TripleA development
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@thedog said in TripleA development:
The initial rewrite must be able to read most of the current crop of maps/scenarios, otherwise their will be no maps/scenarios to play.
Agreed. I'd suggest not requiring to be able to load games saved with 2.x.
Regarding subs/destroyers/fighters I'd suggest to only support the version considered best by the players - with the devs having a say if a slight variation is technically much better.I also agree, that we might throw over board supporting some maps - especially in the early versions.
@Cernel
Regarding walls to be taken over by the winner of the battle: I support this requirement. But it should not be based on the current non-infrastructure/infrastructure concepts. The devs should come up with functionality supporting such a feature not accitently but by design - so the code is comprehensible. This also applies to the "just conquered" markers in BC270 Wars: They should not be implemented as units (requiring territories also being units), but as a feature of its own. -
@rainova said in TripleA development:
@beelee I agree we should get the open issues under control. I've started a thread dedicated to that.
yea I feel bad as my limited skills can close few of them. Gonna be a thousand soon.
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@rainova said in TripleA development:
@Cernel
Regarding walls to be taken over by the winner of the battle: I support this requirement. But it should not be based on the current non-infrastructure/infrastructure concepts. The devs should come up with functionality supporting such a feature not accitently but by design - so the code is comprehensible.I disagree. Although it can be based on a more direct feature (whatever that would be), the current way it is done is good too and totally neither incidental nor even a hack. It is all based on a series of actually supported features, acting as intended: that units may turn into other units when taking damage, that this may happen also when the damage is equal to their hit-points, that some units ("infrastructures") cannot be hit by normal attacks and are conquered with the territory, and so on. None of the features used to implement the rule is doing anything more than what it is supposed to do, as far as I know.
This also applies to the "just conquered" markers in BC270 Wars: They should not be implemented as units (requiring territories also being units), but as a feature of its own.
I disagree that what said for the previous case applies to this one too. This case is near-to completely different from the previous one as the markers are actually doing nothing substantial: they are merely visual aids for the players (the game plays the same if you remove them in the code within the game file). However, I would agree that the TripleA program should visually indicate what are the territories conquered during the same turn, if it makes any difference, but it does not, so I used units to hack it. I guess the reason why such an obvious feature never existed is due to the fact that, in the simple basic games, only the placement of new "factories" is influenced by this, and you place such units rarely enough that it is easy to remember what are the territories which you conquered on the same turn.
Generally speaking, I personally believe that everything should be always visualized, nothing left to the memory of the player. This said, there are far more important missing matters, like the fact that TripleA fails to show retreat ways and which units can retreat until after you start the specific battle (and, in the current 2.5 stable, it doesn't even do that during the battle!), or the fact that the remaining movement of air units is not displayed, to name just a couple of such problems.
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My thoughts concerning
@rainova said in TripleA development:
@ all: How much should a rewrite still be a tribute to Axis & Allies?
The tribute to A&A (at least) to me is the fundament of my identification with the project.
TripleA does not stand for "Armies Attack Arbitrariliy". It stands for
- Would you require all variations of sub vs. destroyer/fighter?
TripleA requires the support of the core rulesets to enable play on current and future maps as well in current as in future TripleA versions.
- Must the game engine support turning a damaged unit into an infrastructure unit that is than converted to a winner's unit of the initial type (that's how BC270 Wars handles walls)?
The game engine should support customizations and specialities intended by map makers.
Currently sometimes a workaround is needed to achieve intentions.- Must the UI still imitate the battle board of the board game or would zooming into the battle territory be near enough to A&A?
What would "zooming in" show then? IMHO the "conduct combat phase" is not about territory sightseeing . But about resolving the conflict represented by the battle-board. To me this is somehow the highlight of every turn.
- Would we again have Napoleonic Empires without Napoleon?
This is not an engine topic but a quick fix within the map repository in case someone misses Napoleon.
- Would you be keen on better music/sound effects?
No. That's just distracting bling-bling in my opinion. As well as eventual graphic "enhancements".
- Should the game engine support parallel playing?
No. That'd be a totally different game. Of course that might maybe be interesting in another context.
