Planning system/Whiteboard feedback

[gabba]

Official Planning System/Whiteboard feedback thread

Quoting partially the 1.9 release notes:

A brand new move planning system codenamed "Whiteboard" has been developed as a Google Summer of Code 2010 project by gabba. Its purpose is to visually test out several possible move (/attack/recruit/recall) combinations, check out the possible enemy moves for each one, and then execute the planned moves of your choice with the press of a key. Out-of-turn planning is also supported, so you can finally fine-tune your recruits and recalls or lay out some basic moves while waiting for your turn.

This planning system is also the candidate replacement for Delay Shroud Updates, a feature that is giving headaches to C++ coders and WML developers alike. Therefore DSU has been disabled in this release so the whiteboard's worth as a replacement can be determined. Your testing and feedback in this area is particularly needed and appreciated.

Commands
To turn the planning system on and off, press P, or use the checkbox in the right-click or Actions menu. There is an option in Preferences to enable the whiteboard on game start. You can also hold the Tab key as an instant toggle: it allows planning a move when the whiteboard is off, and making a regular move when the whiteboard is on.

Once you have some planned actions defined, readily identifiable by the numbers (and arrows, for moves), you can execute or delete them, or move them up/down the action queue. Numbering matters, since if you're not hovering the mouse over a particular unit or action, the "execute" or "delete" command will target action #1. The current shortcut keys use keys that were free, and are subject to change, but they are currently:

* Execute: y
* Execute all: ctrl+y
* Delete: h
* Reorder action up/down: PgUp/PgDown

Limitations

* Out-of-turn planning doesn't reliably work while units are moving. Concretely it works fine for multiplayer games, not so well against the AI since it plays fast.
* Disabling enemy moves tracking might help with out-of-turn planning.
* The planning system hasn't been tested against the whole range of possible WML events, some of them might still cause crashes. However succesful tests included the tutorial, the "test" scenario, Dark Forecast, the first scenario of Legend of Wesmere.
* The sidebar shows unit information only when hovering over the future destination of a unit (for instance, if it has two moves defined, over the second move's ghosted unit), and not over the unit itself, which is not very intuitive.
* There's no interaction between the whiteboard and the game clock, therefore you won't get any time credit for planned moves until they are executed.

Short-term developments
Those are the features planned for the near future:

* Cumulative Battle Statistics and Chance to Kill calculations for multiple attackers.
* A "consider dead" action that allows you to pretend a unit is dead for a moment, and see the effect on pathfinding and Zone of Control.

Long-term developments
The whiteboard has been developed from the start with a networked aspect in mind, eventually allowing your allies to see your planned actions, as well as other interesting features such as suggesting moves and placing label-like symbols on the map. However there is still a lot of work left to get there.
The networked aspect has been developed by tschmitz during GSoC 2011, and I'm currently ironing out the bugs and polishing the interface.

Your testing is needed
But for your reports to be useful, you should run the game with full logging enabled:

Windows

• Hold shift and right-click on your Wesnoth directory, pick Open Command Line Here
• Type "wesnoth --log-debug=all" without the quotes and press enter
• If you experience a problem, upload the stderr.txt file this created in your Wesnoth directory along with your bug report

Linux

• Launch wesnoth by typing "wesnoth --log-debug=all 2> wesnothlog.txt" without the quotes into a terminal and pressing enter
• This will create a wesnothlog.txt file in the directory you were in where you launched the game, so typically your home folder if you had just opened the terminal
• If you experience a problem, upload the wesnothlog.txt file along with your bug report

In addition, you can also run the game under debugger and provide me with a stack trace in case of a crash. I won't explain how to do this here, if you report a severe bug I can't reproduce I may walk you through it.

Bug reports are easier for me to track if you do them here: http://gna.org/bugs/?func=additem&group=wesnoth (Assign to gabba)
But they're appreciated even if you do them in this thread.

