Warcraft: War Heroes - Official Thread
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@all
This BETA stage map is now downloadable via the EXPERIMENTAL section ingame.
Be sure to use with a pre-release version of TribleA: https://github.com/triplea-game/triplea/releases -
@Frostion beautiful map.
Noticed a few technical problems:- PNGs could be losslessly compressed. The total size of the map is very heavy, the engine has trouble running it and makes for a slow download.
I could run lossless compression on the PNG files and upload it to the repo, would you like me to do that?
- The unit help blows up the game engine!
This one is a bit funny, the core game engine is going to have to do better to not blow up so easily. Hopefully this can be fixed in time for 2.0.
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@LaFayette said in Warcraft: War Heroes - Official Thread:
- PNGs could be losslessly compressed. The total size of the map is very heavy, the engine has trouble running it and makes for a slow download.
Is there a guide somewhere on how to do that exactly like you would?
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I noticed that the unit help would crash the game engine. The map itself was also very large.
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@Frostion But, I do really like your map. I think it is the best tripleA map so far, both graphically and in terms of units. You did a really great job!
The only thing that could be improved is reducing the filesize like LaFayette mentioned, which would avoid game engine crashes and improve running.
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@Greg-Anderson To me, it doesn't crash anything. It just fails to open and freezes the game for about 1 minute, then the game is back working.
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@Cernel I only noticed that the game engine crashed when trying to open the unit help section. That's what LaFayette noticed as well.
But I guess I could try again to see if you are right.
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@Frostion The map is the most epic map in TripleA to date, and an awesome first entry on TripleA 2.0, but I have to say the relief are making really hard telling factions apart by their colourization. By the way, you forgot to set the minimumVersion to 2.
Do you think it is possible to play this live, or is a map reserved for very long asynchronous matches? How long an average real time game would take? I'm fearing this one is impossible for live multi-games (games with 4 or more players you casually meet on the lobby) or am I wrong?
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@Cernel I think the map is way too complex to play live. I also think that the colorization is just right, as it allows us to still see the relief.
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@Cernel @Greg-Anderson It was a fine balance between color and relief art. I did some testing and ended up on the existing mix. But I can see that especially the Tauren yellow is hard to even see up against the neutral army green. But when the players meet up, I think the colors are quite distinct, or at least distinct enough.
@Cernel Yes I forgot to make it 2.0 in the XML. This will be fixed in version map v0.1.2. I don’t know who will play it. I think time will tell. There is a lot of PVE and not much PVP going on in the first many rounds, there is also a lot of randomness and luck involved, so this might talk against it being popular in multiplayer. But I guess it is an OK map to play in multiplayer for two persons if they got the time and if the start seems reasonable and fair to both parties.
@LaFayette @redrum Regarding the Unit Help Window: Because of this map’s vast amount units, more specifically units that are not combat units or units to purchase, the unit help window is flooded with units.
It is a problem for this map (and other maps) that there is no unit sorting option that the map maker can make use of (that I know of). I guess this is a feature request, but would it be possible for the map.properties file to have options like this:
#use to NOT draw a list of units or territory names, comma delimited
#dont_draw_units=infantry,artillery
#dont_draw_territory_names=United Kingdom,Union of South Africa,German
#use to NOT show a list of units in unit help, comma delimited
#dont_show_in_unit_help=Gryhon-Egg,Loot-Level-1,Origin-Artisan,Humans-Level-1,Amulet-of-Accuracy-Itemor maybe figure out some other way that units might be set to be excluded from the Unit Help Window?
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@Cernel said in Warcraft: War Heroes - Official Thread:
Is there a guide somewhere on how to do that exactly like you would?
The process would be OS specific and depending on which tool you would want to use. In theory a map-maker could go for lossy compression and get even more savings (but at that point it's a judgement call).
The lossless compression tool I'm aware of an use is
optipng, we run it automatically against PNG assets included with the game engine, this line shows an examples with args: https://github.com/triplea-game/assets/blob/44e60d38df85326a8007370030166b81db7a04d3/.travis/run_optipng#L14@Frostion Re: file size, what bit-rate are the sound files? The 50MB from sound is a place for savings. If you're over 128, that would be a good place to save. I'd recommend going with 96KBPS for perhaps all sound files, 128KBPS for sounds with very varied pitch ranges.
Re: unit-help & units
I'd be reluctant for the engine to not show all units. Personally I was looking there to get an explanation of the non-combat units in particular. Can you detail why you recommend the units you have to not be shown in unit help? Are they never visible to players or something like that?
I also found the engine was not helpful when using edit mode to place units. The rendering windows were stretched to the largest unit, the units were not sorted at all. Due to that it took me a solid few minutes to find the trebuchet-shot unit.
I also found I was missing the 'I' key for unit info and would have wanted units to have been labelled in the territory panel. Maybe clicking on units you do not own to show the tooltip would have been nice, I'm interested in ideas for how we can make it easier to learn about the variety of units.
