right fix is. Software is stupid exact, exact steps of what should be done are required. This then combines with the repro steps so that a dev can then repro with a fix to ensure the problem was actually fixed.
Those 4 items define a bug report. As a software project, that is what is needed for us to be able to effectively fix bugs.
I continue to be disturbed we have a 'bug' section in forums as none of those items are properly tracked in a conversation thread, they all need to be simulated by manipulating titles and the 'prompt' of this is the information we need can only come from a 'read this first' post. It can be made to work, but it's for sure simulating proper bug tracking software in forum (aka conversation) software.
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@LaFayette If this whole matter would be summarized in a way to be complete and understandable (that would really require a number of examples) (which we cannot do until v1 is clarified too), it will be a really long wall of text, and still require the best part of a hour to be fully understood by someone having no idea about it.
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@Cernel Understood, that wall of text is probably better as a wiki document to summarize how V1 should function. From there, for actual bugs, I'd recommend divide and conquer and break down each independent item to its own bug report.
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@LaFayette No, actually, what I meant is that v1 is the one we haven't fully sorted out, mostly due to the lack of good documentation, and it might not be bugged, though I doubt it. For the remaining part, this is about a number of different things working differently in v2 OOB, v2 LHTR, v3, v4 and v5/Global. Some of those things are more important than others, and a few are substantially irrelevant, even if theorically wrong.
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@Cernel Ah, thanks. I'm thinking a wiki document with a summarized set of "this is how it should work" (per ruleset) would be really valuable. We could then compare actual behavior to that document to know where the bugs are. A discussion thread like this is essential for creating that document, it'd be great to see this take the next step so we can incorporate this knowledge back into the game.
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@LaFayette said in [Open] AA revised minor bug:
@Cernel Ah, thanks. I'm thinking a wiki document with a summarized set of "this is how it should work" (per ruleset) would be really valuable.
Yeah, that would be really cool to have, for each basic maps from v1 to v6, plus a general list for the things that apply to all of them, but it would be really a huge effort that only a very few people can do (practically, you need someone having a virtually perfect knowlenge of the intended rules and a virtually perfect knowledge of the program and maps behaviour, to see where they differ). On top of that, if such a thing would be telling the players what they are supposed to look after (or edit), then it should comprise both issues at an engine and at a map level. In a way, @Deltium has starting doing it for Revised, due to the need of regulating the ToC where TripleA doesn't fully support correctly.
I might see if I can put something together for v3 at least, I guess, but not promising. It would not be a short list...
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@Cernel said in [Open] AA revised minor bug:
you need someone having a virtually perfect knowlenge of the intended rules
Indeed, though that's a good place to start! The process of comparing what actually happens vs what should can happen over time.
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@LaFayette said in [Open] AA revised minor bug:
@Panther or other, is there another bug report for the major issues uncovered? Could those issues be summarized for a bug report?
Some time ago I created a list of currently unresolved rules issues here:
https://www.axisandallies.org/forums/topic/32958/triplea-engine-known-rules-related-bugs-issuesI am happy to maintain that list on this forum, too, so I have just copied it. Find it here:
https://forums.triplea-game.org/topic/1549/triplea-engine-known-rules-related-bugs-issuesCurrently I am not aware of any other wwII-game rule issue that we do not already have a Github issue for, at least v3-v6 (including wwII_1940_any) should be investigated and covered well.
Some of those issues mentioned there contain further implications for v1 and v2 - but those never have been investigated any deeper. -
@LaFayette The issues of this specific topic are summarized here:
https://github.com/triplea-game/triplea/issues/4133v2 is elaborated on in detail, the other games in brief.
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@Panther Looks like that really needs to be closed to ice box.
Anyways, I think that list is very brief, and more like a items' listing for people already fully knowing what the matter is. For example, when you see something like "incorrect timing of AA fire (different rules for OOB and LHTR apply, but both versions are affected)", there's no way you can know what that means, unless you do (or learn it, for example by reading through this thread).
EDIT: I see that this specific matter has been subsequently detailed and also discussed, in that issue. Sort of duplicating what we already did here.
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@Cernel said in [Open] AA revised minor bug:
EDIT: I see that this specific matter has been subsequently detailed and also discussed, in that issue. Sort of duplicating what we already did here.
