Pruning image and sound assets distributed with the game engine

Hepps

@LaFayette By that you mean on GitLost I'm assuming?

LaFayette

@Hepps Well, if we accumulate more images that are created and unused, it'll avoid creating more zip files. A forum post for "get your assets here" could be good, but I shudder to think about looking through dozens of zip files and the various variants. Nicer to have one place IMO.

Also I wonder if people would really want to post there if they have just one or two images.

For the record git deletes nothing, all items checked in are recorded in its history. Deleted files are marked as deleted but still always fully available in history.

LaFayette

@Hepps it would make it very easy to browse all images. All repo's have a 'download as zip' link. From there most OS will show thumbnail previews. No need to hunt through pages of forum posts downloading zip file after zip file.

Hepps

@LaFayette All good. I am just not a techy... so I was really just asking if what you were talking about was GIT Hub.

LaFayette

@Hepps In short yes. Git is a technology, like email. GitHub is a provider that hosts an implementation of Git, similar to how Gmail hosts email, or hotmail host email. There are other git providers, notably: bitbucket and gitlab. Github is very open source friendly.

Previously all TripleA assets, code and images and maps were on SVN hosted by SourceForge. That we went from one source control system (SVN) to another (git), really means that in some ways nothing changed over the lifetime of TripleA. I'm not sure if anyone here is really that big of a fan of SVN; but it was easy to confuse as sourceforge did happen to host a forums (and that is not SVN, that is just a simple forum). For completeness, what did change is that all map changes are no longer queued up for months at a time for one person, an admin, to do then a bunch of SVN work to register all the updates. With git that workload can be, for better or worse, distributed and is self service. You don't have to have (as in 100% required) a map admin anymore to push map updates for you.

Hepps

@LaFayette All good. I was just clarifying. I am behind the idea.

My suggestion to link it here was to ensure Neanderthals like myself know how to get to the "Pearly Gates".

LaFayette

The pruning effort is essentially done, the files being removed can be seen here:

It was interesting to see confusion around images and duplication. For example, 'puppet-states' is in the main game engine, but all maps with that player already include those images.

For sounds, most are used, the sounds in the 'other' folder can be pruned (not very many). It's also interesting to see when assets were 'disabled' instead of just being removed, eg: "_old.png" images

LaFayette

Should note, for sounds, the biggest surprise were the "turn_start" sounds, the game engine does not have configuration to play those sounds. Should be unused. FWIW: SoundPath.java has the list of folders that are looked at for playing sounds.

LaFayette

@Hepps Sorry I'm still scarred from the experience of:

Me: "We're updating TripleA technologies! Existing is going to become new, better, easier, and free up time for us to make more TripleA improvements faster!" :grinning_face_with_smiling_eyes:

Audience: "What!! Change! TRIPLEA IS OVER! IT IS DEAD! MAY AS WELL SHUT IT DOWN! Why are you introducing new things?!"

Me: "Umm.. nothing is new, just updated, the things being updated were transparent and took a lot of time to manage" :crying_face:

Audience: "SHUT IT DOWN, SCREW YOU, YOU'RE KILLING TRIPLEA, WE WON'T USE THAT, WE LOVE SOURCEFORGE, WE'RE NOT MIGRATING!! WE'RE LEAVING!"

Me: :anguished_face:

Hepps

@LaFayette

Sorry should have been more specific...

Technology is bad.png

Cernel

Commenting here about the proposal renamings at:
https://github.com/triplea-game/assets/pull/40/commits/79a8356d4d4e82bea77554391cc1fb2e17af53ce

