No more "unknown unit" in multiplayer, please.

[jmegner]

Summary:

If you've been playing a long time and have a fairly complete encountered_units list, I'd really appreciate it if you could paste your encountered_units list from your preferences file.

Would the developers be agreeable to a patch that makes it so there are no unknown units in multiplayer but does not affect campaigns?

-----------------------------

Main message:

Sometimes I am playing multiplayer and an enemy unit is about to level up. Let's imagine that the enemy unit is a skeleton. So, I check out the unit description on the skeleton. Let's say this is what I see:

Advances to: Revenant, Deathblade(?)

And if I click on Revenant, I can see the stats on that unit, but if I click on Deathblade, I get "unknown unit" instead. Yeah, I've seen revenants but not deathblades in multiplayer before, therefore I can see the revenant's stats but not the deathblade's stats. I don't like that I can't look up units I haven't seen before in multiplayer.

As far as I know, there's three ways for me to cure this.

1) Play until I've seen every unit. I could even set up local games with multiple human players (all me) with the sole purpose of levelling up units to units I haven't seen before. Ugh, that seems long and tedious, especially if I like to play with Era of Myths too.

2) I could edit ~/.wesnoth1.6/preferences and add the rest of the units to the encountered_units variable. This options seems better than option1, but still tedious. Perhaps someone could give me the contents of their encountered_units variable? That way would be very quick. It would completely solve my current problem, and I would really appreciate it.

3) I could fiddle with the code so that in multiplayer, there are no unknown units. I'm guessing the developers like that campaigns have unknown units, so I'd try to make sure that campaigns were unaffected. I would like to ask: would the developers would be agreeable to accepting a patch like that?

[Turuk]

2) I could edit ~/.wesnoth1.6/preferences and add the rest of the units to the encountered_units variable. This options seems better than option1, but still tedious. Perhaps someone could give me the contents of their encountered_units variable? That way would be very quick. It would completely solve my current problem, and I would really appreciate it.

If one person did this one time, it would not have to be done again. Even you could quickly right it up so that there were no unknown units for you, and then provide it for everyone else.

[jmegner]

If one person did this one time, it would not have to be done again. Even you could quickly right it up so that there were no unknown units for you, and then provide it for everyone else.

I take that to mean you think your encountered_units list is shorter than mine and wouldn't help me get started? Also, it would have to be done for every new era. I guess I'll start writing a perl script to scrape unit_type ids from cfg files in /usr/share/games/wesnoth/data/core/units/* and ~/.wesnoth1.6/data/campaigns/*.

[Turuk]

I take that to mean you think your encountered_units list is shorter than mine and wouldn't help me get started?

I don't know as I have not seen yours, but given that you want it to cover every era, you are talking about hundreds of units that should be listed. I was just suggesting that since you are asking someone else to give you a completed one, you may as well try to develop one yourself.

[jmegner]

Replacing the encountered_units line with what's attached seemed to do it. I've also included the perl script that generated this for me. The extension is txt only so I could actually upload it. The script is designed for Linux installations of Wesnoth. If your Wesnoth installation is not in /usr/share/games, you'll have to change the $defaultEraDir variable at the top.

I'd still like to make the patch. What's the best way of seeing if the developers are amiable to the type of patch I proposed?

edit: moved encountered_units list to text file so the post isn't ten feet wide.

[Alink]

Note that 1.7.0 has already a new command ":discover" doing that. It fills encountered_units with the units of the current campaign/multiplayer.

[jmegner]

Note that 1.7.0 has already a new command ":discover" doing that. It fills encountered_units with the units of the current campaign/multiplayer.

Ah, great. Why are there unknown units in multiplayer to begin with?

[Cloud]

:debug shows all unit types in 1.6

That or the unit tree

[Turuk]

Why are there unknown units in multiplayer to begin with?

Most likely because not everyone is like you, and others like to encounter units both in campaigns and in multiplayer.

[jmegner]

Why are there unknown units in multiplayer to begin with?