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@panther said in TripleA development:
- Would you be keen on better music/sound effects?
No. That's just distracting bling-bling in my opinion. As well as eventual graphic "enhancements".
I think sound effects deserve some love. I think that out there there are many less popular free games which have better sound effects than TripleA. Sometimes I think the sounds in TripleA are so poor that it is worse than not having them.
I think the two main things to improve, regarding sound effects, is allowing having per-unit costumized sounds when placing and when selecting units and having background sounds, possibly multiple background sounds per map, so the user can pick one.
Example:
https://forums.triplea-game.org/topic/275/units-specific-placed-sounds -
Maybe. Of course this is a question of personal "taste". I always turn sound off when using TripleA. But of course I understand your ideas / use cases.
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Also, turning on/off map sounds should be a setting per map (or, more precisely, per skin) (like the "zoom" setting). Meaning that you should have sounds on every time you open a new map, and turning sounds off should affect only the skin of the map you are looking at.
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I would love to rewrite some of the low level stuff and have some ideas on how to do it, I'm just short on time.
The biggest issue I see is the game file format itself. XML is fine, but we should use an XSD not a DTD and have the structure of the file reveal more of the available options instead of relying so much on generic properties with weird operators (like splitting a string on colon) that require extensive documentation.
The biggest benefit too is that map makers can leverage xi:include to include fragments of common elements (like units) into mods/skins/whatever.
Then we can also code generate the map saving/loading code with JAXB, removing a ton of boilerplate and and making games backwards compatible instead of using Java serialization.
But yeah... so much to do at my job and I have a family, so not too much time to do work stuff but for fun!
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But yes- contributing to TripleA has been hard for me, because of the code base as well as a difficult PR review process, either due to a focus on incredible detail (that's what happens when a bunch of military strategists maintain an open source project I suppose ;-)) or because of inactivity of PR approvers. I certainly understand both reasons, but it has been discouraging me from contributing more if I know it will be a huge time investment to even get a change merged in to the next release.
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@djabwana said in TripleA development:
But yes- contributing to TripleA has been hard for me, because of the code base as well as a difficult PR review process, either due to a focus on incredible detail (that's what happens when a bunch of military strategists maintain an open source project I suppose ;-)) or because of inactivity of PR approvers. I certainly understand both reasons, but it has been discouraging me from contributing more if I know it will be a huge time investment to even get a change merged in to the next release.
This. All of this is exactly why I have done limited contributions so far.
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@djabwana said in TripleA development:
The biggest issue I see is the game file format itself. XML is fine, but we should use an XSD not a DTD and have the structure of the file reveal more of the available options instead of relying so much on generic properties with weird operators (like splitting a string on colon) that require extensive documentation.
The biggest benefit too is that map makers can leverage xi:include to include fragments of common elements (like units) into mods/skins/whatever.
Then we can also code generate the map saving/loading code with JAXB, removing a ton of boilerplate and and making games backwards compatible instead of using Java serialization.
The use of JAXB or JSON for serialization would help to fix a lot of the game save issues. The serialization that is currently being done to OutputStream makes sense if you don't want an extra dependency or you are looking for an easy way to keep users from editing saved games.
However, I don't see that trade off as worth it given that JAXB or JSON are far more portable, easier to troubleshoot, less prone to "mysterious" corruption and can just as easily be secured using encryption.
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@magicstyck @djabwana If we work on accelerating the PR process, how much time would you then volunteer to TripleA improvements? What would be required to make these improvements worth the time for you? Would you be satifsfied with purely technical improvements like fixing the serialization and cleaning up the code base?
Would you expect that we can marshal the required dev capacity by merely improving the dev process?
Would it be worthwhile to discuss other ways to make development more attractive? If so: Would it suffice to adress the developers currently active in the TripleA community or should we try and recruit developers who are currently not part of the TripleA community?
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@panther said in TripleA development:
IMHO the "conduct combat phase" is about resolving the conflict represented by the battle-board. To me this is somehow the highlight of every turn.
When you deal with this conflict: Do you rather think of it as a battle or of a struggle between opposing military formations during a 3-6 months period (i.e. the duration of a turn)?