General feedback is also welcome!
[*]Please describe how you tested the whiteboard and how useful it was to you.
[*]What feels right, what feels wrong?
[*]In particular, did it work ok as a Delay Shroud Updates replacement?
[*]What future development or improvement are you looking forward to the most?[/list]

Known Bugs

• You can currently plan several attacks in a row for the same unit and the game will execute them all in the same turn without complaining. Fixed for 1.9.1.

[FAAB]

Hi gabba,

you have done a terrific job with that planning system that has just been put into the game.
I haven't had a chance to test it thoroughly so I haven't tried to find any bug, I just think of a couple improvements.

• - When entering the execution mode of the recorded moves on the whiteboard, it would be nice to have the move 1 in green rather then red, so that it gets highlighted from the remaining moves.

• - I think the number of the move should be displayed on the original square rather than the target square. The logic is that in the player's mind, it is easier to remember which target is defined for a certain unit rather than which unit has a given target. In the current system when executing the move, I look for the target 1 and then have to check that this is really the unit I am thinking of that is targeting that place by reverse-following the arrow. I would prefer to look for the unit having label 1 and assess if the move I planned (that I probably remember) is still good.

• - It would be very useful to be able to select a unit that has a move on the whiteboard and assign to it another move without having to delete the recorded move first (especially if this unit is not the first in the whiteboard stack). The recorded move for that unit should be deleted then and the stack be reordered.

• - The ability to play any move by entering its number, rather than being limited to accept the first move with 'y', would be a nice improvement

• - When the movement is interrupted by a newly discovered enemy unit, we can keep continue the movement by pressing 't'. But it would be nice to be able to do the same by pressing another 'y' (as my finger is still on that key, even if 't' key is not that far )

• - You should give a better description of how to use the page up/page down keys. I haven't found out what they were doing. I guessed it was swapping moves in the whiteboard stack but that is not.

Again, all these items are wishes and are in no way a limitation to the praise you deserve.

Similarly, I think none of these improvements should pass before the implementation that shares the whiteboard amongst players of a same team. I do think that would the best showcase of your work.
It could even bring some players that enjoy team games on the development server before 1.10 is out

[gabba]

Hi FAAB, thanks for the feedback!

Hi gabba,

you have done a terrific job with that planning system that has just been put into the game.
I haven't had a chance to test it thoroughly so I haven't tried to find any bug, I just think of a couple improvements.

• - When entering the execution mode of the recorded moves on the whiteboard, it would be nice to have the move 1 in green rather then red, so that it gets highlighted from the remaining moves.

Arrows receive the team color (try it with another team that the red one to see what I mean), that's gonna be necessary when the MP part comes in to distinguish the planned moves of various players.
The specific visuals of the three levels of highlights can change however without writing a line of code, just by changing images under the images/arrows subdirectory. I think eleazar is looking into improving them: changing their shapes or adding some non-team colors depending on the highlight state would probably help visibility a lot.

However highlighting move #1 when no other move is being mouseovered is a good idea, I'll implement it.

• - I think the number of the move should be displayed on the original square rather than the target square. The logic is that in the player's mind, it is easier to remember which target is defined for a certain unit rather than which unit has a given target. In the current system when executing the move, I look for the target 1 and then have to check that this is really the unit I am thinking of that is targeting that place by reverse-following the arrow. I would prefer to look for the unit having label 1 and assess if the move I planned (that I probably remember) is still good.

This is indeed something to consider, I found I had the same reflex of reverse-following the arrow. However I'm currently planning to focus even more on the future position of units, i.e. displaying the HP/XP bars and ellipse at the final destination of the unit. Then the number's position would make more sense.
If that doesn't work out I'll probably go with your suggestion.

• - It would be very useful to be able to select a unit that has a move on the whiteboard and assign to it another move without having to delete the recorded move first (especially if this unit is not the first in the whiteboard stack). The recorded move for that unit should be deleted then and the stack be reordered.

Can you elaborate on how you imagine the interface necessary to do that?

• - The ability to play any move by entering its number, rather than being limited to accept the first move with 'y', would be a nice improvement

Interesting idea, except that number keys already have a function in Wesnoth (undocumented?): they show where enemies can reach in 1, 2, 3, 4, etc turns.
Don't forget you can also mouseover any move to execute that one instead of move #1.

