v0.4.2 soon?

[Dilvish]

* Is there a technical reason the AI-built fleet names aren't translated? SD_MARK_ENDO... looks broken. If we just need a ton of new stringtable entries i could pitch in.

This seems to be bothering a lot of people, sorry, That's just a how I named them to help track design characteristics; I will in the not too distant future move that all back-end. A set of names to be used for AI ship designs would be nice, but as reasonable stand-in would be for me to simply use the ship-name list currently available. The real issue is that I hadn't yet tracked down how to tap into this system at all. And if they AI's are all pulling different random design names then the pedia ship design page is going to fill faster **edit** the following was wrong and probably entries writing over each other (I notice that currently, if two AIs enter ship designs with the same name, there is still only one listing, which is fine for now since the design contents are also currently identical).

What would be quickest & hopefully a reasonable stop-gap is for me to just change the initial part of the ship names -- so instead of "SD_TROOP_SHIP_A2" we would have "StormTroopers_A2" etc for troopers, and for military ships, instead of "SD_MARK_Z_C_MC5", "SD_MARK_Z_C_MC6" and "SD_MARK_Z_D2_ENDO5", "SD_MARK_Z_D2_ENDO6" etc I could have "Panther_5", "Panther_6", "Jaguar_B_5", "Jaguar_B_6" etc.

That's a change I could crank out very quickly today. I suppose longer term we might want to shoot for a separate set of design names for each species, and for me to not encode any info at all into name suffixes, which will be fine (just not necessarily for today)

[eleazar]

The basic issue is, i think that non-coders only see text in all caps separated by underscores when some technology isn't working right. It looks like something's broken. Typographically, it's loud and ugly too.

What would be quickest & hopefully a reasonable stop-gap is for me to just change the initial part of the ship names -- so instead of "SD_TROOP_SHIP_A2" we would have "StormTroopers_A2" etc for troopers, and for military ships, instead of "SD_MARK_Z_C_MC5", "SD_MARK_Z_C_MC6" and "SD_MARK_Z_D2_ENDO5", "SD_MARK_Z_D2_ENDO6" etc I could have "Panther_5", "Panther_6", "Jaguar_B_5", "Jaguar_B_6" etc.

Sounds good. With the exception of special function ships (scout, colony, troop, outpost), i'd name them more descriptively, by the hull type. I.E. "Endomorphic-B-5". Also if possible, please use hyphens instead of underscores. It is a mark of writing intended for human consumption rather than a machine's.

That's a change I could crank out very quickly today. I suppose longer term we might want to shoot for a separate set of design names for each species, and for me to not encode any info at all into name suffixes, which will be fine (just not necessarily for today)

Not necessarily. The player (or AI) may have many species, it could be confusing to have an identical ship named differently according to who is driving, when there's no actual difference.

[eleazar]

If somebody wants to make me a list of user-visible ship parts that borrow icons from other ship parts, i'll try to whip more icons out.

[Geoff the Medio]

I notice that currently, if two AIs enter ship designs with the same name, there is still only one listing, which is fine for now since the design contents are also currently identical.

That might be a bug with how I did the alphabetization of entries... The multimap should be able to store multiple entries with the same human-readable text, as long as the linked-to item has something different about it (eg. different design ID), but it's possibly not working as I intended...

[Dilvish]

I notice that currently, if two AIs enter ship designs with the same name, there is still only one listing, which is fine for now since the design contents are also currently identical.

That might be a bug with how I did the alphabetization of entries... The multimap should be able to store multiple entries with the same human-readable text, as long as the linked-to item has something different about it (eg. different design ID), but it's possibly not working as I intended...

I'm sorry, it seems I was mistaken -- I must have gotten that impression during a game where I had run into multiple AI's, but they were using different levels of ships or I just didn't observe enough to see the ship design entries getting duplicated. Checking now I do indeed see multiple ship design entries with the same name in the pedia.

[Dilvish]

ok, I just committed an update that gives the AI ship designs better names & also catches them up to the tech and hull changes that were just made.

[Dilvish]

I also want to suggest that the save file name format be reverted for a stable 4.2, even if it gets left the same in the test versions -- as it is now, the timestamp prevents any save files from ever over-writing each other, and they easily get to be several MB each, resulting in a single game taking up a significant fraction of a GB of disk space. I think the folks who might run the 4.2 rev should not all be expected to guard against the game eventually filling up their hard-drive.

Perhaps also, or as an alternative, there should be an option setting for 'max space to be devoted to saved games in total' after which it will delete the oldest file(s) before saving a new game?

[eleazar]

I also want to suggest that the save file name format be reverted for a stable 4.2, even if it gets left the same in the test versions -- as it is now, the timestamp prevents any save files from ever over-writing each other, and they easily get to be several MB each, resulting in a single game taking up a significant fraction of a GB of disk space.

And/Or the default for autosaves could be set to every 10 turns.

[Geoff the Medio]

The reason for the autosave name change was partly because there were crashes happening due to it trying to overwrite the same save file it had just read, but which wasn't closed properly yet. A proper fix would involve not autosaving immediately after loading a save game, but that hasn't been done yet.

[eleazar]

And/Or the default for autosaves could be set to every 10 turns.

HD space issues aside, i think this would be better. The save folder can easily get a huge number of files that are a bit of a pain to scroll through.

[eleazar]

Also don't forget changelog.txt for significant user-visible changes.

[qsswin]

So did r5546 fix sensor ghosts entirely?

[Geoff the Medio]

So did r5546 fix sensor ghosts entirely?

Probably not; such issues usually require a few iterations - at least - to get right.

[yandonman]

What's left to do to release 0.4.2?

[Geoff the Medio]

I want to hear back about testing the next builds. If there are no major replicable issues, then I don't have any more specific things left that I want to do. Content will probably need tweaking, though.