Without considering the removed items (your call here) or the changes from plural to singular (not much an opinion here, tho in general I prefer having either all singular or all plural, for consistency (for example, are you sure you want to have forest singular and mountains plural?)), the other renamed things are worsening, in my opinion:
coastal->coast
In a grand strategic game, the actual coast can easily be but a very small portion of the whole territory touching the sea. For example, you can have Italy as a single territory. It would make sense to say that Italy is a coastal territory, but it would not make sense to say that Italy is a coast. Even if the game would be so detailed as having Normandy as a sigle territory, it would definitely sound better to me to define Normandy as a coastal territory, rather than say that Normandy is a coast. Coast would really fit better than coastal only for tactical games.
mires->marsh
Mire (as well as wetland) is a more generic term, encompassing both marshes and swamps, among other things. However, I would agree that marsh is at least better than swamp, if only one of the two would be available.
high_sea->sea
It doesn't make a lot of sense having a "sea" territory, as usually sea zones are all sea. This can apply to some uncommon cases, like maps having "sea zones" represeting rivers, and such, but a division between coastal and non coastal sea zones would be most likely more relevant for a grand strategic game. Even if a game would have a representation of internal waters, the sea is probably going to still be the common type of sea zones, so you would rather want to have a territory effect for the rivers and lakes, leaving the sea as the default (thus no territory effect for it or only for forbidding units altogether). So, in this case, we could rather add a territory effects for "internal" or "river" sea zones (better internal, as I guess such an effect would apply both to rivers and lakes).

Cernel

@LaFayette Removing sounds that are not generally used is fairly agreeable, albeit I'm warning you that any of those sounds could be specifically used (and in use), by specifying the path to them, in the sounds properties. If removing, I would rather suggest moving them into some assets, that are not downloaded with the program, but available for mapmakers to find and use.

LaFayette

@Cernel Indeed my suggestion for an 'assets' repo is a place to put these unused sounds images. AFAIK the sounds marked for removal are completely unused. There were not very many, but of some note, many images were unused.

Cernel

@LaFayette I was just saying that in theory there could be maps that have the path to those sounds specified in their properties, thus are using them. However, I would be surprised if this is actually the case and, as a mapmaker, I would not do it.

Generally speaking, this is the main reason why I rather prefer adding all the stuff within my map, even if unnecessarily covering or even duplicating something currently available in assets. So to avoid issues related to possible future changes in the program's assets.

Hepps

@Cernel said in Pruning image and sound assets distributed with the game engine:

Commenting here about the proposal renamings at:
https://github.com/triplea-game/assets/pull/40/commits/79a8356d4d4e82bea77554391cc1fb2e17af53ce

Without considering the removed items (your call here) or the changes from plural to singular (not much an opinion here, tho in general I prefer having either all singular or all plural, for consistency (for example, are you sure you want to have forest singular and mountains plural?)), the other renamed things are worsening, in my opinion:
coastal->coast
In a grand strategic game, the actual coast can easily be but a very small portion of the whole territory touching the sea. For example, you can have Italy as a single territory. It would make sense to say that Italy is a coastal territory, but it would not make sense to say that Italy is a coast. Even if the game would be so detailed as having Normandy as a sigle territory, it would definitely sound better to me to define Normandy as a coastal territory, rather than say that Normandy is a coast. Coast would really fit better than coastal only for tactical games.
mires->marsh
Mire (as well as wetland) is a more generic term, encompassing both marshes and swamps, among other things. However, I would agree that marsh is at least better than swamp, if only one of the two would be available.

Mire is not commonly used in English at all as a noun... but
rather is generally used as verd... "He got mired down in the details".

In close to 50 years of English as my native tongue I have never heard a single person refer to a swamp as a mire.

Generally speaking when someone uses the term Wetlands they are speaking about an area of connected lakes and rivers containing swamps... ergo the de-facto term is swamps when trying to describe a swamp.

What you seem to forget is that what we are trying to do here is use the most common terms in the wide spread use and with the highest level of recognition. Not the most accurate in terms of its dictionary definition.

high_sea->sea
It doesn't make a lot of sense having a "sea" territory, as usually sea zones are all sea. This can apply to some uncommon cases, like maps having "sea zones" represeting rivers, and such, but a division between coastal and non coastal sea zones would be most likely more relevant for a grand strategic game. Even if a game would have a representation of internal waters, the sea is probably going to still be the common type of sea zones, so you would rather want to have a territory effect for the rivers and lakes, leaving the sea as the default (thus no territory effect for it or only for forbidding units altogether). So, in this case, we could rather add a territory effects for "internal" or "river" sea zones (better internal, as I guess such an effect would apply both to rivers and lakes).

You mistake the need for a terrain type because it has some effect verses just having one for consistency sake visually while playing a game. Sometimes a terrain effect can be added purely so that they appear at the bottom of the screen no matter what territory you cursor over. It adds a certain sense of continuity to the visual aspect of the game. The same thing can be said for plains... it is usually the terrain that is the basis for other terrains having bonuses or negatives applied to units... but when you add it to a game with terrains... it looks much better if every territory has one (whether it has an effect or not).