• - When the movement is interrupted by a newly discovered enemy unit, we can keep continue the movement by pressing 't'. But it would be nice to be able to do the same by pressing another 'y' (as my finger is still on that key, even if 't' key is not that far )

I dropped it for GSoC because I lacked time to properly implement it, but my idea for move interruptions is to simply keep a planned move with the remaining path. Then you would indeed be able to execute it (continue on the same path) with y, or delete it or save it for later.

• - You should give a better description of how to use the page up/page down keys. I haven't found out what they were doing. I guessed it was swapping moves in the whiteboard stack but that is not.

Point taken. The idea is to mouseover a move first, and then pgUp and pgDown will swap it up or down the whiteboard stack just as you say. I welcome suggestions to make it more intuitive.

Again, all these items are wishes and are in no way a limitation to the praise you deserve.

Similarly, I think none of these improvements should pass before the implementation that shares the whiteboard amongst players of a same team. I do think that would the best showcase of your work.
It could even bring some players that enjoy team games on the development server before 1.10 is out

Actually I'll probably fine-tune the single-player experience first, since if the whiteboard has too many annoyances it won't be acceptable as a Delay Shroud Updates replacement. But I'm really looking forward to get the networked part in, it was always my main goal and motivation.

[Eleazar]

The part of the whiteboard that most violates my wesnothinan thought patterns and therefore the part likely to trip me up is the ordering/queueing of moves.

Personally i would have gone with a more intutive if less powerful model where whatever unit is selected is the one whose move is "executed", and you need to select units/paths to execute each one. I.E. there's no queue, little numbers, Pg up/Pg down, etc.

Even if the basic approach doesn't change, the display of information could use some work. Currently the info showing which moves are queued and in what order is not easily accessible-- it can be scattered all over the map, in the form of little numbers.

I suggest adding an actual Queue on the side of the screen. See crude mockup.

Not only would it show the order of planned moves, but moves could be re-orderd by drag-n-drop within the queue. We might also want to include health/Xp bars in the queue, and perhaps some other icons indicating something about their orders, weather their orders are multi-turn or weather they involve attacking, or moving back the shroud etc.

[fog_of_gold]

I suggest you two things:
1st: Have an execute-all function. You usually do not plan moves if you aren't sure about what to do because of random ways like new enemies appearing from fog and fights. You can at the moment just press and hold 'y', but if you reach an enemy used to be in fog and your unit aborded the move, you won't have pressed 't' and will therefore execute the next move.

2nd: If the mousecurser is hold over a planned action and you scroll, it's not that you go with your field of view up or down, it's that the planned action is done earlier or later. I think it would save a lot of time.

[fog_of_gold]

bug: The number of turns the unit need to go to the place being covered by the mouse won't be shown, if it's the unit after the planned action.

[gabba]

The part of the whiteboard that most violates my wesnothinan thought patterns and therefore the part likely to trip me up is the ordering/queueing of moves.

Personally i would have gone with a more intutive if less powerful model where whatever unit is selected is the one whose move is "executed", and you need to select units/paths to execute each one. I.E. there's no queue, little numbers, Pg up/Pg down, etc.

Even if the basic approach doesn't change, the display of information could use some work. Currently the info showing which moves are queued and in what order is not easily accessible-- it can be scattered all over the map, in the form of little numbers.

I suggest adding an actual Queue on the side of the screen. See crude mockup.

Not only would it show the order of planned moves, but moves could be re-orderd by drag-n-drop within the queue. We might also want to include health/Xp bars in the queue, and perhaps some other icons indicating something about their orders, weather their orders are multi-turn or weather they involve attacking, or moving back the shroud etc.

I considered various ideas to help visualize the sequence of moves. I'm not sure a queue like you're proposing would work, since just looking at the bar itself wouldn't give much info (especially if the three units in the queue are 3 similar units e.g. 3 horsemen). If the corresponding arrows highlight when mouseovering the queue, maybe it could work, though. Unfortunately it's far from trivial to implement.

