Getting ready for 0.4.5

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Dilvish
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Re: Getting ready for 0.4.5

#46 Post by Dilvish »

MatGB wrote:Dilvish! If there's going to be a delay, would you, um, object too much, if I introduced a new ship into the Energy line? Because I've been putting off Yandonman's energy frigate but it's SOOO VERY PRETTY. I'm thinking make it roughly on a par with the Robotic Hull and go between Compressed Energy and the two bigger beast on the tech chart. I won't consider it if the AI team say they can't adjust the tech &c but I really want to play around with it...
The ShipDesigner will automatically consider new available hulls (won't understand any funky characteristics though). Deciding on how to prioritize the tech shouldn't be too bad, for at least something reasonable anyway. Put it in a branch on your fork, which I'll check out to experiment a little, but I expect it would be fine.
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Dilvish
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Re: Getting ready for 0.4.5

#47 Post by Dilvish »

I think it hasn't been mentioned yet-- the Sitrep Panel should start out on show rather than hide (for Release) so that new players see the welcome message and pedia link right away.
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MatGB
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Re: Getting ready for 0.4.5

#48 Post by MatGB »

Agreed, also a completely new player would probably be helped by seeing all the unlocked at game start techs as they'll give an idea about some basic features.

Of course, some of them need to be reworded so that they actually do give an idea about basic features, but that's a different issue (and stringtable cleanup is ongoing anyway)
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mel_o
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Re: Getting ready for 0.4.5

#49 Post by mel_o »

Dilvish wrote:I think it hasn't been mentioned yet-- the Sitrep Panel should start out on show rather than hide (for Release) so that new players see the welcome message and pedia link right away.
It now defaults to being visible, although it now remembers if the user has hidden it and if so, won't automatically show when starting another new game. Might be a good idea to have it always show up when starting a new game, but remember its last state when loading an existing one?
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MatGB
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Re: Getting ready for 0.4.5

#50 Post by MatGB »

Dilvish wrote:
MatGB wrote:Dilvish! If there's going to be a delay, would you, um, object too much, if I introduced a new ship into the Energy line? Because I've been putting off Yandonman's energy frigate but it's SOOO VERY PRETTY. I'm thinking make it roughly on a par with the Robotic Hull and go between Compressed Energy and the two bigger beast on the tech chart. I won't consider it if the AI team say they can't adjust the tech &c but I really want to play around with it...
The ShipDesigner will automatically consider new available hulls (won't understand any funky characteristics though). Deciding on how to prioritize the tech shouldn't be too bad, for at least something reasonable anyway. Put it in a branch on your fork, which I'll check out to experiment a little, but I expect it would be fine.
Done Added Energy Frigate hull, tweaked Energy hull line prerequisites · MatGB/freeorion@2c5f3e4

(I rarely use my fork these days so I deleted and just reforked from master before uploading that)

Needs stringtable work but haven't time to do that now and better you see what I've got. It is so very pretty, think it's a nice little complement to the line.
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Vezzra
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Re: Getting ready for 0.4.5

#51 Post by Vezzra »

mel_o wrote:Might be a good idea to have it always show up when starting a new game, but remember its last state when loading an existing one?
Yep, sounds reasonable (IMO).

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Dilvish
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Re: Getting ready for 0.4.5

#52 Post by Dilvish »

oh, another thing that I think we should do for Release is to make the default Galaxy Seed be blank rather than zero (so it will seed from the clock by default).
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Geoff the Medio
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Re: Getting ready for 0.4.5

#53 Post by Geoff the Medio »

Dilvish wrote:oh, another thing that I think we should do for Release is to make the default Galaxy Seed be blank rather than zero (so it will seed from the clock by default).
Just requires:

Code: Select all

-        db.Add("GameSetup.seed",                UserStringNop("OPTIONS_DB_GAMESETUP_SEED"),                    std::string("0"),   Validator<std::string>());
+        db.Add("GameSetup.seed",                UserStringNop("OPTIONS_DB_GAMESETUP_SEED"),                    std::string(""),    Validator<std::string>());

