Welcome to the warlords remake

[SnotlinG]

We have now completed the instant join/play functionality.
It basically works like if a players first turn times out (and the player hasnt logged in to the game), the game will go into instantplay-mode, listing the game in a special instant join list under the normal "Create/Join" page. The first player to click this link will be given the slot (and can do his/her first turn directly)


This is only valid for the first turn. If a players turn times out at a later turn, the normal 3 strikes before kicked out of the game will apply.

Also as some might have noticed our "cartoonish" armyset is also getting graphical updates:


From left it is the Light infantry, Giant, battering Ram, Griffon, Knight hero and Amazon hero.
I think we can expect further updates to the other units

[SnotlinG]

We are very satisfied that the number of bugs seems to be very low in beta2

Me and piranha has done the following updates and bugfixes the last few days:

# Pressing OK button to leave a game now brings you out to the account page

# When accepting a new hero offer, the clients gold wasnt updated. This is fixed.

# Updated Report-> Army, Report->City, Report->Gold to all be in the same popup, using tabs instead. New menu dropdown is Report->Stats

# Added your number of cities to your realminfo (at the bottom of the gamescreen)

# Game with illegial characters in the gamename didnt get initialised correctly. Fixed.

# Layout update in the accountpage, Current games and "unfinished games where you are eliminated" have been joined to only 1 list "Current games"

# You can click on players shields in the accountpage, and you will go to their profile-page. Information in the profile-page is still very limited though

# If you managed to set a very long path on a unit, the unit wasnt possible to select on your next turn. Fixed, only 100 coordinates will be stored of the path between turns now.

# History reports in the menu now has correct colors, and a reasonable scale for turns and Y-axis

# Unit that gets out of move will go into "skip for this turn"-status automatically

# It was possible to group a ship and units with movespecial abilities (on a bridge) and sail away without needing to convert the landunits to ships. This has been fixed.

# Fixed some incorrect calculations in the client when moving hero/flyer/ships on bridges

Interesting to know is that a hero is allowed to get flying with a flyer unit, but also a hero will be allowed to jump on a ship from a bridge without getting turned into a ship. The hero can then jump to land from any shore-tile. Be aware though that if the hero is left alone on water he/she will drown


If you spot any bugs or other issues, don´t hesitate to let us know via our forum...

[piranha]

Now that summer is coming up and people may be away for a while we added a function called sitter.

If you need to be away from the computer you can let someone else log in to your account using your name but their own password and play your games for you.

To set a sitter go to your account and click update profile settings.
There you will also find more details on the limitations of a sitter.

If you need a sitter there is a forum section where you can ask for a sitter. Do it in time so someone have time to answer and you can set them as sitter to your account before you leave.

[piranha]

I've made several small fixes here and there.

# You can no longer host games with no name.

# Password now have a tool tip since so many people start games, password protect them without having enough players joining to get the game going.

# You can not select a map that has fewer starting positions than max number of players in the game.

# The lobby will now show map name, map description and max players.

# The host can kick player from a game.

# A javascript function that caused IE to hang after spending a while in the game or in the lobby have been replaced. Hopefully this is the reason why IE would hang. If you experienced that the site didn't load all of a sudden this was most likely the reason.

[SnotlinG]

As Beta2 is quite stable we are planning to branch of again in a few days, and start development on the beta3-phase. This means we wont fix much bugs etc in beta2 (unless critical).
But please continue to report bugs and odd events to us, so we can fix it to beta3

Updates

# Completed games are cleaned up. Some information is stored still, also player statistics will be updated with win/loss

# Inactive hosted games are cleaned out

# Minor cosmetic updates to the ingame stats-popup, fixed headlines plus scale on Y-axis.

# Fixed a bug wich caused a crash, when attacking an empty city with an army with bonus versus flying units.

# Fixed a bug when closing the battle report at the X, which caused the next occupy-screen to be missed

# Updated minimap cities/armies to be easier to spot... feedback?

# Slightly increased the chance to get a hero offer if you do not have any hero

# Scheduled the startup of games when the lobby is full

# Updated number of cities needed for win. Currently you need 65% if its a 2 player game, otherwise 50%

# Added 2 new maps, "BullRun" (created by KGB) and I have also created a smaller map for max 4 players (called "SmallWorld") as it seemed people like to play with just a 2-4 players in the game

BullRun:


SmallWorld:

[piranha]

I fixed some more bugs today.

You can now save settings in the game it will remember your settings.

Fixed a bug that caused long mail messages to overflow on the next message.

Stats are now saved. From now on all games with 2 players are considered 1v1 and will be saved to the 1v1 stats and games with more players will be considered FFA games and will be saved to your FFA stats.

There is no rank/rating system in place yet.

[piranha]

You can now see all battle rolls in the battle log to know the actual strength that was used and what the dice rolled. This is to spot situations where the battle calculation / strength calculations may be wrong. When we start beta 3 and fog of war is implemented this feature to know your enemies strength values will be removed.

This is mainly for beta testing purposes.

I've spent the last days on working towards the new beta 3 interface. I'm very pleased with how its going to work. It will use the whole screen so for me example who is using 1920*1080 I can see more than twice as much even when the tiles are changed to 64x64.

The layout will change depending if you have a low resolution to still be able to display everything on the screen without having to scroll. Also the new interface graphics look nicer and more modern.

[SnotlinG]

I have optimized almost all of our javascripts used in beta2 with googles closure compiler (http://code.google.com/intl/sv/closure/ ... ed_ui.html).
So the download of all js code should be a bit quicker and i think the code should run a little bit smoother also.

[SnotlinG]

Fixed a bug that caused the game to get stuck in conquerer-mode if you killed (or got your own hero killed) outside a town. The location/coordinates of the hero-death gets stored to the historytable, and this also accidently added the conquerer-mode for that player, but without any city to conquer the game gets stuck in this mode.

[SnotlinG]

After the poll on the game discussion forum I have now updated the winning condition to be 75% of the cities at the start of your turn. I hope this should work better for you

Beta3
Besides this I have started the work on beta3 (Piranha started a while ago on interface work).
Im currently working on rebuilding parts of the game-structure, to better optimize the database and use a new solution for mapbuild/drawing. This is quite a big task and will take a while.