Map: Afropa

[kenc80]

Zorro/Snotling,

I was going to play a 1v1 here but couldnt find it under the submitted maps page (in fact, the page looks empty) nor is it in the official maps page. Did you pull it?

Is this map dormant? Was going to give it a go but I can't seem to find it.

Let me know if you know anything about this,


Thanks,


Ken

[piranha]

If you change the dropdown to submitted you can see the maps.

But the Afropa map that Zorro created is removed by him. Seems like Zorro haven't been online for a pretty long while now too. Perhaps he will come back to try Beta4.

[kenc80]

yeah strange, my submitted maps page is blank. is this user/browser error? everything good on your side?

Zorro told me he was having PC problems. He'll be back.

[zorro]

no, I left cos I was pissed about the buggy games and everyone quitting and that destroying the games

I also heavily dislike the strange (in my opinion stupid) map policy - you should be happy when someone makes more maps people could have fun with - instead you only let them set up 2 of them, and when those finally get officialized after months of time your map editor tells you you can not finalize more than two, sux, even when they were made official

also the perspective on beta 4 is like I imagine HoMM 0.8 beta, not something I long for

dont misunderstand me, I appreciate the effort and everything...

i would at least make minor fixes once a month instead of working out something completely new that will then have to be fixed all over again and again

[SnotlinG]

Hello zorro,
Im sorry to hear your disapointment.
Maybe we have been a bit bad with information/explanations, and so what to expect has been a bit unclear.

The reason why it takes such long time to get fixes are because of several factors:
1. Myself and piranha drive this project on our spare-time, so we are very limited in the amount of time we can put in. So we need to be as effective as possible to make progress. (which is why we sometimes are a bit late at responding to questions/bugs etc, as we are focusing on the development)

2. As part of the game evolving (i.e. new ideas / new programming knowledge etc), we are between each beta restructuring the database on the serverside, as well as the structure of all java objects on the clientside. While this might sound like a lot of programmers talk, the real meaning is that each Beta version is so diffrent from the previous one that the effort of making a fix in both the current Beta and the next beta would be almost double the work (and not always feasable due to structure changes needed etc). So considering point 1 above, we have choosen to focus on the next beta only (and only making critical bugfixes to the current beta) to speed up our progress.

3. Another thing to take into consideration is that making bugfixes to a live system (i.e. beta3) is much more tricky than making them for the next beta, as you are potentially affecting a lot of ongoing games, and you dont want to introduce a new issue, or accidently delete/affect the gamedata.

And to try to address your other questions

# This is started as a hobby project, so currently we do not have much money to invest in graphics or other nice features.

# Saving data on a webhost costs money, and every map a user creates are data that needs to be saved. If we didnt put a limit we would risk having hackers or other evil figures creating tons of maps, and thus crashing the site. I agree that 2 is a very low number, and this will be addressed quite soon

# As for minor fixes, I think this will be the case for our development strategy once we get the code on a more stable level. So far each Beta has been a complete rework of 90% of the code. I think Beta4 will be much more stable than 2 & 3 though, so hopefully we will get closer to be able to supply small patches more often.

# Leaving players are very hard to address, but we are trying/planning this in several ways:
- Adding more tutorials
- Making the game more inituitive for new players, making them want to stay and play
- Change the instantjoin functionality
- Replace the player by AI (In beta4 the player will be replaced by a "Citystate", as AI in itself is a big assignment)