Most likely because not everyone is like you, and others like to encounter units both in campaigns and in multiplayer.

I can understand liking to discover units in campaigns, especially in your first campaign. It makes real-world sense. You don't know about units you haven't seen because you haven't seen them. My questions and such have nothing to do with the campaigns.

For multiplayer, there is no storyline. One multiplayer game shouldn't affect the next. In multiplayer, you are there to win and do your best with as much information and wisdom as possible. So, is there anyone who actually likes having unknown units in multiplayer? I'm not asking for speculation about other people, but people who like it themselves.

[Noy]

Most likely because not everyone is like you, and others like to encounter units both in campaigns and in multiplayer.

I can understand liking to discover units in campaigns, especially in your first campaign. It makes real-world sense. You don't know about units you haven't seen because you haven't seen them. My questions and such have nothing to do with the campaigns.

For multiplayer, there is no storyline. One multiplayer game shouldn't affect the next. In multiplayer, you are there to win and do your best with as much information and wisdom as possible. So, is there anyone who actually likes having unknown units in multiplayer? I'm not asking for speculation about other people, but people who like it themselves.

So its either one or the other, and for MP people its really easy to work around using the debug command. So we decided to go with prioritizing campaign over MP. Again if you don't like it, use the debug command.

I'm considering locking this thread. Jmenger if you post another reply basically asking the same thing with no elaboration at all, its going to get locked.

[jmegner]

So its either one or the other, and for MP people its really easy to work around using the debug command. So we decided to go with prioritizing campaign over MP. Again if you don't like it, use the debug command.

I'm considering locking this thread. Jmenger if you post another reply basically asking the same thing with no elaboration at all, its going to get locked.

I was not aware that the :debug command worked in multiplayer. I would have thought that all debugging stuff would be disabled in multiplayer. Thank you, Cloud, for the info, and thank you, Noy, for making me understand. The :debug and :discover commands completely satisfy me. Seems like the developers tackled the issue long ago.

Sorry, Noy, I thought my post was elaborating and clarifying. Now that I see I misunderstood Cloud's post, it would seem I was just repeating a grievance.

[Noy]

So its either one or the other, and for MP people its really easy to work around using the debug command. So we decided to go with prioritizing campaign over MP. Again if you don't like it, use the debug command.

I'm considering locking this thread. Jmenger if you post another reply basically asking the same thing with no elaboration at all, its going to get locked.

I was not aware that the :debug command worked in multiplayer. I would have thought that all debugging stuff would be disabled in multiplayer. Thank you, Cloud, for the info, and thank you, Noy, for making me understand. The :debug and :discover commands completely satisfy me. Seems like the developers tackled the issue long ago.

Sorry, Noy, I thought my post was elaborating and clarifying. Now that I see I misunderstood Cloud's post, it would seem I was just repeating a grievance.

No worries. Its often the case that a person just wants to argue for argument sake, which was my intent to stop.

[Gambit]

Why was this change made to begin with? I never really noticed it... But I know it wasn't always like this...

[Alink]

Btw I planned to try showing all units in multiplayer when I was working on the new 1.7.0 help features, but currently busy with RL stuff. OTOH, now that we have ":discover" that seems less needed, and has the advantage to please both types of players (the encountered-units feature may be wanted by some people in MP, and being a console command should prevent true beginners to activate it).

Alternatively, I suppose that maybe we could add a new option in the multiplayer preferences for this.

A little detail to consider: if we hide not-yet-encountered units in campaigns and show all units in MP, then we must also decide what to do for MP campaigns. Depending of that, we may need to detect these special cases, or introduce a new WML thing for this.

Why was this change made to begin with? I never really noticed it... But I know it wasn't always like this...

It depends what you are referring to, hiding not-yet-encountered unit's help pages is an old feature (at least pre 1.2), but the UI has been improved, so it's maybe more visible now, and also more clear why it's like that (it was not-hyperlinked text before, which looked broken). If the "(?)" suffix is not visible enough, we could use a different color (like red or gray) but not sure how more clear it will look.