Overall one has to consider the various use cases for the whiteboard though:
- Planning some trivial moves (those you'd usually do with "delay shroud updates") and fast-execute them
--> Order doesn't really matter
- Planning a few moves and attacks in a battle situation, to see e.g. how you can bring a maximum of attacks on the enemy leader.
--> Order matters, but not as much as the final position of each unit. Also, you're likely to only execute the first three actions before changing your plans, so again order isn't so important
- Planning a complete turn with moves, attacks, etc., and then executing it move by move
--> Here order matters and a better overall view of all the moves would be useful, but planning a complete turn will very rarely be useful since a lucky/unlucky hit might change the situation at any time. Besides, a good MP player like Noy will tell you that planning ahead so much is a very bad habit to take if you want to get better at Wesnoth.

None of those uses indicates a glaring need for a visible queue, in my view. Maybe you could explain your own use of the whiteboard in more detail, so I can better understand your needs.

Other ideas I've considered for better visualization of the move queue:
- Controls to hide all moves and then show them one by one in order of execution, animated or not. Some kind of replay controls that allow you go back/forward in the queue, basically.
- Ghost the unit at the starting point, and give the "real" unit appearance with health/xp bars and ellipse to the destination one. (I'm most likely trying this before every other alternative, it's easier to implement.)
- Have a toggle key that hides all arrows and other whiteboard stuff, and only shows you the resulting positions of all the moves.

[gabba]

I suggest you two things:
1st: Have an execute-all function. You usually do not plan moves if you aren't sure about what to do because of random ways like new enemies appearing from fog and fights. You can at the moment just press and hold 'y', but if you reach an enemy used to be in fog and your unit aborded the move, you won't have pressed 't' and will therefore execute the next move.

Agreed, it was already a planned feature. This is easy to implement, but wiring-in a new hotkey is dreary and a bit long, which is why it didn't get in yet.

2nd: If the mousecurser is hold over a planned action and you scroll, it's not that you go with your field of view up or down, it's that the planned action is done earlier or later. I think it would save a lot of time.

You're suggesting to use the mouse wheel as a pgUp/pgDown alternative? I like the idea. Maybe I'd limit it to selected units (not just mouseovered) though, since otherwise with a relatively simple implementation the scrolling will stop as soon as your cursor is over a planned move, and it could get annoying fast.

bug: The number of turns the unit need to go to the place being covered by the mouse won't be shown, if it's the unit after the planned action.

If you don't want me to forget about it, submit it to bugs.wesnoth.org and assign to me. Try to rephrase or provide a bit more detailed (i.e. multi-sentence) description, as well, since I'm not 100% sure what you mean.

[Velensk]

Experimenting with this I found a few things one of which I'm not sure if it is a bug or not and the other merely falls under the realm of suggestion.

The thing that seemed like a bug was that when I planned a turn full of recruiting on a castle then a leader move and hit 'y' to execute the leader moved off the keep to the village leaving behind a castle full of planned recruits that could not be executed. I may be wrong but I had thought that all actions were executed in the order they were planned but for some reason the leader moving was jumping the queue.

Other notes:
-It would be nice if enemy actions did not interrupt planning.
-It would be nice if you could plot movement beyond the range that you can reach in a turn. There is an odd effect caused by being in WB mode: if you recruit a castle full of units and turn on white board mode you cannot tell all your units their destinations for next turn unless you hold tab. Now you could wait till it is your enemies turn and plot your movement then but it is a somewhat unpleasant quirk.
-I agree that having an execute all command would be very much appreciated (not too sure about some of Elesars other suggestions I have no problem with the action order).
-I agree that being able to reroute plans without deleting previous ones would be nice.

