Lock History option
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It'd be nice to have one; one that keeps you at the point in the game history you click on, and doesn't change unless you tell it to.
It'd be the history counterpart to lock map.
The basic issue is that when watching a live game, whenever someone moves, the game shifts everything to there. The existing lock map feature will keep the game from moving the map to the location where the movement is occurring; but there's no way I can see to keep it from moving the game to the current game state.
I wanted to look at some of the moves on a prior turn, but because people are constantly moving, the history keeps getting shifted to the current game, preventing me from being able to take a look at what happened in the past.
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@zlefin Yeah, I've had this happen as well and usually just save the game and open it locally
But definitely a valid feature request especially when spectating games or in games with lots of players and you aren't the active player and want to review past moves.
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Should 'lock history' perhaps be the default behavior? If viewing the history, we could show a "history mode" message or overlay to indicate it's not the current game.
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@LaFayette I don't get it. You are always in history mode, at least default, when someone else is playing.
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@LaFayette I don't see the point of having a, likely annoying, "history mode" overlay message, since when you are in history you are presented with the left bar, showing the history. I never felt that was not telling enough.
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@Cernel The idea is more that when you click in history, it stays locked. If the game transitions to history mode, then it follows with live play. When history mode is locked, we indicate this with an overlay of some sort (it does not need to be the same size or treatment as the edit mode overlay). To turn off the lock, we could have a 'jump to live' button, perhaps near the overlay or in place of the overlay to turn off history lock.
There have been a few times where clicking on history can be accidental or just spend so long browsing around that you forget that you are not looking at the latest. A UI indication that you are not viewing 'live' would help provide additional feedback. It's perhaps most typical when it is your turn and history mode is turned on to review previous moves or purchase, and then instead of turning off history mode moves are made. As further consideration, you may recall it used to be a game corrupting bug to make edits during history mode, UI feedback while history mode is on could/would help that kind of situation.
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@LaFayette said in Lock History option:
@Cernel The idea is more that when you click in history, it stays locked.
If you mean that when you click at any point in the history, that shows in the history tab (on your left), you stay at that point, no matter if someone or something else (chance triggers, for example) is adding new history (usually by currently making moves), I agree. But you, then, also need a clearly visible button for restoring the game to current.
This is pretty much how whatever decent professional chat program works, for example when you watch anything on YouTube or Twitch. If you are scrolling through chat history, you stay there, and just are offered a button to go to current chatting. By the way, this is an issue the lobby/host chatrooms have, as any time someone chats you are pushed down to reading the new message automatically (it can be a bit annoying if you are trying to Ctrl+C something in chat history).
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@Cernel Indeed, we're on the same page I think. Good point about chat, unless scrolled to the end, the chat position should remain.
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Reviving this; I am assessing the feasibility of coding this myself and make a git issue to track my progress and make notes on findings, but haven't decided how to label the issue yet (since you're not supposed to use 'feature request' there, and I don't see a listed option for just saying 'feature'); also there are some points raised in here about what the behavior should be, and it does seem like this is a good place to work out the intended behavior of the feature rather than doing so in git. Though this isn't so good a place to actually delve into the coding details involved.
Of particular note in terms of behavior is the combat screen - you don't want it repeatedly coming up when you're trying to look at history; but if you're playing one of the nations in the game, and your input is needed, that's a much higher priority than if you're just a spectator.
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@zlefin Sorry it is confusing, forums is for players, issues is for developers. Use the forums to work out the details of how something should work, use issues to discuss with other developers how to code it.
This might be a difficult one to tackle, maybe not. I suspect it might be difficult due to the general cludginess of how the history is rendered. I will commend any effort, though you might be about to get knee deep in the swamp on this one : )
Do feel free to post any coding help/question/discussion items as needed, we will be eager to help you, help the project.
Of particular note in terms of behavior is the combat screen - you don't want it repeatedly coming up when you're trying to look at history; but if you're playing one of the nations in the game, and your input is needed, that's a much higher priority than if you're just a spectator.
FWIW - There is an option to show combats as an observer. It's somewhat hidden in the settings window and would do well to have a second home (a place to also toggle it) on the battle window itself.
