Allow user to specifically choose amphibious offloaded units in battle chooser

Cernel

@rainova said in Allow user to specifically choose amphibious offloaded units in battle chooser:

@cernel pointed out mistakes in my question, thanks. Since it is already 1h old, I cannot change it any more and post the correction here:

Let's imagine we have marines with normal attack 2 and marine bonus +2 and also improved infantry with normal attack 3 and no marine bonus, and both marines and improved infantry are attacking from land and from sea. What unit order would you like?

A)

withdrawable marines (attack 2+0)

non-withdrawable improved infantry (attack 3+0)

withdrawable improved infantry (attack 3+0)

non-withdrawable marines (attack 2+2)

(sort first by attack including bonus, then by non-withdrawable)

B )

withdrawable marines (attack 2+0)

non-withdrawable marines (attack 2+2)

non-withdrawable improved infantry (attack 3+0)

withdrawable improved infantry (attack 3+0)

(sort first by attack without bonus, then by bonus, then by non-withdrawable)

If you prefer A) - let's assume we now have the some horseman (attack 4, marine malus -2) and some sellsword (attack 2, no marine bonus/malus) attacking. What would you prefer:

A1)

non-withdrawable sellsword (attack 2+0)

non-withdrawable horseman (attack 4-2)

withdrawable sellsword (attack 2+0)

withdrawable horseman (attack 4+0)

(sort by attack+marine bonus/malus, then non-withdrawable, then attack)

A2)

non-withdrawable sellsword (attack 2+0)

withdrawable sellsword (attack 2+0)

non-withdrawable horseman (attack 4-2)

withdrawable horseman (attack 4+0)

(sort by attack+marine bonus/malus, then attack or unitType, then non-withdrawable)

Thanks in advance for your input

I've really the feeling this is getting bogged down in minor details. I think chances are that noone (else than me) will answer you here. Moreover, the few that might answer are likely not to read the whole topic attentively before doing so because so much information has been added to this topic that I doubt many will want to go through it.

My suggestion is just add the "non-withdrawable" wherever you want and possibly have this new feature (arguably a problem fix) done for 2.6. The order of losses autoselection can be reorganized after this new feature is already available.

RaiNova

@trevan said in Allow user to specifically choose amphibious offloaded units in battle chooser:

@rainova I don't think the UI causualty selection should be this advanced. Just split the non-retreatable units from the retreatable units and keep them together. I don't think the UI should worry about power, bonus, etc.

Thanks for your wisdom. So I did not change the unit order. Then I came across this test case:

To me it looks the non-withdrawable elephant should be shown first, i.e.

@Trevan, @Cernel, everybody: What's your preference?

Cernel

@rainova I believe the root of the problem is the fact that, as I understand it, the program is always not showing the undamaged state of the unit if none are present at that state. I would go with your second example, but I would rather have the penultimate row (the one showing the image of a damaged non-withdrawable warelephant) having a first column showing a "x0" non-damaged non-withdrawable warelephant, whereas the "x2" damaged non-withdrawable warelephants (which are shown on the first column) would be shown on a second column.

Again, I also think these are minor matters: I would certainly take any one of the proposals so far made over not having this feature at all.

Trevan

@rainova
The non-retreatable row and the retreatable row should have the same number of columns. So there is some other issue that is causing the non-retreatable row to not show the damaged column.

Cernel

@trevan said in Allow user to specifically choose amphibious offloaded units in battle chooser:

@rainova
The non-retreatable row and the retreatable row should have the same number of columns. So there is some other issue that is causing the non-retreatable row to not show the damaged column.

It is actually not showing the non-damaged column and moving the damaged column in the place of the non-damaged one. I have assumed this is not an issue but intentional (not to show the non-damaged and non-withdrawable units because there are none).

@Panther Do you think it is better to call land units which cannot retreat as non-withdrawable or non-retreatable? Is there a definite difference between retreating and withdrawing?

Trevan

@cernel said in Allow user to specifically choose amphibious offloaded units in battle chooser:

It is actually not showing the non-damaged column and moving the damaged column in the place of the non-damaged one. I have assumed this is not an issue but intentional (not to show the non-damaged and non-withdrawable units because there are none).

Ah, good point. I didn't notice that those were damaged elephants. So I think it is working fine as is. But I do agree with you that it should probably show the non-damaged units but with 0 in them. That can be a later improvement.

