Introduction

Hi everyone.
As some of you might know I'm silently working on a complete UI rework.
This UI rework will probably take at least half a year until it's completely usable (not final).
Because this is going to be a lot of work, I'm asking for your creative help.
This new UI comes with a completely changed core concept. Everything is going to be a in single window, to avoid small and frequent popups and to allow for a real fullscreen mode.
The new UI will also only support a single game instance at once. So in order to play multiple games at once you need to start TripleA multiple times. This makes the code less complex, and isn't going to be confusing, because there's just one window per application.
BIG and few Buttons. A big goal of this project is to avoid too much options per menu.
Also the new UI will support full localization, i.e. multiple languages.
To get an idea of how the new UI looks in the current state you can check out 1.9.0.0.8105+ and go to Engine Preferences > Testing > Use JavaFX UI and set this option to True.
Not that you need to manually restart TripleA for this change to become active.

Why I need your creativity

TripleA should be user friendly, not just "work for developers/power users".
I'm completely open for suggestions what the new UI should look like (as long as my requirements I mentioned before are met).
Colors, fonts and general layout are not final and can be changed if you think they're not intuitive to use.
Note I'm only accepting constructive feedback.
Don't tell me what not to do, tell me what to do!
Should there be sound on the start screen? Should there be Gameplay in the background of the start page? And similar questions, not "don't use this color".
I'm not going to promise anything, but if I believe your suggestion is good and is implementable in a short amount of time (less than a week). I'll try to bring it into the UI.

Final Words

It's still a long road until we get to a polished UI.
In the meantime we try to simplify the current UI to "rewire" some of the current code to work with a new UI.
If you want to return to the normal UI, go to Settings>Testing>Use this experimental UI and switch off the toggle.

Known Issues

The splash screen doesn't hide when the experimental UI pops up. This is an install4j issue, so it's up to them to fix it, but it shouldn't be too annoying.
Teaser:

Props to you @Panther you're getting really good at troubleshooting common issues
Couldn't have done it any better

Well I'd not value this as a pure technical discussion, so the forum is probably a place that suits well.
It's a bit hard to tell how to learn more about the engine, but I hope I can give you an idea how I got started with this project:
I first got involved with triplea development 2 and a half years ago (On 1st April 2016 to be precise).
Some time before I discovered triplea searching for an A&A that worked on Windows 7 or higher. I quickly realised that triplea was written in java (due to an icon that wasn't correctly set), and I had a couple of things in mind I wanted to change about it.
I'd consider myself to be a programming noob back then (I knew how to write simple programs and the syntax of java so that's the basic knowledge I had), but back then I had the confidence I could achieve everything by simply messing around with the code (how wrong I was).
But I found a couple of things in the code I found mildly annoying (generic raw type warnings in my case, that could easily be fixed by adding a couple of lines).
Combine this with my perfectionism and my first pull Request was born. (I had used git before but only using the github desktop client.)
Somehow one thing lead to the next and here I am 2 and a half years later, with much more knowledge about programming, java and the triplea engine.
My approach really was simply learning by doing, the idea came first, and then I started trying to figure out what needs to be changed to achieve that, not always successful.

To conclude: I'd recommend learning the absolute basics about programming (if statements, while loops, functions) and then trying to apply that knowledge to the code on your own.
We can show you how to setup your pc locally so you can mess with a couple lines and try out what happens.
Of course we can give you hints about what part of the code is roughly responsible for what functionality, but the truth is that nobody really knows the codebase 100% because triplea is such an old project.
So everyone is some sort of specialist for a certain area of the code.

I hope this gives you a good idea on how to approach such an ambitious plan.

So if you have checked the lates pre-release lately you might will have noticed some changes on the Pbf/PbEM screen:

Most of the changes were under-the-hood changes, you hopefully won't notice at all. Perhaps the only thing you want to notice is that using the latest version, the local.cache file you probably will have noticed in your triplea folder becomes redundant and can be deleted. Of course you probably want to keep it for now when you plan to return to 1.9 versions in the future.

Back to the original topic:
As you may have noticed on the screen there are a lot of features missing, most notably the Help functionality and the ability to non-persistently store credentials for forum email etc.
"But where's the option to set our login credentials?" you may ask. Fear not, they have just moved to all the other engine settings to be consistent throughout the engine. I know that this isn't obvious to the user, so we probably need to include better instructions, which is the point at which you come into play.
How should users get an introduction to PbF/PbEM. A wall of text provided as a popup? A lot of Tooltips? Links to the forum? Hire someone to provide a 24/7 call center service to explain PbF/PbEM to people?
What would you like to see when first opening this page? Comment down below.

Also if you know something you always found confusing, that should be explained in detail, please let us know as well.

@redrum It's a little bit more complex than that. During the last update of the forum software I had to upgrade node.js from v6 to v10 for it to work.
However a silent error sneaked in: The newer nodebb version didn't recompile some binary dependencies (that are required for image processing), therefore the server had an internal server error for image uploads (the server compresses images) and uploads didn't work.
So all I had to do is recompile the dependencies using the newer node.js version. There were some complications having to do with write permissions in certain folders, but now everything is working again.

