TO DO for next release

[tomreyn]

Since I can only speak for myself (taking into account that I should not act selfish), here's

Outstanding changes I consider neccessary for the next stable release

• Game menu redesign
• Disable / hide: harvested resources info in debug menu, or debug menu entirely -- done in svn rev# 2710
• UI cleanup: custom game menu in its various variants (i.e. dedicated server, too)
• Bug fixes: There are currently (as of Nov 2) several open bugs which should be fixed for the release, but ideally already for the beta. Most seem to be not too complex.

Outstanding changes I would like to see for the next stable release

• Voting to drop human or AI player - or any way to drop a misbehaving player during a game
• A player should be allowed to give up and spectate the map - similar to above
• Customizable multi-player game title (and MOTD)
• Lack of food notification - I'm not sure about the solution but many seem to think that currently lack of food is too easily missed
• Game Mods: Automatically check all mods for updates + upgrade
• Game Mods: Threaded downloads
• Controlling music in a game room - we generally need a proper design for how/when the K key switches things
• New intro: Make new game intro 'nice', i.e. compromise somehow
• Some apparent issues need to be reproduced and commented on

[Omega]

Outstanding changes I consider neccessary for the next release

• Make new game intro 'nice', i.e. compromise somehow

How do you propose to do this one, though? If we're referring to having a video in the intro, bear in mind it will bloat an already massive download with a video (and it'd be necessary to have a fairly large filesize in order to have manageable quality - too low quality video in a full screen program would look far worse than the current simple screen). I'm not so sure about the priority of this.

[titi]

- "Game Mods: Checking all installed mods for updates" is already done
- "FTP server should become unavailable during games" should really be fixed.

One Point from me:
- Our fonts still look pale compared to the legacy fonts because they are somehow a bit transparent. This makes them harder to read :/ . Maybe this can be improved somehow

( @Omega: there is already something in the pipe for the Intro )

[tomreyn]

- "Game Mods: Checking all installed mods for updates" is already done

You're right, of course, the automatic check for available updates is already implemented, that's nice!
There is no "upgrade all mods" button, though, which was the second part of this feature request. I renamed the feature request to "Game Mods: Automatically check all mods for updates + upgrade" to make this more visible.

- "FTP server should become unavailable during games" should really be fixed.

The latter is a false report, my test setup was flawed. I've removed both off the list above.

- Our fonts still look pale compared to the legacy fonts because they are somehow a bit transparent. This makes them harder to read :/ . Maybe this can be improved somehow

I'm not sure which of the FTGL methods we currently use. I assume it's one of the textured fonts (GLTextureFont or GLBufferFont) variants, both of which use anti-aliasing. The old font system did not use anti-aliasing. I assume this makes titi consider them pale. Personally I like anti-aliasing, but one could try GLBitmapFont or GLExtrudeFont methods to see whether those are closer to what it used to be like. Another option might be to add extrusion to the font we are using now (like you can have it on the in-game chat already), or use bold cuts, or just a monotyped font as ugly as the old one.

For example,
The lazy dog jumps over the quick brown fox.
may seem more readable than
The lazy dog jumps over the quick brown fox.

To me it's actually the other way around, but YMMV.

[titi]

2 ToDos:

1) if you play the japanese mod in multiplayer with crossplatform you nearly always get out of sync after a while ( command x not found for unit y ...)
We must test this a lot with latest svn, to see if its fixed!

2) Crash with svn while playing:
Sadly I cannot provide more info at the moment because I forgot "ulimit -c unlimited" ....
I have the feeling ( just the feeling!) that it has something to do wiht the romans using new features in MG ( like multiple anims) but we will see.
What we have to do is: "Playing test games!"

[tomreyn]

I agree- One more thing which may be worth looking into, if possible, is that some people have reported, and I've also observed this, that sometimes you have people who get disconnected repeatedly from a server before the game has started, but once the game has started they can play just fine and there is no more trouble. Unfortunately I cannot provide any details on what triggers this, or when it happens and when it doesn't, but this phenomenon does seem to exist.