Panther

@cernel said in Allow user to specifically choose amphibious offloaded units in battle chooser:

@Panther Do you think it is better to call land units which cannot retreat as non-withdrawable or non-retreatable? Is there a definite difference between retreating and withdrawing?

Actually I don't know whether there is a difference between the meaning of "to retreat" and "to withdraw" in English language.

But maybe a native speaker can tell us ...

As we are talking about retreat-rules I would prefer "retreat", in case the wording makes no difference.

TheDog

to withdraw, is an organised move away from the battlefront
to retreat, is not as organised as a withdraw (its messy & chaotic)
as an aside to rout, is a every man for themselves

So in TripleA terms either withdraw or retreat is fine, but I too would also go with retreat.

Cernel

To me, to say that something is "withdrawable" sounds more natural than "retreatable", so I've wondered how frequent each of them is over the internet.

In google, "retreatable" gives 16,300 results, whereas "withdrawable" gives 1,260,000 results (writing both within quotation marks). Honestly, I didn't expect such a huge difference: may someone else check this on google out of curiosity?

RaiNova

The top military command withdraws units. It is the units who retreat - and may route in the process.

The TripleA player plays the top military command role. In the situation we are discussing here, routing is not an issue. IMHO we should use the the term withdraw

How do we come to a conclusion so I can unify the terminology in the program code the right way?

RaiNova

@cernel said in Allow user to specifically choose amphibious offloaded units in battle chooser:

Do you believe that is a correct or else advisable behaviour for TripleA? I would say a raster-images-based program should always work at 100% scaling default, no matter if the general (Windows or whatever) zoom is set otherwise.

Currently I am using the 1942 game for testing with 100% display (scaling switched off), and for me the images are too small on a 4k screen. I could solve that by setting map zoom to 150%, but map zoom > 100% is not supported.

Cernel

@rainova said in Allow user to specifically choose amphibious offloaded units in battle chooser:

@cernel said in Allow user to specifically choose amphibious offloaded units in battle chooser:

Do you believe that is a correct or else advisable behaviour for TripleA? I would say a raster-images-based program should always work at 100% scaling default, no matter if the general (Windows or whatever) zoom is set otherwise.

Currently I am using the 1942 game for testing with 100% display (scaling switched off), and for me the images are too small on a 4k screen. I could solve that by setting map zoom to 150%, but map zoom > 100% is not supported.

Try to look at the map and units at a monitor resolution of 2/3 of the maximum whilst having 100% general zoom and at the maximum (4k) monitor resolution whilst having 150% general zoom. What, if anything, gives a better visual of the map and units?

Meaning, starting from a 4k monitor resolution at 100% general zoom, is it better for your view to increase the zoom to 150% or to decrease the monitor resolution to 2.666k?

Cernel

@rainova said in Allow user to specifically choose amphibious offloaded units in battle chooser:

The top military command withdraws units. It is the units who retreat - and may route in the process.

The TripleA player plays the top military command role. In the situation we are discussing here, routing is not an issue. IMHO we should use the the term withdraw

How do we come to a conclusion so I can unify the terminology in the program code the right way?

Though, I have to say that to withdraw makes me think that we are deciding unit per unit whether or not to withdraw it (that is what we should be able to do when we submerge submarines, although TripleA fails to support this). The concep of, nomally (full land invasion), withdrawing the entire army in the field or nothing, without having the option deliberately to withdraw only part of your units is something that I do not associate to the concept of withdrawing. Terms like "fall back" or "pull out" come to mind.

A long time wish of me was a new feature that would allow withdrawing/retreating as many units as you want (amongst those which you can withdraw), instead of being obliged to retreat all you can or nothing, and also being able to retreat once the battle is won (retreating when no defending units are left). Of course, off topic.

@Panther What I actually meant is whether there is some sort of official distinction between withdrawing and retreating, game wise.

Panther

@cernel said in Allow user to specifically choose amphibious offloaded units in battle chooser:

@Panther What I actually meant is whether there is some sort of official distinction between withdrawing and retreating, game wise.

Result of a quick check:

v1 uses "withdraw" only
v2, v3, v4, v5, v6, 1940... all use "retreat" only
LHTR2 uses "withdraw" and "retreat" both. See pages 14-16. (Step 7 of the Conduct Combat Phase). For the distinction please see yourself (as I am short of time at the moment).

