IPhone beta

[JemDaddyO]

I would really love pinch-zoom. It seems too close by default. I can't even see the entire range of movement of an elf in the forest. And the units seem plenty big to select individually. I'm sure if I zoomed out, i could stand smaller units but larger view. Kyle, is that just a a huge effort due to the platform port nature of the game?

I would be in favor of that inertia panning as well. Since you can't see the full range of moves, panning seems rather clunky right now. I select the unit and then the process of panning often deselects my unit somehow before i can pan over to his destination. For long distances I've tried the minimap selection to find my location but that map is so small, I'm often way off and still have to pan resulting in the same problem as above.

Kyle, are there any specific areas we should test? Aside from the memory problems causing crashing, I haven't seen anything I would call a bug. Pretty nice work.

Kyle, anything we can help with? I'm pretty good with an editor and if you give me a sample of what needs to be done, I can figure out how to transform files. I'm a software developer, just not for games.

[Ktalyx]

I've finished the campaign "An orcish incursion". There were many crashes but I finished it.

The only other problem is that I can't play skirmishes without fog of war because I win the battle as soon as I finish my first turn

[KylePoole]

I've finished the campaign "An orcish incursion". There were many crashes but I finished it.

The only other problem is that I can't play skirmishes without fog of war because I win the battle as soon as I finish my first turn

I'll have to change the default settings in the skirmish boxes... For some reason if you do not use map settings, by default the players are on the same team.. so yeah, instant victory for that team!

[Kymille]

Those are great ideas on the panning.

I would like to second the idea of pinch-zooming. Of course maybe it is too hard to implement, but I found myself wishing I could zoom out and then back in, like with looking at web pages or photos.

I'd also like to suggest dropping the other options when you double-click on the castle tile. I imagine the user will almost 100% of the time want to recruit, so why have another menu. Who often would people want to put labels on iPhone maps anyway? I think it would be a good trade off, if it's not difficult.

Anyway, you've done a wonderful job. Thanks again.

[GuypronouncedGuy]

I'd also like to suggest dropping the other options when you double-click on the castle tile. I imagine the user will almost 100% of the time want to recruit, so why have another menu. Who often would people want to put labels on iPhone maps anyway? I think it would be a good trade off, if it's not difficult.
Anyway, you've done a wonderful job. Thanks again.

I think this is a good idea as well, but leave the recruit AND recall options! (if possible)

[Zerovirus]

I think you should put the menu buttons at the bottom. This is a port, the menu layouts don't have to be the same. If you put the main menu buttons on the bottom, they'll have more space to stretch out and thus be easier to press. A few redesigns of the menus would also be useful- you could use more submenus because the current menus' buttons are just a bit small. Also, crashes. Lots of them. Hopefully they'll be fixed. And pinch zooming. Though I'm not sure how well that'd work with pixel graphics, I'm thinking maybe the max zoom can be what we have right now and the max zoomout be something like the minimap-size, maybe a bit bigger.

Edit: Maybe the additional data should be gotten rid of. Statistics, autosaving after each turn, stuff that takes up unnecessary memory. Might help the crashing problems too.

Another Edit: Would it be possible to make a separate program or change the app so that it can sync the savefiles on your PC's Wesnoth with your Iphone's Wesnoth? It would make campaigns a lot more portable and fun.

[Sangel]

I've finished the campaign "An orcish incursion". There were many crashes but I finished it.

The only other problem is that I can't play skirmishes without fog of war because I win the battle as soon as I finish my first turn

I'll have to change the default settings in the skirmish boxes... For some reason if you do not use map settings, by default the players are on the same team.. so yeah, instant victory for that team!

But my mother always taught me that the best games were those in which everybody wins!

Incidentally, unit traits (strong, resilient) etc are not showing up on my iPhone 3GS (3.1.2) - their effects are still present, just the trait names are not showing up in the space where they usually would. Instead, there's a blank space in the stats pane on the right where the traits would usually be.

[Crunchy]

Another Edit: Would it be possible to make a separate program or change the app so that it can sync the savefiles on your PC's Wesnoth with your Iphone's Wesnoth? It would make campaigns a lot more portable and fun.