[Pizza90]

I'd like to add my idea for chat improvements see here: https://forum.megaglest.org/index.php?topic=7690.0 if you have opinions about it comment

[softcoder]

Regarding being dropped in the lobby, I commited an update that fixed nasty / subtle timing issues in the UPNP code that may have contributed to lobby connection issues (applies to Internet games where the host relies on UPNP). It is possible that with these changes that the lobby will be more stable for internet games.

[tomreyn]

When this happened, some network players were already connected and remained connected (and didn't experience freezes) while others joined but got disconnected repeatedly. This sounds a lot like bad connectivity between client and server, but then these clients could play fine once the game started.
I assume some clients getting dropped while others remain connected without freezes can't be an effect of UPNP code issues, since this would just result in firewall/NAT rules being changed, but those would affect all users, not just some. I know, this issue is really hard to diagnose, and I wouldn't know where to start, just listed it here to have it referred to somewhere.

[Coldfusionstorm]

I have seen this behavior before, namely in the Game Red Alert 3, Getting INTO a game could be very hard, but once the game got running it was fine.

just fyi for the devs. also Remeber that there is a situation where it is impossible to host between two nats im not sure if it also aplies to client to client connections. i don't remeber much of network class atm.

PC1-NAT-Internet nodes-NAT-PC2.

[tomreyn]

Here's a few things I came across when testing during the past couple of days:

• FPS decreases massively from 25 to 5 FPS when camera is above forest with tilesets Meadow and Dark Forest; this happens on both current subversion revisions as well as on 3.5.2, and I'm not sure whether it only happens since I upgraded to Ubuntu 11.10 or whether it has always been an issue with my or any GPU. It needs to be tested on other systems. Related discussion
• WONTFIX: All sounds should be normalized. There's tools to automate this which we should use. 3.5.2: mummies, esp. death sound, are too loud (this may already be fixed in svn). See titi's response below.
• Team switching: when you try to join a team of two CPUs but are denied you see this message twice: [your playername]: Player [your playername] was denied the request to switch from team# 1 to team# 2. Either only display this message once or state the origin of this message (AI1 vs AI2 probably).
• Team switching: There's some situation (unclear how to reproduce) which can cause a player to be asked whether he wants himself to join another team. Coldfusionstorm reports: "I was asked whether I wanted player Coldfusionstorm to join you". The message box said something like "Do you want to allow Coldfusionstorm to join tomreyn" or "Do you want to allow Coldfusionstorm to join your team"? I think to reproduce it we will need to have overlapping join requests (vice versa) or something similar. We had a lot of join requests going when this happened.
• Team switching: I had 'A.I. accept probability' set to 70% and requested to join a single A.I. team many, many times, but was always denied. Either all decisions, once taken, are permanent (when a request is denied once, the same request is always denied in the future) or I was very, very very very unlucky ... or the randomizer is broken.
• Font licenses: Font file licenses need to be documented / unused font files should be dropped (or not included in release); references to previously removed font files should be removed off translation files.
• Resource modifier for human player: I recently made it to reconfigure things on the custom game menu ending up with a resource modifier for myself, the human player. I'm afraid I failed to take note and am now unable to reproduce, but believe the underlying bug may still be present.
• Returning from the Network Game menu (Custom Game menu with network player slots, whether or not publishing on master server does not matter) takes way longer than it used to take. 17 seconds.

These issues are just here so I don't forget about them. Once I know how to reproduce them I'll file individual bug reports.

[titi]

1. Regarding the framedrop in desert we should really open a new thread. ( https://forum.megaglest.org/index.php?topic=7715.0 )

2. NO don't normalize the sounds! They are all manually adjusted and are meant like this. I used these tools in some cases, but there are sounds which are meant to be loud or less loud.

[tomreyn]

2. NO don't normalize the sounds! They are all manually adjusted and are meant like this. I used these tools in some cases, but there are sounds which are meant to be loud or less loud.

I see what you mean, it can be nice if some units are louder than others. I do think the mummies are too loud, but it's not anywhere close to urgent to change this.