KH War TODO List

ATTENTION

I've made massive upgrades to the system.  Speed shouldn't be an issue anymore due to the way things are being handled.  I haven't tested things in regards to memory usage yet, and I know there are a butt load of bugs.  For example, if the socket server crashes out (say due to a memory problem), NOTHING will restart it.  I haven't written that yet, but I can restart it from wherever.  Just PM me or something.

The map borders don't "update" on certain actions.  I'll work on that when I have a little time.  I've just sunk another 4hrs into programming, and have to get some sleep so I can get up in 5.5hrs, get 2 kids ready, and get the fuck out and off to work. :P

Long story short, it's insanely fast compared to what it used to be.  I've set a 3s delay to prevent bots, but at this point, it's looking like speed won't be an issue.  Instead, we need a way to limit bots.  Either a delay, or an energy thing...

After analysis and extensive testing...

Action in a new quadrant (not touched in the past, say, 15 minutes), 1.9s
Action in the middle of an active quadrant 0.1-0.2s

Sides will trip 2 quadrants, and corners will trip 3 quadrants.

The new map handler is a running server process that uses a unix port.  It's always running, so it holds a lot in memory (on last reboot, it was consuming 3% of the entire server's ram), but it's always fast as hell.  I'm pretty sure I have found a way to re-start it should it ever crash, but there's a 60s down time associated with it.  I need to write a handler for that...

The inspect command (espionage system) is still needed, but I haven't had the time to build it.  It seems I can't get anyone to lend a hand with Kongregate testing... :P

A thing to fix up, low priority: if you own land near the edge of the map (1575ish), it shows as an artifact at the far end of the map when looking at the last map section.  It's pretty clear what's going on, and won't impact play experience, but will look more polished to have cleaned up.

EDIT:  Also note that the tooltip/popups don't update to actions in the quadrant until you leave/return.  That is, if you take a tile from someone, and mouseover it, it will still say it belongs to them.  (Or if you killed a few forts, it'll say the old number; or if you evac'd, it'll say that it still belongs to you.)

More importantly, if you are skirmishing/battling, your map will not update to enemy actions until you leave/return to quadrant.

Consider an 'Evacuate this quadrant' command, for people who have clearly lost a battle and would prefer not to lose their entire nation to get back to playing.

There are currently a couple of techs with really large benefits compared to others, most notably Blimps.  You may want to consider if this is as desired, and if not, tweak the formulae to make them more moderate.

Look into the PVP XP formula -- when leveling up and continuing to attack the player, I was gaining more xp than before, where I would expect to gain less (because I now more clearly outmatch them).  I suspect the formula is currently weighted to make it effective/valuable to obliterate newbies as a big player, which is likely not what you're aiming for.

Last, I'm not sure that there's much point in the current instance.  We seem to have two players, maybe three (the last might be mostly or entirely bot), and in that case there is sufficient first-mover advantage to allow one player to monopolize the gamespace, so long as they continue to pay attn to the game.  (Specifically, the benefits from holding large numbers of landmarks, which you get from Blimps; in a real game, many players would reach this point semi-simultaneously.)  If you care to get feedback about warfare/factions/coldwars/etc., as opposed to basic game mechanic stuff, you'll need a couple more active players of similar size (meaning having a chance over maybe 10% to win attacks against each other).  Or maybe computer-generated 'players' to play the roles.

Hope the coding is proceeding nicely!

EDIT 2: minor issue, the tooltips/popups are on a lower layer than the side-of-map scrolling arrows, it would be nice if they were 'above' the arrows.

ATTENTION: 
All mapping issues have finally been resolved.  We are left with 1 issue though...
I need to scrap and rebuild the entire map.  This takes a good 8hrs to pull off.  I would have to shut the game down, purge the map & quadrant tables, run everything, then bring the game back up.  Unfortunately, I didn't build a way to take the game offline...  So I guess I've gotta get on that. :P

"Consider an 'Evacuate this quadrant' command"
+1 to this. Put couple input boxes for coordinates under the "Abandon" button, and a "Mass evacuate" button beneath that moves the map to the corresponding quadrant and asks for confirmation.

About PvP, maybe tweak the random factor in formulas a bit, so there is at least 1% chance for successful attack even if the attacker is level 1 and the defender is level 100?

As for the big green arrows, would you make them outlines instead of solid triangles, please? Would help to see what's in the middle tiles.

Also, i think the navigation bar on top takes too much space vertically, slim it down a bit?