That's brilliant. Unnecessary for a first release, and quite a lot of work I'm sure, but it would still be cool to see this done at some point. For now, it would just be cool to see a version that is similar to or even dumbed down from the original. Amazing work really. I don't have an iphone yet. Someday

[Zerovirus]

I'd like to get some confirmation on this. How often do you guys' iPhones crash while playing? For me it's almost once per turn. Also, why does the max free data on the little debug popup notice change wildly every time, from like 40 to 250?

[JemDaddyO]

Hmm, mine crashes maybe every turn to every other turn. I never get above 50 Mb free on my 1st Gen iPhone 8GB. But yes it varies wildly between 30 and 50.

I'm waiting for the next release of the beta where the crashes hopefully diminish. I finished the tutorial scenario, but it's pretty much unplayable with this many crashes.

[jayce]

I'm waiting for the next release of the beta where the crashes hopefully diminish. I finished the tutorial scenario, but it's pretty much unplayable with this many crashes.

Me too. As is, it is really unplayable. I finished the tutorial and try another scenario, but in some case, it crash more than one time a turn...
For now, I didn't notice other bug but it's difficult to test really.

For the memory, a strnage thing, my iPhone have more free memory after a crash than before...

Example :
First start of wesnoth : nearly 30Mb Free
crash of wesnoth then relaunch : nearly 50Mb Free
another crahs then relaunch : still nearly 50Mb Free

Another example :
First start of wensoth : nearly 5Mb Free
crash (earlier than in the first example ) then relaunch : nearly 30Mb Free

Why does the Wesnoth crash free-up more memory than Wesnoth use ?

[Yoyobuae]

Actually, it's not straight forward to tell just how much memory is available.

In Linux, the kernel keeps memory cached or something like that.

That makes it seem like there is more memory being used than normal, the memory used by old programs is not released immediately, but kept just in case it's needed again (ie. for relaunching the program). It is cached. But as soon as the memory is needed the kernel frees it up and makes it available to the program requesting more memory.

Well, at least that's how I imagine it works.

So it might go somethin like:

• Wesnoth requests some memory
• kernel frees it and gives it to Wesnoth
• Wesnoth crashes, kernel frees memory used by Wesnoth
• Re-launching Wesnoth reports higher amount of memory

I suppose something similar would be happening on the Iphone OS.

EDIT: Read some more about it. It's called "disk buffer cache" (or similar). It's an optimization that keeps parts of the disk (internal flash memory in Iphone's case) in RAM to speed up disk (flash) read/writes.

This optimization is strictly optional though. When a big program like Wesnoth loads, it can "push" the disk buffer cache off the memory. One side effect could be slower loading of other applications that are no longer cached in memory.

[Dave]

Here's a more general playabality issue I noticed.

Playing 3p Morituri against the AI with Fog of War, I move a wolf rider from my castle to a village. Naturally, it stops partway when a new enemy unit is spotted. But, the screen is so small that the enemy is not visible to the me. I need to drag the screen to look for the enemy, but since the wolf rider is "active" the interface thinks I want to move the wolf. This all pretty painful, but I don't know what the solution is.

That's a good point... how about if it stops your unit movement and scrolls to the enemy unit that was sighted?

The idea we had for this was to draw a red line between your unit and the enemy unit, so you can easily see where the enemy is and take action if appropriate, but you also know "oh that's some enemy off in that direction...I don't care that much."

We never implemented this in Wesnoth because most screens are big enough so it is mostly a non-issue, but on the iPhone I think it'd be useful. I tend to think that actually scrolling the screen would be annoying, though.

David

[GuypronouncedGuy]

Next version installed now!

Gameplay is a bit faster on my iPhone, and it didn't crash randomly.
Played through the first scenario of 'Rise of Wesnoth' and THEN after clicking 'End Scenario' it crashed. It did save the progress though and I was able to load scenario 2.

Game interface:
Scrolling still is clunky/heavy (not sure if you get what I mean with that description)
Several times after completing a move have accidentally clicked 'End Turn' instead of 'Next Unit' in the context menu as they are adjacent.

Feedback to Dave: I would agree with the red line rather than auto-scrolling personally, I think the less 'redrawing' the better/faster the game will be overall.

[KylePoole]

Great, thanks for the feedback! I've greatly improved the map scrolling for beta 3. I can move the "Next Unit" menu entry to the top of the context menu so there is less chance of mis-tapping. It has also been suggested that it warn you if you click "end turn" when a unit hasn't moved anywhere yet, but I think this would be kind of annoying, since 90% of the time I don't move my leader...