[Eleazar]

Overall one has to consider the various use cases for the whiteboard though:
#1 - Planning some trivial moves (those you'd usually do with "delay shroud updates") and fast-execute them
--> Order doesn't really matter
#2 - Planning a few moves and attacks in a battle situation, to see e.g. how you can bring a maximum of attacks on the enemy leader.
--> Order matters, but not as much as the final position of each unit. Also, you're likely to only execute the first three actions before changing your plans, so again order isn't so important
#3- Planning a complete turn with moves, attacks, etc., and then executing it move by move
--> Here order matters and a better overall view of all the moves would be useful, but planning a complete turn will very rarely be useful since a lucky/unlucky hit might change the situation at any time. Besides, a good MP player like Noy will tell you that planning ahead so much is a very bad habit to take if you want to get better at Wesnoth.

(added numbering to the points)

I'm far from a master player, but the above is what i expected. I thought that the big players had painted a different picture, because the above use cases seem to me to argue that the whole concept of any sort of queue/move order is an unnecessary complication.

[Boucman]

we can't get rid of order completely, because some actions make other actions possible/impossible

you can move units only in a free spot, so if you plan to move unit A, then unit B at unit A's place, the WB needs to be aware of the order

same thing with recruitment planning/leader movement...


so we can't get rid of order completely, except by allowing to plan impossible actions (like allowing recruit in any situation, and checking that the leader is here only at execution time) I'm afraid that this cure would be worse than the disease from a confusion point of view.

It's not a simple problem, which is also why we want some havy playtesting by a large variety of people


Velensk :
if you had the leader selected when you pressed Y, it's normal that the selected unit did its action, skipping the order (that happens to me quite often, executing out of order is a necessary feature that we need a way to make less confusing/accidentally triggering) if that's not the case, it's a bug.

One of the questions we had with gabba when designing the system was that we wern't able to figure out if out of order would be the most common usage, not the most common, but still happen quite often, or very rare to the point of removing the feature/ adding a pop-up to make sure that's the player want.

My personal bet is that it's the middle, but that's also the hardest to implement from a UI point of view. Maybe we should execute when a unit is selected instead of just mouseovered... there is room for suggestion here

-It would be nice if enemy actions did not interrupt planning.
-It would be nice if you could plot movement beyond the range that you can reach in a turn. There is an odd effect caused by being in WB mode: if you recruit a castle full of units and turn on white board mode you cannot tell all your units their destinations for next turn unless you hold tab. Now you could wait till it is your enemies turn and plot your movement then but it is a somewhat unpleasant quirk.
-I agree that having an execute all command would be very much appreciated (not too sure about some of Elesars other suggestions I have no problem with the action order).
-I agree that being able to reroute plans without deleting previous ones would be nice.
Experimenting with this I found a few things one of which I'm not sure if it is a bug or not and the other merely falls under the realm of suggestion.

The thing that seemed like a bug was that when I planned a turn full of recruiting on a castle then a leader move and hit 'y' to execute the leader moved off the keep to the village leaving behind a castle full of planned recruits that could not be executed. I may be wrong but I had thought that all actions were executed in the order they were planned but for some reason the leader moving was jumping the queue.

-It would be nice if enemy actions did not interrupt planning.

probably a bug, unless there is a good reason I can't remember

-It would be nice if you could plot movement beyond the range that you can reach in a turn. There is an odd effect caused by being in WB mode: if you recruit a castle full of units and turn on white board mode you cannot tell all your units their destinations for next turn unless you hold tab. Now you could wait till it is your enemies turn and plot your movement then but it is a somewhat unpleasant quirk.

Out of turn planning should work (that it planning your next turn during your oponent's turn)
I'm not sure about multi-turn planning (planning beyond the current turn) IIRC it's not implemented yet but should be in the future

-I agree that having an execute all command would be very much appreciated (not too sure about some of Elesars other suggestions I have no problem with the action order).

execute all is a very common request... I personally prefer pressing y, having one action executed and the next one focused immediately, then press y again... it's fast, handy, and gives me one last chance to proofread.

However, as gabba said, it's easy to implement and there is obviously a use for it, so it will be added soon

-I agree that being able to reroute plans without deleting previous ones would be nice.

so do we

we are not sure how to do it UIwise... we could probably add a right click action and the possibility to add a shortcut, but we need an "easy/instinctive" way to do it, and all easy keys are already assigned to shortcuts.

again we are open to suggestions here

cheers
Boucman

[Velensk]

For what it is worth, I doubt I will be wanting to execute out of order because the way I think I'll pretty much always plan in the order I wish to execute. If I am not entirely sure what order I want and I think it might matter I probably would just turn off WB and go without the annoying delays that planning causes.