Indeed, at Github I tried to summarize what is spreaded within this thread.
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@Cernel said in [Open] AA revised minor bug:
@Panther Looks like that really needs to be closed to ice box.
Maybe it is just time to remove the misleading word "minor" from the title of this thread.
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@Panther It's actually funny to see that as the title of how many posts thread. I suppose you can feel free to paste the title of your GitHub issue as the title of this thread.
EDIT: Not that really matters about ice boxing it, mind you.
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@Cernel said in [Open] AA revised minor bug:
@Panther Looks like that really needs to be closed to ice box.
In some ways, if an issue is that old.
In this case, it is still quite current and the topic has come up again; In this case seeing if the task can be sub-divided, re-summarized and created as fresh, but smaller and easier to solve tasks is a valid approach. In theory it would have already been ice-boxed, and without an open issue we would have opened one again. Regardless, perhaps take a look at the old queue @Cernel and see if you really want the few devs to work on those issues or should instead focus on instead something like this? There are lots of issues that became old/stale, maybe one day we'll be able to re-open them. Meanwhile, I'd encourage you to be a bit less butt-hurt about it.. The goal is to shrink the bug queue and have it be sustainably getting smaller. The long tail of less important items detracts from the more important ones; a long queue is a cost in of itself.
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My e-mail is blowing up with all the activity in this thread! I dare not follow the discussion though. If anyone needs "expert" information on the book rules for AA revised, let me know. Otherwise I'm not of any use.
There was some debate and disagreement following my original post and I'm not even certain how it concluded but I fully stand by my original comment in terms of what needs changing. Basically, the moves made in Combat Movement should be tracked and at the end of Combat Movement the aa should roll. Looks like you have been discussing individualized aa rolling for aircraft - that sounds good to me. Generically, aa casualties shouldn't be electable by attacker or defender, but there are options for that in game set up.
GLHF.
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@LouisXIVXIV said in [Open] AA revised minor bug:
There was some debate and disagreement following my original post and I'm not even certain how it concluded but I fully stand by my original comment in terms of what needs changing. Basically, the moves made in Combat Movement should be tracked and at the end of Combat Movement the aa should roll.
This has been officially clarified you (and me) were right (tho I was not sure, because I think the rules were not that clear). Of course, that is true the exact same way both for Combat and Non Combat Movement. The only other thing here is the fact that in v2 OOB air units that participated in combat return immediately after combat, so you roll those before the ones that are just non combat moving.
Looks like you have been discussing individualized aa rolling for aircraft - that sounds good to me. Generically, aa casualties shouldn't be electable by attacker or defender, but there are options for that in game set up.
Yes, this has been clarified too (at least I'm taking @Panther word here). Casualty selection is exactly the same for v2 OOB, v2 LHTR, v3 and v4.
On this matter @Panther did we fully officially clarify casualties selection for v5/Global too (where you have AA factories and AA guns for battle only, with limited shots (and escorts/interceptors in case of Global))?
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@Cernel said in [Open] AA revised bug (AA-fire/casualty selection issues):
On this matter @Panther did we fully officially clarify casualties selection for v5/Global too (where you have AA factories and AA guns for battle only, with limited shots (and escorts/interceptors in case of Global))?
We have analyzed that during this thread and identfied "only" the randomness of casualty selection as issue.
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@LaFayette @Cernel
Regarding that "Ice Box" discussion:Starting with Veqryn and continuing until today the developers have always assured me that "rules compliance" belongs to the most important targets of the TripleA-project.
My main concern has always been rules compliance. That is why I dedicate a lot of my time to rules clarifications and to rules-bug-hunting and disregard playing by forum or playing the real board games. That is totally fine, I am happy with that - as I decided to adjust my personal priorities this way.Speaking about priorities - looking at those issues discussed in this topic and in the above mentioned list - I see sort of a discrepancy between the target (rules compliance) and the efforts to reach this target code-wise.
This is no complaint. Just a description of the status quo. I totally accept that everybody supports this project according to his priorities. I do nothing else.On the other hand it would be frustrating to see issues like those discussed in this thread being ice-boxed. What about the target "rules compliance"? How important is that? What is the point of discussing rules? What is the point of rules-bug hunting?
In case rules-issues really get ice-boxed, we should really discuss the targets of the project and if rules compliance still is an issue.
