Monday, March 3, 2008

Major Update

I have just deployed some changes. Some of these were suggested by users -- thanks JinnTann and 123 (whoever you are).

Here are the changes. Please let me know if any bugs have been introduced with this deployment:

1) There is now a "Browse Players" link on the left hand menu. You can see all players and click into their profile. In the future, there will be a search here, but it is not needed with the measly number of users we have now

2) There is a "Send Message" button on the player profile page.

3) The player proflie page shows the players battle history.

4) On the battle detail page, the invite users box now only accepts one user at a time. This was to allow it to have the user-name autocomplete feature like when you are composing a message. Now, just type one username or email and click invite, then do the next one.

5) There is the *beginnings* of a spectator mode. Once a game has begun, if you are not in the game, you will see a "Watch this game" button on the battle detail screen. Clicking that will take you into the game even if you are not in the battle. The game interface doesn't yet account for spectators, so some funny things might happen in the game interface, but it should work for the most part, but I have not tested it. I will be making changes to the game client to support specator mode soon.

6) There is now a "Surrender" button in the game. Clicking this will remove your ships from the game on the next turn. If it is a two player game, the game will end. It will count as a loss for you.

7) If all ships are out of ammo, the game will end. This will count as a "win" for both players since each player had surviving ships still in the game.

8) Command Points are now awarded when a battle ends. This is highly experimental right now, so it may change in the future. The amount of points you get is equal to the average CP of all the ships in the battle -- the bigger the ships are on average, the more CP you will earn. If you lost the game, you will get half of this value. If you surrendered, you will get one third of this value. Some of you are owed CP from battles that ended before this. I will account for that later once I see that this award system is working OK.

9) There are now AI players in the game! You can play by yourself against one or two AI players, or you can invite AI players to a game with other people. AI players work with all the same restrictions of normal people in the game. To play against the AI, just invite an AI player to your game. Their names all start with "AI". So type "AI" into the invite box and the auto-complete should pop-up with all the AI players. Pick one and click the "Invite User" button. The AI will join your game and set his initial orders.

10) The in-game chat and the chat lobby have been improved a little. There should be no more problems with text wrapping or other glitches.

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