Consider incorporating this (maybe switch to percentages instead of fixed values):

/* move chat under game */
    div#chat_div > iframe {
        position: fixed;
        top: 750px;
    }

/* fancy map tiles */
    div[class^="map_"] > div > img:hover {
        height: 44px;
        width: 44px;
        top:  -11px;
        left:  -11px;
        position: relative;
        box-shadow: 3px 3px 7px 1px rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.3);
        border-radius: 10px;
    }

Moving the chat allows playing while still keeping an eye on it. The tab on the top usually shows the number of new messages, so you know to scroll down and have a look.
When released on Kong, i guess you'll just switch to kong chat, besides the change is easily reverted :P

The second part zooms the tile image on hover (landmark, orb, water) and adds a shadow, hope it you like it. I couldn't find a way to zoom multiple images though (landmark+fort, etc), at least on Firefox, maybe other browsers would work different.


And finally, what was that about Kongregate testing couple posts above?

The chat won't be moved, as the game has to run in a 1000x750 box.  Moving it below the game would give you the text input box... and no messages.

Making an image like that pop-out isn't something I'm going for.  Keep in mind that there will be buildings you can construct in the future, most of which will take up more than 1 tile's worth of space.

Why should a guy with a sharpened stick have any chance in hell of capturing land from somone with tanks?

I guess you didn't test the CSS since the server is down... whatevs

Having a chance (however small) would give incentive to new players to continue playing even if the map is mostly monopolized. We want more players, right?
The game gets grindy and boring later on. Add the "all good spots already occupied" + the "what's the point playing against bots" and you get a ton of ex-players that quit soon after they see what's the game about.
Also, if someone has to do 200 attacks on your tile until they are successful, it won't matter to you much as a single fort would double that. But it would matter to the one poking your tank with a sharpened stick.

And, since i mentioned bots, consider reseting the level of yours for proper testing :P

My level is for testing end game extremes, along with consuming mass quantities of the map to judge performance.

There won't be "permanent" players.  That's what the entire rebirth system is for. Let's say you're close to an orb, but some big guy is holding onto it, and you have no chance of attacking him.  Give it a few days and BAM, he's reset and is flung to some far corner of the map.  Now the orb is unprotected and ready for the taking.

I do plan on changing the rate of XP for map tiles.  I've also re-adjusted the XP gain on land capture, as well as the XP gain on successful PVP, defenses, etc.  Once the game's back up, I need to get a few things in a row, then I'll start work on the inspect functions.

On the chat, consider having official support for running it in a separate window?  ATM, we need to flip over to chat to see if anything is new.  (I noticed some controls for seeing who was in the main room and maybe something about notification at one point, but these are gone at last check.  Having a list of online players is useful for opening a chat with someone.

While idk about the sharpened stick vs. tanks (yeah, let's not get too started about Ewoks vs. ATATs), it does seem that the formula atm is saying if one guy has 25% more baseline, the battle is over.  (Area 11 and I had a battle, I had 90% of his level and half of his land holdings, I never won a single attack.  If what you have is something like 'total battle power is calculated from your various attributes with random factors.  Then battle power is compared, better wins.', consider replacing the 'better wins' with something like 'if X is better and Y is less, X gets X chances to win, and Y gets (Y-X/2)*2 chances, and pick randomly between those.'

Especially combined with a fix of sorts to the incentive to obliterate tiny players (noted above, XP/hit goes up as you advance and outclass the enemy even more), and having some incentive to hold land (beyond thinking intuitively that it makes sense until you figure out that it doesn't), that could help keep people wanting to play.

If you have any complaints about the chat system, see this link: https://konghack.com/ucp/xmpp

UPDATE: Just finished cleaning up and bootstrapping that page. :)

Updated the tooltips.  They work just fine now.

Inspect will be coming soon, I have to take care of a few other things first.

I noticed there's a bit of lag when changing map pages, so I've decided to make that faster.  Tile interaction is much faster, as the client simply repaints a tile instead of pulling the map, and actions are "set and forget" via the socket server.  Well, changing a map page, especially to a quadrant that hasn't been loaded recently, will result in a good deal of lag.  Idea time.

The quadrants table will house the JSON array for output.  This will cut down on read and processing times, as it's already pre-processed.  w00t!.

Anyway, have to take off for work.  l8rz.

I'd noted that changing quadrants took a good bit of time, and was thinking of suggesting a 'Moving to quadrant' status msg so the player knew that the command had been received, but speedy performance is perhaps even better.

Well, after overhauling the quadrant system, I've discovered this.

Cached quadrant Gen & Transfer Time: ~0.2s
Fresh quadrant Gen & Transfer Time: ~2s

The crazy bit is that it seems to be lagging harder client side now.  I need to finish the caching mechanism.  Once that's done, we're golden.

Maybe some more ingame objectives or missions would introduce more fun element to this project. More target/goal to reach :) just some personal small advice . no pressure.

Small annoyance with the client - it won't perform an attack on a tile it "thinks" is already owned.
This would be a problem for PvP as until you reload the quadrant to be able to attack, you might not have adjacted tiles anymore.