Hide random map when shroud is on

[bkhl]

Me and my homies likes to play with shroud and fog of war turned on, with random maps.

Now we do this by covering up the part of the host's screen with the map before generating the map.

I think it would be natural for the map to be hidden when shroud is on, though. (And regenerated, if a generated map is already showing when shroud is selected.)

[Neoriceisgood]

Problem is you won't see if you made an unbalanced map, or if the castles are somewhere surrounded by deep water (I've seen this happen once)

[bkhl]

Make it a separate option, then.

Anyway, I don't think it'll be more unbalanced than how it gets if only one of the players know the outline of the map...

[Dacyn]

Problem is you won't see if you made an unbalanced map, or if the castles are somewhere surrounded by deep water (I've seen this happen once)

Doesn't that mean we should fix the map generator so it only generates fair maps?

[bkhl]

Doesn't that mean we should fix the map generator so it only generates fair maps?

Heh, yeah, that too. But in the mean time, I actually find most generated maps fair enough, especially if you play 2v2 or so.

[Dave]

The eventual plan is to have it that if 'shroud' is ticked, the map preview won't be displayed.

Problem is you won't see if you made an unbalanced map, or if the castles are somewhere surrounded by deep water (I've seen this happen once)

Doesn't that mean we should fix the map generator so it only generates fair maps?

This is very difficult to do without making the maps symmetrical or near symmetrical (and thus boring). I haven't seen a game which can generate nice and fair maps.

David

[Dacyn]

This is very difficult to do without making the maps symmetrical or near symmetrical (and thus boring). I haven't seen a game which can generate nice and fair maps.

well I think you would be able to be sure that none of the players are surrounded by deep water, and I'm not sure a human looking at the map could do much better than that anyway.

[bkhl]

This is very difficult to do without making the maps symmetrical or near symmetrical (and thus boring). I haven't seen a game which can generate nice and fair maps.

David

Making the maps symmetrical wouldn't necessarily work for Wesnoth, either, since different races behave differently in the same terrain.

[Neoriceisgood]

The forest of fear is pretty balanced, although elves have slight advantages with certain starting positions (though they lack flying units wich would make the undead,drakes and dwarves better on it; not sure if it's balanced for loyalists though.)

[Dave]

This is very difficult to do without making the maps symmetrical or near symmetrical (and thus boring). I haven't seen a game which can generate nice and fair maps.

David

Making the maps symmetrical wouldn't necessarily work for Wesnoth, either, since different races behave differently in the same terrain.

Sure, but we are completely kidding ourselves to think that we can make maps 'balanced' taking races into consideration as well.

David

[Dacyn]

The forest of fear is pretty balanced, although elves have slight advantages with certain starting positions (though they lack flying units wich would make the undead,drakes and dwarves better on it; not sure if it's balanced for loyalists though.)

wouldn't necessarily

It's possible to make a balanced symmetrical map, but not all randomly generated symmetrical maps will be balanced.

[bkhl]

By the way: How cheat safe would shroud be on public servers?

Is the map actually generated on the server, for instance, and are the miniature map, or the uncharted parts of the full map, sent out to clients?

[Dacyn]

the uncharted parts of the full map, sent out to clients?

This one.

[bkhl]

Ok. Then I guess it doesn't much matter where the map is generated, either.

[Dave]

Wesnoth was originally designed as a single player game. The server is very dumb.

Having a dumb server has many disadvantages, but otoh it has advantages, among which is the easier development.

David