Some rules lean towards the former - e.g. the submerge capability or the fact that you cannot partially retreat (in general).
Improvements in the display of the conflict may depend on this preference.
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@panther said in TripleA development:
What would "zooming in" show then?
It may show the bombarding ships and the related transports on the edge of the display.
The map could be turned in a way that the invader is coming from the left.
Infrastructure units of the territory could be displayed behind the defender, walls in front of them.
If artists are interested, it could actually show a bit of landscape.
These are just the four of my ideas I can most easily sketch out. Once we prodvide the opportunity, artists may come up with better and more.
I am also thinking about a more modern, drag & drop UI.
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@panther said in TripleA development:
IMHO the "conduct combat phase" is not about territory sightseeing . Napoleon [...] is not an engine topic but a quick fix within the map repository [...]
Would you be keen on better music/sound effects?
No. That's just distracting bling-bling in my opinion. As well as eventual graphic "enhancements".
This gives the impression you are playing TripleA mostly for the game logic and hardly for the atmosphere of the time, the setting, the personalities. Does this describe your approach towards the game?
@ all: What is important in TripleA for you?
(For me personally it's sometimes the logic, and sometimes it's the "story". For example, when I played "Total War Shogun II", I really liked it when the general gave a speech to his troops, expressing his sorrow for the enemy soldiers.)If we start anew: What shall be kept? What shall evolve? And by how much?
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@rainova said in TripleA development:
@panther said in TripleA development:
IMHO the "conduct combat phase" is about resolving the conflict represented by the battle-board. To me this is somehow the highlight of every turn.
When you deal with this conflict: Do you rather think of it as a battle or of a struggle between opposing military formations during a 3-6 months period (i.e. the duration of a turn)?
Some rules lean towards the former - e.g. the submerge capability or the fact that you cannot partially retreat (in general).
Improvements in the display of the conflict may depend on this preference.
It is simply one battle of - sometimes more sometimes less - battles.
Resolving the batttles by the outcome of the dice rolls is most important. -
@rainova said in TripleA development:
@panther said in TripleA development:
What would "zooming in" show then?
It may show the bombarding ships and the related transports on the edge of the display.
The map could be turned in a way that the invader is coming from the left.
Infrastructure units of the territory could be displayed behind the defender, walls in front of them.
If artists are interested, it could actually show a bit of landscape.
These are just the four of my ideas I can most easily sketch out. Once we prodvide the opportunity, artists may come up with better and more.
I am also thinking about a more modern, drag & drop UI.
What for? If I wanted animated pictures to create atmophere I would watch films or buy other computer war games.
Imagine people playing in leagues or ladders - sometimes playing five or more games at a time. They usually don't want to see those animations. It is distracting and - depending on the animation - a waste of time. They are busy developping strategies, see how they work out and continue from there.
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@rainova said in TripleA development:
This gives the impression you are playing TripleA mostly for the game logic and hardly for the atmosphere of the time, the setting, the personalities. Does this describe your approach towards the game?
Correct. There are other games having this atmospheric approach.
To me it is a strength of TripleA to have a priority on the game mechanics - while allowing for a certain amount of customization including some atmosphere.Other approaches - such as Beamdog's 1942 Online - are maybe more "atmospheric". But you can read reports of people who are enerved by the bling-bling shipped with it.
Really - for atmosphere and animations and whatever there are countless alternatives on the computer games market.
I, too, love scenarios like the GoT or WoW approaches, also historical scenarios. It is great how the map makers succeed to bring atmoshere to the games with the tools TripleA gives.
I am not against optimizing or careful enhancement.But please let us not bloat up and by this reduce the straightforwardness of our TripleA software.
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I just hope it doesn't take too many more years for the unit transfer bug in bots to be fixed, so global and TWW can work right without editing.
sadly there's nothing else I can do on it.In general I like the plan of just doing basic/essential fixes for now, while having a long term plan for a 3.0 that reworks the code base from the utter mess it is now.
UI-wise; I'd say triplea is fine without bells and whistles; but having optional add-ons for more atmosphere should be fine, as long as it's well compartmentalized. Much like Dominions, the user-base is a niche one that's fine without fancy graphics because of the good gameplay.
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