Re: [Help-liquidwar6] Release 0.0.7beta

[Christian Mauduit]

Hi,

On Sun, October 4, 2009 3:42 pm, Kasper Hviid wrote:
> Great work, Christian! The death match mode is really good, and there
> seem to be quite a lot of improvements.
This deathmatch thingy is one of key stones of, what I think, is a nice
network mode. Indeed in this mode you can easily imagine that players
connect on the fly to an existing game, which is much harder with the
legacy behavior of LW5.

> In-game, there's a lw menu cursor on top of my game cursor. However, I
> don't know if this is an error or a feature, because I suspect it's
> linked to the fact that Liquid War is now compatible with my Wacom
> Cintiq 21UX! It is likely that it also will fit with a tablet-PC and
> other touch-screen devices as well. Here's a video clip:
>
> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NJRi8KBWCdI
Wow, bad trip for Mr Green ;)

Indeed it's not a bug, it's a feature, if you see the "regular" mouse
pointer. 0.0.6beta used the function MouseWarp to set the mouse at a given
position, to be more precise, in the center. For technical reasons - I
could detail but... - it was easier that way, so I *had* to hide the
cursor because it was anywhere but where you would expect it. You pointed
out that it can't be assumed that MouseWarp works. For a tablet-PC or your
fancy device, it just makes no sense, unless a robot takes your hand and
moves it against your will. So with the new implementation I don't "warp"
any more and the pointer is just at its default place. Could be an option
to hide it in-game, but personnally, I did not find it disturbing. It's
not that big and cumbersome and at least, it gives you an instant
information on *which* cursor you control. I remember the old times with
LW5 trying to move a cursor with the keyboard until I found out which one
I was really controlling. You (I, at least) always forget which you are ;)

> I will work at getting some better .xml files ready for the levels. I
> think this is quite important for the gameplay.
Yep. Did you notice some of your recent levels fire warnings when loaded?
I mean, other warnings than the "README" one (which is partially
corrected, only there's an unexpected side effect which *still* causes a
warning). It's important to respect boundaries ;) Game is pedantic anyway
on all the "rules", it won't let any invalid value in. BTW, I don't really
plan to release extra-levels for 0.0.7beta, please tell me (Kasper) if you
want to. Most of its new content since 0.0.6beta is yours. I had planned
to wait 0.0.8beta and have things polished.

So well, now that I took a rest and have some time, here's a short (is it
short) todo list for 0.0.8beta :

- the score screen. We have the idea of the history (good) and the idea of
the pie-chart (good too). I'd like to display those, together. They
reflect different informations, the history and the final state.
Additionnally, I'd like to make a podium, maybe displaying a medal for the
1st, 2nd and 3rd. Or maybe only the first. Depends on what layout we use.
By medal I mean maybe something like this :
http://www.ufoot.org/liquidwar/v5/img-000132 My "problem" is that I come
out with no clear idea of how to put this together : the history, the
pie-chart, and the awards

- sounds. Yes, sounds. At least. Music can maybe wait a bit again, but
sound is needed, to ponctuate the action. As of today there are only
annoying sounds when using the menus but that is merely to check out the
sound API works. So my idea is that (and if someone could do this, that
would *really* help) one should get sounds for those events:
- program startup (as of "sound played when program is launched")
- menu select (maybe something very light, barely noticeable, but something)
- menu valid (when one enters a menu, validates an entry, and so on)
- game start
- a team is dead
- a team appears
- bell 5 seconds before game ends
- score screen (the equivalent of the "applauses" in LW5)
- network connection
- connection closed
That's 10 sounds in all. The idea would be to have a sound bank for this.
The reason it's a bit (not *that*, but still a bit) hard is that it has to
be GPL compliant. Public domain is OK, Creative Commons can work under
some conditions but we need to be able to contact the authors to make
things clear, and all those "free for personnal use" are non-valid. I
clearly don't have time and energy to do something nice on this front :-/
Help needed ;)

- visual tuning. Many visual "effects" can be tuned. I wrote a short
passage on this :
http://www.gnu.org/software/liquidwar6/manual/html_node/Advanced-tweaking.html

I'm insisting on this because the new "health circles" at the bottom-right
corner probably need fine-tuning. For instance in the
data/gfx/gl/hud/floating/gl-floating-const.xml file you'll find this :
  <float key="gauge-relative-bg-inner" value="0.36" />
  <float key="gauge-relative-bg-outer" value="0.48" />
  <float key="gauge-relative-fg-inner" value="0.38" />
  <float key="gauge-relative-fg-outer" value="0.46" />
Those values define the size of the circles. fg (foreground) is the
colored part, and bg is the background and uses the texture
data/gfx/gl/hud/floating/image/marble.jpeg Anything can be modified.
There's probably a bit of trials and errors before finding out the right
texture with the right sizes. The current setting is OK (at least, I like
it) but I admit it's a bit raw and doesn't match the screenshots submitted
by Tim.

That's it for now.

Toy arround, find bugs, write reports, make suggestions!

Enjoy,

Christian.

PS: yes, I know, if one resizes windows on Mac OS X or MS Windows,
textures are lost and it's a mess. GLX on GNU/Linux does not have this
problem, I'll try and fix it, but it's really a pain, 100% uninteresting
task, but this one I fear I can't delegate. *sigh*

-- 
Christian Mauduit <address@hidden> - http://www.ufoot.org/ ___ __/\__
Liquid War 6 - http://www.gnu.org/software/liquidwar6/     / _")\~ \~/
"Les amis de la vérité sont ceux qui la cherchent et non _/ /   /_ o_\
ceux qui se vantent de l'avoir trouvée" - Condorcet     (__/      \/