Official new ladder thread

[Quetzalcoatl]

When it commes to keeping parallel ladders, well it isnt prepared for this at all tbh. I will think about that but it may be that having second instance of the ladder would be best way :/. About sides yep allow_player=no was what I was reffering to so it looks ok. Do you have any conquest replay without sides assigned to AI (I mean all slots taken by human players).

Cheers
Q

[SlowThinker]

Do you have any conquest replay without sides assigned to AI (I mean all slots taken by human players).

Do you mean a replay from replays.wesnoth.org or a replay created by 'Menu/Save Replay'? It looks their structure is different, and also some replays created by the game server are corrupted:
corrupted replays at replays.wesnoth.org

In Conquest games some sides may be empty: for example a 8-player map may be played with side 1 and side 2 only. Is this OK?

[Quetzalcoatl]

Both should be ok so if possilbe I would ask for one with empty sides and second with all asigned.

Cheers
Q

[SlowThinker]

The files are locally saved replays.

[grrr]

Great work there, Q. Since you're already parsing replays to prevent cheating: One feature I personally would like to see is an online replay viewer, meaning I wouldn't have to fetch the replay, then load in Wesnoth, then step through replay. I want to do all that on the ladder website!

[nagafono]

grrr, i suppose there is a need in more simple interface for web-viewing for your idea. 'cause in other case it would not be fastly-solved task to implement

[Quetzalcoatl]

SlowThinker: So I checked those replays and found that indeed manually saved files cause problems as they have differend structure but I guess its not a big deal. About conquest and replays in archive: they work nicely with L8 but there is one problem. When I was searching for replays in archive I found that often conquest maps are played by less players than map have slots avaiable. Currently Im doing kind of lame check (on ladder8.herokuapp.com) to see if all slots are taken to aviod reporting games with invalid number of players and such. Anyways changing this behaviour is very easy and I made a quick patch that does the trick.

grrr: thx we will see whats possible

[SlowThinker]

I think you should count with the manually saved files, because people should submit them if the server's replay is corrupted (see the bug I linked above).

Conquest games use only consecuctive slots, starting from slot 1.

grrr: thx we will see whats possible

it would require a fairly large amount of work (a note: in past I saw a link about somebody writing a web for online Wesnoth games, it might help) ...
maybe you should invest that work in improvement of the Wesnoth built-in replay engine: I am missing many features

• to choose a point of view of any side (not only side 1 / full map)
• to replay on the MP server, so that anybody can watch and comment
• pause (anytime), step back, rewind
• variants

[grrr]

it would require a fairly large amount of work (a note: in past I saw a link about somebody writing a web for online Wesnoth games, it might help) ...
maybe you should invest that work in improvement of the Wesnoth built-in replay engine: I am missing many features

• to choose a point of view of any side (not only side 1 / full map)
• to replay on the MP server, so that anybody can watch and comment
• pause (anytime), step back, rewind
• variants

Well, if you approach it like that, it'll never get done

The trick is to heavily limit the scope. So let's check what a viewer needs to do:
1. Show a hex grid (because Wesnoth uses hexes).
2. From savegame, match each terrain string to a simplified graphical asset that can be used on website (no need for fancy tile border transition code).
3. For each unit, have a simplified graphical asset (a black circle with a label "OG: 44/5" for an Orcish Grunt with 44hp and 5 movement points would be enough already!). Skip battle animations, unit animations and whatnot entirely
4. No mouse support needed! This is a viewer, you are not allowed to click on units, or right-click on terrain. Though one might want to show a nice tooltip while hovering over terrain/units.
5. Parse turns and move units accordingly (for a first demo, I'd be happy to have a step and play turn button).

Now the tragic thing is that a viewer *needs* to recalculate the battle outcomes (dont ask, it's plain stupid really, if you ask me), because one gets the random numbers that were drawn, not the battle results. I doubt the Wesnoth devs would want to patch their replay file format to make it more viewer friendly, so one has to copy the battle calculation code (it's all in one file I think), but also extract all units stats (well, perhaps patching Wesnoth to store better replays is easier in the end ).

[Quetzalcoatl]

Well yes indeed its not so joyful perspective actually. Obviously its a lot more work that website with one or two report buttons . Not to mention all of that have to be done in js . I fear to think what would happen with new wesnoth releases when some tweaks to units would be done here and there or such. Anyway I was always curious why wesnoth cant open replays from directories other than saves folder. While obviously thats not the thing we are talking of one could at least click open with and launch wesnoth and that would help a lot to most ppl. Was thinking about making a patch but I do not know when or if I will ever find motivation to do so. I also have no idea about C++ but that shouldnt be such a big problem .

So well I would rather wait a bit to see some evolution of replay engine. Who knows maybe it will be redone as for now it seems that it is designed to be parsed only by clients that implement almost full wesnoth logic .

[Kolbur]

For some people the registration code link wasn't working (might be because they were in a game and not in the lobby) so someone posted a code in the chat and it could be used for another to register. That sounds like a hole in the registration process.

[Quetzalcoatl]

As for the registration code its hard to imagine for me why you come to conclusion that it will be posted in game chat . Obviously thats not the case. About code not being delivered Im 100% sure I handle all errors properly so ppl will always get message what went wrong and the most common problems that may occur are connection problems (script not being able to connect to server wesnoth org). But you will get message explaining that.

Well: maybe thats because its 01.04 , didint thought about that earlier .

[SlowThinker]

Ideas:

Add a chat to every game-related page.
Allow to create a page for planned games too, in order to allow chat there. Announcing a game might attract observers.
Add a page with a list of all chat entries, in both shrunk (link only) / full (all the text is shown) mode.

[Quetzalcoatl]

Hello,

sorry but I had quite crazy week and couldn't find time to visit forums. There is a chat on game pages and players can comment profiles of other players as well (I added this option when I was thinking about such features), but yeah some improvements would be cool. Those features however remains hidden as they are avaiable only for registered players.

Cheers
Q

[SlowThinker]

Those features however remains hidden as they are avaiable only for registered players

I wonder whether this is a good marketing strategy