Re: Unit Help Window
No matter how many units you have, the game should not be exhausting 300MB~1GB of main memory to render it. The engine is doing something quite inefficient. I think we might have a cross-product happening where it's rendering all units for all factions, with some 50 units and about 15 factions, it's 750 units, but still that should not be causing a crash.
To summarize, map specific:
- we can look at lossless image compression and more aggressive sound file compression to cut on the map size
To summarize, engine specific:
- unit sorting would be really useful for edit placements, perhaps for purchase and other unit display windows
- unit name and attribute discovery could be helped. Maybe having a faster/easier tooltip, perhaps labeling unit names in the territory window
- unit help window needs to be looked at and improved
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I am well into round 6 of an all human game, and I noticed a few things and issues that are now fixet (but not released). More fixes and adjustments are sure to come.
V0.1.1 to v0.1.2
• Some unit price adjustments.
• All instances of items and origin skills affecting “all heroes”, now only affect heroes of the opposite faction.
• Pets (Mastiff and Battle-Chicken) must now be built and are no longer generated automatically. This is because pets can end up be generated out at sea and then become stuck there.
• Fixed dynamite unit. It can no longer be thrown over air ways and it now actually works and participate in battle
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@Frostion When will the updated version be released? Is there also a way to make the map free-for-all?
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@Greg-Anderson
Here is the first draft of v0.1.2 but you will have to start a new game to make the changes work. So if you got a game going then you could just wait for the official new release of v0.1.2
Manually replace the files in your downloaded zip with the two files in this zip: v0.1.2.zip@LaFayette
Unit image files are like 10 MB
Relief+basetiles is like 125 MB
Sound are like 55 MBFor the map most sound files are 160 KBPS. This was because that I could hear a real noticeable difference between 160 and 128 when it came to some of the music files.
Let’s look at the image compression at some point. I would want you to try to compress an image of the tiles at some point. Thx.
Regarding unit help window, I can see the need for players to want info on many if not all units. Maybe add categories to the unit help window? Use the existing categories but then also add a miscellaneous (assorted?) categoy for all the units that do not fight or are not factories etc.
Yes, edit -> add units is a mess for a map like this. Maybe it can be fixed with categories in the add units window?
I don’t mind no "i" key, as I just hover the mouse over units, so I really never noticed that the I key is not there anymore
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Because of my lack of testing, and especially testing stuff like naval transportation of heroes, I didn’t really know the behavior of the engine.
It actually seems like no unit generation of land units (createsUnitsList) happens at sea at all. Lucky me
So the previous change about pets been generated at sea, and that this was problematic, is not the case. It does not happen. Woohoo!
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@LaFayette said in Warcraft: War Heroes - Official Thread:
The lossless compression tool I'm aware of an use is
optipng, we run it automatically against PNG assets included with the game engine, this line shows an examples with args: https://github.com/triplea-game/assets/blob/44e60d38df85326a8007370030166b81db7a04d3/.travis/run_optipng#L14I've no idea how to do anything out of that, but this is not the thread for talking about it. I suppose I will just ask that to be run on all images of my map when asking it to be added to the repository. Shouldn't this maybe be a standard procedure, even if the mapmaker doesn't ask for it?
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@Cernel I'm offering to do so for this map, not so for any map whenever. Notably there is some coordination that should take place. I could be convinced maybe to do so across all maps on occasion, but again the coordination makes it more prohibitive. In general the map-upload process has been updated/designed to reduce/eliminate any centralized bottleneck like map admins running a compression job, namely so map makers can do all on their own.
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OK here is the latest pre-release of the v0.1.2 of the map – EXCLUSIVLY for download here
v0.1.2.zip
It is only XML changes - just copy it over to the map/games folder in zip fileV0.1.1 to v0.1.2
• Some unit price adjustments.
• All Elites and Veteran units cut to half price.
• Destroyer now moves, 2 not 3.
• All instances of items and origin skills affecting “all heroes”, now only affect heroes of the opposite faction.
• Fixed dynamite unit. It can no longer be thrown over air ways and it now actually works and participates in battle.
• Spells may now cross air ways (This is more intuitive, and now the spells may follow a hero flying on a 4 move air transport)My own experience:
When I play vs myself, controlling all 8 players, then I have not had the game break down. But I would much more like to play against AI. But when I play against AI there is a lot of different errors that can cause the map to crash. Is this what other people see? Or is it a memory thing?It is kind of demonization getting 5-10 rounds into the map and it breaks down. I guess I have to save some more, maybe after every round, and see if that changes anything.
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FWIW @Frostion , if you clone the map, or extract the zip file, it's in the right format for direct upload to github. https://desktop.github.com/ makes the sync process easier. If you commit often, then you can go back in time to any commit and restore; which means no more needs to take backups and syncing up to github is a just a few clicks of a button and no file zipping.
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@LaFayette I have used the free tool PNGGauntlet-3.1.2 (super easy to use) to compress all the tiles images. The total map size unzipped has gone from 204 to 167 MB.