RaiNova

@cernel said in Allow user to specifically choose amphibious offloaded units in battle chooser:

Try to look at the map and units at a monitor resolution of 2/3 of the maximum whilst having 100% general zoom and at the maximum (4k) monitor resolution whilst having 150% general zoom. What, if anything, gives a better visual of the map and units?
Meaning, starting from a 4k monitor resolution at 100% general zoom, is it better for your view to increase the zoom to 150% or to decrease the monitor resolution to 2.666k?

The unit icons have about the same quality with 150%@4K and 100%@2660 x 1440. But text is perfectly sharp with 4k while blurry with 2660 x 1440. We should not expect players to change their screen resolution in order to see TripleA units big enough

Cernel

@rainova No idea if it is feasible, but my suggestion is that every time you start TripleA whilst having a zoom which is going to be applied to the program, the program prompts the user to choose whether or not actually to apply the zoom to TripleA too (maybe with a tick box for not asking it again, though such a choice should better be somehow reversible).

We should not expect players to change their screen resolution in order to see TripleA units big enough

I agree. I remember someone (who I believe is not any longer active) in the past arguing that doing so was easy enough, back then when I pointed out that most of TripleA was going to become visually obsolete with the advent of 4k.

Some might remember that it has been many years I'm keeping saying everyone in TripleA should think primarily in terms of 4k resolution (like advicing mapmakers to make maps optimized, or at least good enough, for 4k screens).

A good "worst-case" test map might be "World At War", since it is a very popular game which has very small units and zones.

Cernel

I followed this feature since the initial take by @Trevan. I really don't understand why it needs to be refined if it does. Currently the program fails to support this rule at all, so I would say having this feature is better than nothing as long as it does not error out. I don't understand why not having it in the program already, at its current state (whatever the preselection given).

RaiNova

@cernel I have finished programming the feature - using the answers I got to my questions and trying to keep the change small -a few weeks ago. The only thing incomplete is integration testing the unit chooser component (which is the one I changed). I found the follwing use cases it is involved in:

BattleDisplay
TripleAPlayer.pickTerritoryAndUnits
Place
EditPanel.selectUnitsToRemove
EditPanel.actionPerformed
MovePanel.selectUnitsToMove
BattlePanel.getCasualtiesAa
TripleAFrame.scrambleUnitsQuery
TripleAFrame.selectUnitsQuery
TripleAFrame.moveFightersToCarrier

Use Cases 1-6 work fine, but I can't work out how to produce the use cases 7-10. What do I need to do? In which game?

If I don‘t get any help, I‘ll probably run some more tests on the next two weekends and checkin in die middle of November.

Cernel

@rainova said in Allow user to specifically choose amphibious offloaded units in battle chooser:

BattlePanel.getCasualtiesAa

TripleAFrame.scrambleUnitsQuery

TripleAFrame.selectUnitsQuery

TripleAFrame.moveFightersToCarrier

Use Cases 1-6 work fine, but I can't work out how to produce the use cases 7-10. What do I need to do? In which game?

I'm guessing from the names only.
7 may be in what order to display casualties in games having fly-over fire (Classic and Revised), and I guess only for games in which you cannot choose them (Revised).
8 may be for selecting units to scramble (as in Global 1940).
9 may be an old legacy item (maybe not any longer used), back then when there was only one mode of selecting units (since it just says "select units").
10 may be for moving non-newly-placed air units to newly-placed carriers from the territory used to place the carrier (as in Revised basic).

Cernel

@rainova said in Allow user to specifically choose amphibious offloaded units in battle chooser:

@cernel said in Allow user to specifically choose amphibious offloaded units in battle chooser:

Try to look at the map and units at a monitor resolution of 2/3 of the maximum whilst having 100% general zoom and at the maximum (4k) monitor resolution whilst having 150% general zoom. What, if anything, gives a better visual of the map and units?
Meaning, starting from a 4k monitor resolution at 100% general zoom, is it better for your view to increase the zoom to 150% or to decrease the monitor resolution to 2.666k?

The unit icons have about the same quality with 150%@4K and 100%@2660 x 1440. But text is perfectly sharp with 4k while blurry with 2660 x 1440. We should not expect players to change their screen resolution in order to see TripleA units big enough

I'm curious about what results you'd have doing the same thing but with 200% and 1920x1080. It should look bad/blurred if the monitor makes an interpolation, but it should look just as good as a same-sized 2K otherwise (that is if having foursomes of all-adjacent pixels in the 4k acting as a single pixel in a 2k).