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Dilvish
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Re: Getting ready for 0.4.5

#54 Post by Dilvish »

Geoff the Medio wrote:Just requires:
Um, yeah, I knew it was a trivially easy change to make. I was just making a note/proposal here so we could agree on it, and then also be less likely to forget to add it to the 0.4.5 branch once we actually make it. Or are you thinking we should go ahead and make that change in Master?
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Geoff the Medio
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Re: Getting ready for 0.4.5

#55 Post by Geoff the Medio »

Dilvish wrote:Or are you thinking we should go ahead and make that change in Master?
Probably not; default repeatable galaxy generation is helpful.

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Vezzra
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Re: Getting ready for 0.4.5

#56 Post by Vezzra »

Dilvish wrote:I was just making a note/proposal here so we could agree on it, and then also be less likely to forget to add it to the 0.4.5 branch once we actually make it.
I second that proposal :)

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MatGB
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Re: Getting ready for 0.4.5

#57 Post by MatGB »

Not sure about this idea.

In theory, I like it, in practice? Completely random seed that we've not tested can lead to very very bad first games depending on circumstances, currently the default seems to be quite a good little game, but I've had some horrific quickstarts on a fresh install in the past.

For 0.4.4 I spent about 2 weeks playing through seed 0 on every galaxy layout just to make sure it worked well enough and it did, but soon afterwards quickstart gave a horrific 2 Laenfa and an Eaxaw neighbour setup that I couldn't make headway against.

In theory, I like the idea, in practice I think we should keep t a default seed that we've tested (especially given a better walkthrough on the Wiki is a plan)
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Dilvish
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Re: Getting ready for 0.4.5

#58 Post by Dilvish »

MatGB wrote:For 0.4.4 I spent about 2 weeks playing through seed 0 on every galaxy layout just to make sure it worked well enough and it did, but soon afterwards quickstart gave a horrific 2 Laenfa and an Eaxaw neighbour setup that I couldn't make headway against.
In theory, I like the idea, in practice I think we should keep t a default seed that we've tested (especially given a better walkthrough on the Wiki is a plan)
Hmm, well, it sounds like you have a very good point about not just gambling on the random seed for people first trying the game.

Our galaxy generation code has changed enough I don't think we can count on seed 0 necessarily giving us the same results before. Perhaps you cna Sloth can run through that again? And if seed 0 doesn't work well we can choose some other initial seed. I don't know that the games really need to be played out to check it decently, though. I would think that building a supertesters and checking the starting vicinity would be good enough.
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MatGB
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Re: Getting ready for 0.4.5

#59 Post by MatGB »

As of last week, seed 0 quickstart gave a great game, nicely balanced and fun—well, multiple Terran worlds within 2 jumps of homeworld, anyway. I plan to test it again when everything that's planned to go in is in (as sometimes weird changes happen) and hopefully run it on the Windows machine as well, if it's a bad start I'll test 1, 2, etc until I get something playable.

I had completely forgotten blank would give us the date, tend to not want to do that myself as I sometimes like to replay a layout with a tweaked setting, etc.
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Geoff the Medio
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Re: Getting ready for 0.4.5

#60 Post by Geoff the Medio »

Vezzra wrote:Important: changelog!!! This can already be worked on prior to the creation of the release branch, but of course has to be finished before I can make RC1. Geoff, as you've proved to be the one who's most efficient in producing that thing, I guess that task will fall to you, if you're willing to...
Without access to the SVN commit logs, I'm having a hard time telling where to start the v0.4.5 changelog. Do you or anyone else know what the first post-v0.4.4 commit was? I think there was a separate release branch as well, so some of the commits before the actual release branch was tagged / created should probably be included in the v0.4.5 log...

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