In order to fix the MDS (ZombieLoad) CPU vulnerability, our server hoster will restart a couple of our servers in the coming two weeks.
The planned schedule is as follows:

• 2019-06-25 3:00:00 AM UTC - TripleA-Forum
• 2019-06-27 2:00:00 AM UTC - bot35_frankfurt_de
• 2019-06-29 1:00:00 AM UTC - bot55_london_uk
• 2019-07-01 5:00:00 PM UTC - bot65_tokyo_jp
• 2019-06-26 4:00:00 AM UTC - PreRelease

They are scheduling a downtime window of 2 hours but assume the actual downtime will be much less.
The servers should start the bots again on their own automatically, but we had some issues in the past with this process (which hopefully should be fixed by now, but you never know), so we might be short on a couple of bots for some time in the worst case (for me this time window is somewhat in the middle of the night, so I can't stay up that late on a weekday, hopefully one of the other devs can have a look at this).

Sorry for the inconvinience

@LaFayette About the territory naming problem:
Wouldn't it make sense then to simply give territories unique ids and use that internally instead of names as identifiers and keep names a visual-only thing?

WIP

@taplayerzz To give you a rough overview of the way the dice are being rolled:

When playing PbF/PbEM

Whenever a player needs dice rolls to determine a result of a battle, a request to dice.tripleawarclub.org is being made over a secure HTTPS connection (relatively strong encryption for web standards). On a successfull roll (i.e. a valid request) an email is being sent to each player to prevent someone to just reload an old savegame from a round ago and replay the same scenario and get different results that may favor someone elses turn. So if you get 2 emails mentioning the "same" battle, you know something's odd.

Playing over the internet

Private hosts

No guarantees here, the private host has full control over his server code in theory

'Bots' aka Official Hosts

We host the bots ourselves and have therefore ensured that the code is unaltered.
The actual rolling is done on the bots, so therefore no practical way of altering the code remotely.
However the results are being sent over an unsecure connection, so in theory someone could hijack your private connection and simulate a complete game for you i.e. pretend you rolled bad although you didn't, because at some point the results become out-of-sync with the actual game, but this is really unlikely because our netcode is at the moment really compilcated to deal with, so probably not worth trying unless someone has waaay too much time (if such a person exists, feel free to join us, there's lots of code to fix ^^).

TL;DR While it's in theory possible to play games on you by altering your connection, it's not possible to reasonably alter your dice results in a trivial way, unless of course someone found an exploit in our code or something, in which case we had a more severe issue than faked dice results.

Additional Info:
While online games are being played over an insecure connection, the passwords being sent for private matches are transmitted securely. (We aren't security experts, but based on our knowledge on best-practices in the recent time, we consider it secure, feel free to prove us wrong)

Just a note for the map makers among you, as of Version 1.9.0.0.9142 the engine no longer requires the package name in front of the attachment class name.
This means instead of writing for example

<attachment name="unitAttachment" attachTo="army" javaClass="games.strategy.triplea.attachments.UnitAttachment" type="unitType">

You can now write

<attachment name="unitAttachment" attachTo="army" javaClass="UnitAttachment" type="unitType">

Note however that this change is not backwards compatible, so in case you are planning to change your map xmls keep in mind that players with any previous version will no longer be able to play it.

I'm planning to do a similar change for the delegate names as well, however allowing the exact same will cause problems because there are duplicate delegate names in the games.strategy.twoIfBySea.delegate package for EndTurnDelegate, InitDelegate and PlaceDelegate, that are only used by a handful of maps.
If someone could tell me the difference of those delegates (compared to the normal ones in games.strategy.triplea.delegate), or even modify the xmls to no longer use them, I'd be happy to try and remove this requirement for delegates as well.

@aardvarkpepper

What is a "magic hover spot", exactly?

@LaFayette is referring to this special location, where you can put your mouse where it flickers between 2 animation states, which doesn't look nice, nor is it intentional.

was grey with text buttons, not all nice with the folders and buttons

It still is that way, this thread is discussing future UI improvements.

Testing Forum poster

Test summary from TripleA, engine version: 2.0.0, time: 15:50:25
Savegame

Testing Forum poster

Test summary from TripleA, engine version: 2.0.0, time: 15:38:05
Savegame

Testing Forum poster

Test summary from TripleA, engine version: 2.0.0, time: 15:37:46
Savegame

Testing Forum poster

Test summary from TripleA, engine version: 2.0.0, time: 15:34:06
Savegame

@Jim-Parker

Thanks for fixing my naive post of passwords.

If that helps: I'm "currently working" (read as "I should finish this little project soon but haven't proceeded so far") on a small change to the system so we no longer store real passwords, just encrypted Login Tokens that can be revoked and re-created at any time.

I doubt that this planned change will fix the issue you're currently experiencing, but if all attempts to nail the problem down fail that would be an option as well.

Ok, next set of questions:

.userPrefs/games/strategy/security/prefs.xml has a fixed property called DEFAULT_CREDENTIAL_MANAGER_MASTER_PASSWORD right? I just want to make sure it actually saves the key it encrypts the passwords with.

When you're just looking at your engine preferences: The username you configured along with the password. Does it change as well? Or is it the same username you entered in the first place?

If it does indeed change: When does it change? After closing and reopening the game/window/tab, something else?

So I did some digging and I have identified a potential error source.

@Jim-Parker Could you check .userPrefs/games/strategy/security/prefs.xml for me and check if that changes as well?
If it does this would already explain a lot, but not everything. If it doesn't I'll have to check elsewhere.
Do NOT post the contents of this file here, it contains the password used to encrypt the passwords. Also I redacted them in your previous post, just to feel a little bit safer.

I haven't looked into it so far, but it sure looks like this is a common issue, so definitely worth creating a github issue

We need to make sure we avoid 'magic hover spots'.

This exactly the reason the buttons don't move. No idea why certain locations still act this way