Warcraft: War Heroes - Official Thread

Frostion

@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 MB

For 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

Frostion

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!

Cernel

@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#L14

I'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?

LaFayette

@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.

Frostion

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 file

V0.1.1 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.

LaFayette

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.

Frostion

@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.

Frostion

V0.1.1 to v0.1.2 is now downloadable ingame

NOTE: This version does not seem to AI compatible! At least not on my PC. The map will only start with all human players. Please take a look at this dear Devs

• Some unit price adjustments.
• All baseTiles and reliefTiles images have been compressed, reducing their size to about 65% of before.
• All Elites and Veteran units cut to half price.
• Instructor Origin, Officer Origin, Recruitment-Posters and Crown-of-Kings now generates less veterans and elites. All standard fighting units still produce 1 veteran or 1 elite per turn.
• Dwarven Riflemen added as an elite purchasable unit.
• 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)
• The terms “Ranged Speed” and “Ranged Power” has been replaced by “Targeted Rolls” and “Targeted Power”. I really liked the old terms, as they were more Fantasy roleplay-like, but it also could create some confusion if players are used to see the other terms. Also the engine generated tooltips use the new terms.

avshar

So i have tried the game out and the A.I. turns seemed to work fine. I am playing as suggested the horde races. After the A.I. went it then asked me to pick my Orc hero's origin skills. I picked four different ones and then continued but no matter what i did i could not place the skills on the hero as it suggested i do. It just kept saying nothing else can be placed in the region my hero was standing in. So i continued the turn without placing them and then at the end of the turn it let me place them again like they were recruits instead of skills and then even though i had moved my hero into the factory location during the turn it still wouldn't let me place them so i am at a loss. No clue what i am doing wrong or right. Hope this helps.

Frostion

@avshar I think that I have to help the players out a bit more by writing an explanation on how to place and activate the origin skills. I will update the map with this at some point.

You have to purchase the skills, then place them on the Hero Bar, not the Hero him/her self.

The hero bar is the top bar of the map. But it is also to be placed on a specific area of the Hero Bar, the buttom left area (between the squares) of the field in the bar. Right now the pop-up picture during start is the only hint, and this is obviously not enough.

Please return with more feedback when you get it to work Right now I have not worked on this map for some time so my list of things to fix is empty.

PS: Download the latest pre release to avoid game breaking errors. There still are errors but not the critical anti air error that bugged this map for a long time.

PPS: And use Hard AI.

avshar

@Frostion Ok i will try this and play it again. I have the current version of the game and always play the A.I. on top difficulty. I will let you know if encounter any other problems. Maybe i will also start a game against the Horde to see if those issues you mentioned are still happening.

Frostion

@avshar if playing against horde, I would recommend setting all horde players to 125% income at the start screen, to compensate for them stacking up units and not expanding so much during early game.

TheDog

Frostion, WoW, just WoW !!!
It looks and feels great.
First game, playing Orc Horde only, rest are Hard AI.
Crashed see screenie below. Tried to send it via report to TripleA, but it would not let me.
Tried to replay from the last saved Even and Odd saves, it still crashes at the same point.

Frostion

@TheDog yea the map still has some issues. Could you drag and drop the save you have into a post here? Then maybe a dev can take a look at what is causing the breakdown. That would be great!

EDIT: That error does look familiar. You could also try to download the latest prerelease and run the save again. Maybe a newer version of TripleA will actually run it without errors.
https://github.com/triplea-game/triplea/releases

Frostion

After playtesting this map a bit more, trying to figure out the next development step, I can again point out this map’s 3 biggest issues. As these are pretty much all AI related, does any dev with AI knowledge feel like taking a look at the save game and the error reports? ( @Alexei-Svitkine @redrum @LaFayette @RoiEX or other dev?)

The AI-players are lacking the ability to handle land territory canals that do only allow certain units. (In this map these are called airways and marked with blue arrows) The result is AI players stacking up around capitals and other places with airways. Like here, where the enemy army stacks up outside a capital that they cannot enter the way they want to. Only flying units can pass these canals:
26roundsWWH.tsvg
The AI-players lack ability to purchase factories during play. At some point during map development, the AI did purchase factories, but not at present time for some reason. This really hinders the AI from winning. I assume it is some kind of resource type issue, as there are plenty of 3+ PU territories.
The "Wrong owner" Issue. When AI controlled main players capture territories from AI minor players this error pops up. It does not happen when human controlled main players capture from AI minor players. I suspect the cause is that the AI minor player units killed spawn an infrastructure unit when killed, and this unit is overtaken by the attacker.
(Don’t blame me for duplicate error reports, as I did not upload more than one of these (I think)):
https://github.com/triplea-game/triplea/issues/6836
https://github.com/triplea-game/triplea/issues/6439
https://github.com/triplea-game/triplea/issues/6840

LaFayette

Do any of those error reports have a savegame attached that is just before the error occurs?

TheDog

@LaFayette sadly no, but now Im saving every turn.

Frostion

@LaFayette the "wrong owner" errors happen literally every single time an AI player attacks and wins over an minor AI player. So by running an all AI game, one can easily make the error occur during round 1.

LaFayette

@Frostion cool, though isolating it is still really helpful. Any code fixes need to have that set up and you can be sure we'll play through it a dozen times while isolating the problem and verifying any fix. So getting a save is a necessary step. Getting that ready just saves time, hence very helpful.

Trevan

@Frostion I've been able to duplicate the error. So I'm looking into it.

@LaFayette I'm getting stack overflows when I load the Warcraft War Heroes in my game launched from IntelliJ. But I don't get the stack overflows when I run the prerelease game. I'm assuming there is a setting I need to change but I don't know where it is yet.