However as a suggestion for UI perhaps have some function that cycles the queue order. Could be inconveient when you're doing large plans but it would be the way that fits a certain thought style best.

EDIT: May require some sort of filter to determine if an action can be moved to the back of the queue without causing problems for another. The more I think about it the less I like it however as I very rarely pay attention to what unit is selected while I am planning I find the current way of doing it even more counter intuitive.

Personally I like the idea of just being able to take certain portions of my turn ahead of time and hit a button that says 'Go!' and have that part of my turn executed while I figure out what to do with the rest of my turn. That is the biggest virtue I see in this feature and it dosn't really require the out of order execution at all. I understand that it is intended to replace 'delay shroud' but I don't use that feature much either.

[Yoyobuae]

Something I noticed right away is that it is not possible to see the reachable hexes for the ghosted units. I do this all the time with "delay shroud updates": move, mouseover unit, press '2' key, see reachable hexes. This lets me see the reachable hexes for the next turn. But I cannot plan a move, then use the '2' key to see these reachable hexes for the ghosted unit at the destination.

Something similar happens when planning a recruit. It would be very useful to be able to see which hexes the planned recruit could reach in the next turn. Would avoid having to count hexes at game start to plan the recruits to be able to capture villages efficiently.

[fog_of_gold]

[...]

-It would be nice if enemy actions did not interrupt planning.

probably a bug, unless there is a good reason I can't remember[...]

I really think it's better to keep this feature. For example, you can use it to plan how to look in the fog. But this is the reason I really think adding execute all is very needed.

[...]If you don't want me to forget about it, submit it to bugs.wesnoth.org and assign to me. Try to rephrase or provide a bit more detailed (i.e. multi-sentence) description, as well, since I'm not 100% sure what you mean.[...]

It is nearly the same bug like:

Something I noticed right away is that it is not possible to see the reachable hexes for the ghosted units. I do this all the time with "delay shroud updates": move, mouseover unit, press '2' key, see reachable hexes. This lets me see the reachable hexes for the next turn. But I cannot plan a move, then use the '2' key to see these reachable hexes for the ghosted unit at the destination.

Something similar happens when planning a recruit. It would be very useful to be able to see which hexes the planned recruit could reach in the next turn. Would avoid having to count hexes at game start to plan the recruits to be able to capture villages efficiently.

You can't see how far a unit is able to move, if it is the 'ghost unit'(the unit who is going to move to the place being covered by your mouse).

You're suggesting to use the mouse wheel as a pgUp/pgDown alternative? I like the idea. Maybe I'd limit it to selected units (not just mouseovered) though, since otherwise with a relatively simple implementation the scrolling will stop as soon as your cursor is over a planned move, and it could get annoying fast.

I wouldn't think it could get really annoying, since first, you do not use this feature of scrolling your field of view since it is just in one direction and second, you can very easy redo this by only scrolling the other way arround.

[Alink]

You're suggesting to use the mouse wheel as a pgUp/pgDown alternative? I like the idea. Maybe I'd limit it to selected units (not just mouseovered) though, since otherwise with a relatively simple implementation the scrolling will stop as soon as your cursor is over a planned move, and it could get annoying fast.

I wouldn't think it could get really annoying, since first, you do not use this feature of scrolling your field of view since it is just in one direction and second, you can very easy redo this by only scrolling the other way arround.

There is support for horizontal mousewheel.

I also think that block scrolling is bad. I suggest "Tab pressed + mousewheel" to do this. And maybe even "Tab + clicks" on units for othe WB actions like delete or execute. But I didn't really checked if it was intuitive or UI wise. The middle click is ok, but maybe it's a problem if you forget that you still have your finger on Tab and just want to select/deselect the usual way. Or just add visual clues to prevent that (cursor, visible 0-length WB arrow ...)