The other thing is there could be circumstances where you want a Sea terrain to have an effect. It might not affect a great deal of units... but those effects might be important for the game. An example is forth-coming.

Whether you call it High-Sea or just Sea... is a matter of semantics. Again the goal here is to use the most recognizable term that the vast majority of people are going to understand.

Furthermore, the idea is to keep these descriptors as short as possible. I doubt anybody is going to get lost if a terrain effect is called Mountain or Mountains verses Mountainous.

Cernel

@Hepps If not mire, then I would go with wetland. Wetland would also have the benefit of clarifying it is a "land" territory effect, as a marsh or a swamp could really be either a land or a water (that is, sea, in TripleA) territory.

I want also to point out that TripleA has the naming limit of calling water territories as "sea zones", so you are not supposed to have water zones that are not sea, but I see this rather as a limit of the general naming.

I don't think that giving all sea zones the "sea" territory effect just to see the related image would make sense (I'm not saying that having all sea territories having the same sea territory effect would be pointless; for example, I can see a very good use to it for having different combat values for air units in land and sea), and actually I would see it as a wrong use of what territory effects are for, but I guess this is purely subjective. The case of having a "plains" territory effect, doing nothing, is more interesting, but I still think that I'll rather skip having pointless territory effects (and something has to be the default, of course; tho you could decide that the default is "hills", and having territory effects for "plains" and "mountains").

Cernel

@Cernel Though also the case of all sea zones having the same "sea" territory effect to set different combat values for air units (from land) looks to me a workaround of something rather related to the more general land/water (actually, land/sea) distinction, that is missing from the engine. This also considering that, then, the battlecalculator would require you to set the "sea" territory effect every time you are in a sea battle, while it should rather automatically use the correct values, depending if the battle is land or sea (talking if the aim is just having some air units with different att/def values depending if battling on land or sea).

Hepps

@Cernel If you are battle calculating in a sea territory (or sea zone)... presumably with the sea terrain... then the engine already automatically adds the terrain type.

LaFayette

@Cernel the renames was so that the territory effects would match territory effects that are in use. I'm sorry to have shifted the goal posts on you a bit, at this point if an image or sound are unused, they are pruned from the main game engine. As such, all of the new territory effects are unused.

If the territory effects being picked up by maps that previously were missing an icon will cause any kind of problem, then the action to take would be to remove the new territory effects.

If we have a new "triplea-maps/assets" repo, then they would have a home available to any map maker that would want to browse them. They could then copy them into their maps and name them as would suit their needs (I believe that pretty much was the original goal with providing a set of terrain effects, to give map makers something to work with).

FWIW, here is the list of all territory effects that are in use, the renames were done so that the territory effects would match something from the list below. It's of course easier and more consistent to rename the new territory effect images than it is to rename the territory effects already in use.

:~/work/maps$ while read map; do grep "territoryEffect" "$map"; done < <(find . -name "*.xml")  | grep "territoryEffect name=" | sed 's/^\s*//' | sed 's/.*name="//' | sed 's/".*$//' | tr 'A-Z' 'a-z' | sort | uniq
air
arctic
capital
cave
city
coast
confined
crossing
deep
desert
earth
entrenched
fire
forest
fortified
hill
hills
houseaethalos
housebarowulf
houseculst
housedurn
houseellowstan
houseflynn
housegregoran
housejohanesal
housekulfras
houselannassey
housepriminorth
housestahl
housetallimore
houseustrahan
housewilfred
i
ii
iii
island
iv
jungle
lake
land_territory
major_river
marsh
mountain
mountains
northerncommand
northrecruiting
o
ocean
open
pass
plains
port
river
sahara
sea
settlement
shallow
snow
southrecruiting
swamp
t
trees
tundra
ungovernable
urban
v
walled
waste
water
woods

tl;dr: either the renames are useful or we remove all of the new territory effects and put them into 'triplea-maps/assets' (or some sort of other similar file hosting)

Cernel

@LaFayette Also since territory effects are rather niche, I think we should rather think about devising a good, coherent, limited set of territory effects to be the default for relatively basic games, from now on, rather than worrying too much, or at all, about what is being currently used or named by the relatively few maps having them, that were made at various points in the past.