[glob2-devel] my final release candidate testing feedback

[Joe Wells]

Here is my final release candidate testing feedback.  I'm going to
have to put glob2 away for a while now, so you probably won't see any
more comments from me soon (unless I am weak).  Hopefully all serious
bugs in the release candidate have been discovered already.

Here are the remaining issues:

• Bug:  I'm seeing this error message:

    StringTable::getString("[wheat], -1") : error, no such key.

  I don't notice any problem at run-time connected with this.  (But I
  know all the messages already so maybe I wouldn't notice anyway.)

• Bug (or merely extreme annoyance?):  There are dots above a
  building/flag indicating how many globules are requested.  The
  updating of the number of these dots can fall way behind (by entire
  minutes!) the adjustments, if you make a large number of adjustments
  very quickly.  To see this, select a building, and then use the
  scroll wheel (or control-scroll-wheel if you have turned off
  unmodified scroll wheel) to quickly increase the number of requested
  globules to the maximum, then decrease the number to zero, and
  repeat this 20 times.  On my machine, it then takes about a minute
  for all of the changes to be drawn to the dots.  In contrast, the
  indication of the number of requested workers in the status area is
  always instantly correct.

• Bug:  If you create a new map, then edit it by creating a new hive
  and deleting the original hive, when you play the map, the area
  around the original hive is revealed as seen as though the original
  hive existed for a moment at the beginning of the game.

• It would be better if map files and saved game files were
  compressed.  I have discovered by testing that gzip compression
  reduces the size of saved game and map files by 90% (sometimes even
  more).  (Anyway, I thought glob2 was being switched to use a
  zip-based structure for maps and games.  That would have solved this
  issue.)

• glob2 is quite a bit slower on a 512 × 512 map against two Nicowar
  opponents.  In this case, it is almost unusably slow.  The slowdown
  from smaller maps is quite noticable.  What is glob2 doing that
  costs so much on a per-map-cell basis?

• Nicowar is an extremely weak opponent on 512x512 maps.  It is very
  difficult to defeat an opponent on such large maps without building
  inns/hospitals near the opponent's territory.  Nicowar doesn't do
  this.

• It would be nice to be able to randomize the assignment of colors to
  teams, just to be able to see different colors.  Right now you have
  to use the colors assigned when the map was created.

• It would be nice to be able to randomize the assignment of players
  to teams, just to be able to play different map positions.

I hope these comments are helpful.

-- 
Joe

  “The parties' assertions as to the importance of this issue may reflect a
  certain amount of hyberbole. For example, Sprint states: ‘It is estimated
  that 32 billion viewers throughout the world will watch the games.’ This
  is indeed an extraordinary assertion given the current estimation of a
  world population of only 5 1/2 billion, and no reliably verified evidence
  of interplanetary travel.”
          -- U.S. District Judge John Martin Jr.