General experience with 0.4.7 RC1

Describe your experience with the latest version of FreeOrion to help us improve it.

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Oberlus
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General experience with 0.4.7 RC1

#1 Post by Oberlus »

It's very, very good.

Fighters are so cool.

Performance is also way improved from 0.4.6. In a continuous sesion of play from turn 1 to 240 I had never to wait more than 5 seconds between turns, so the issues that I noticed in 0.4.6 seems to be resolved. Only a few (less than 5) times I clicked on a far away system to check its planets and UI freezed for a few seconds (normally it's instantaneous), but that may be due to Windows, and nevertheless it's irrelevant.

Also, I like all the cool monsters wandering around and the taming of them (I didn't see any kind of nest in my few games with 0.4.6, now in my first 0.4.7RC game I have three tamed kraken nests and two more under enemy control).

IA seems improved also. No more suicidal troopers, no scattered fleets that come in dribs and drabs. I still see some nonsensical behaviour:
- AI sending troopers to a system that has no guarding fleet but has shields and mines, so troopers die before they can do anything.
- Systems under AI supply reach that remain uncolonised for the whole game (200+ turns), despite that AI has 1k+ PP, nearby shipyards on well developed colonies and no close enemy fleets. Maybe it was because of poor habitability, but having reached turn 200 I would bet it has enough growth tech for it to be worthwhile.

Good job!

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Dilvish
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Re: General experience with 0.4.7 RC1

#2 Post by Dilvish »

Oberlus wrote:- AI sending troopers to a system that has no guarding fleet but has shields and mines, so troopers die before they can do anything.
Hmm, right, the recent AI troop movement improvements did not add any checks regarding mines. The AI does estimate when it might start running into mines, and will generally start building armored troop carriers at that point, but that is only a partial protection. I will bookmark this and add to my todo list, to get around to adding some enemy mine considerations into the movement code.
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MatGB
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Re: General experience with 0.4.7 RC1

#3 Post by MatGB »

For what it's worth, currently if there are only troop ships in orbit no combat occurs so Basic Damage Control, Advanced DamCon and any internal stuff (eg Robotic Hull) will work, Fleet Field won't unless there's some strangeness in supply, obviously. I've more than once marooned scouts without fuel and had them repair themselves out of destruction, I keep meaning to tweak it but it's not a major issue and it's harder to script than the simple "turns since last battle" check.

@Oberlus thanks, it's good to know the performance improvement I've been noticing slowly as it incrementally appears is as big for someone making the jump as we hope, and the AI improvements have been substantial (they 'jumped' for me as we had a bug for a few weeks that I didn't notice for ages, when that was fixed they suddenly got very scary).

For what it's worth, the monster nests haven't really changed for years (before my forum joined date anyway), the only tweaks I recall were to reduce numbers, so it must've just been a strangeness in your previous games that they weren't there: we keep meaning to do more with them but it's a question of finding time and not getting distracted by newness: most of my time in this cycle has been testing Fighters and minor tweaks for example, and the main devs did a lot of the backend performance stuff you've noticed.
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Oberlus
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Re: General experience with 0.4.7 RC1

#4 Post by Oberlus »

You're more than welcome. I'm just impressed of what you all got here and I really feel in debt for the hours of fantastic playing I'm having. The least I could do is to take the time to report what I find. And some people say open source and free software games are not worth trying... ¡los cojones!

BTW, I'm regretting not having upgraded to Ubuntu 14 or 16 in the past because then I would have met FO way earlier (I'm still on 12, where there is no freeorion in the repos, I tend to pospone upgrades until is really unavoidable so that I don't disturb my C projects, since it's only me who use them). I found FO because I was nostalgic of GalCiv2, was going to install it in my current rig from the old CD but the CD/DVD was broken so I end up browsing for free alternatives and here I am.

Another minor thing:
Clicking on the "Happiness" word in SitReps (like in "Orbital Drydock could not start repairs due to low Happiness") does not open the corresponding Pedia page.


In my current game I'm trying Egaseem. I thought I was going to be pwned quickly since I've never played a research-handicapped species (not even in MoO2, where my custom klackons where always creative and focused on research buildings nonstop). Then I found that only 2 out 20 scouted planets were inferno so I was begining to really worry. On top of that, when my colony ship got to that medium inferno planet an annoying ion storm stopped me from colonising for 10 turns, plus another ion storm saved those derthrean from being invaded for even more time. By that time I was OMG!OMG!OMG!
But hey, I had been cranking out robocruisers and robotroopers (didn't know what else to do with all that PPs) and I'm thriving now. Its turn 95 and I've stolen two systems from those Gyisache that got mad and keep crashing fleets of destroyers against their just-lost system (they really need better pilots, but hey, they don't look like cowards), the Etty on the other side stare at me but don't dare to attack and my RP is the highest since turn 60 (no need to say about PPs). I like those fatty demonic bastards.

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MatGB
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Re: General experience with 0.4.7 RC1

#5 Post by MatGB »

Heh, in 0.4.5, Egassem were the most underpowered species. We (and by we I mostly mean I) gave them a series of boosts over time and sorted out a few other imbalances. Which means one of my early projects for the 0.4.8 cycle is to nerf them a bit. I won't say specifically why because, y'know, working out how to use a species well is part of the fun.

Weird that it wasn't in the 12.* repos, I forget what version it was but I first discovered FO when I first tried Ubuntu nearly a decade ago and it should always be there, but the package is managed by someone else.

The Happiness link should be a link, I'll look into that, thanks.
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Oberlus
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Re: General experience with 0.4.7 RC1

#6 Post by Oberlus »

MatGB wrote:one of my early projects for the 0.4.8 cycle is to nerf them a it
I posted a hopefully useful suggestion on this line in Other Game Design.
MatGB wrote:Weird that it wasn't in the 12.* repos
Yeah, isn't it? It wasn't available in 10.04 nor 12.04 (not even in PlayDeb), not sure about previous versions.

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biza
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Re: General experience with 0.4.7 RC1

#7 Post by biza »

just one small thing i noticed so far.
In: design > finished>description
On screen description on all ship designs is as on image....
Screenshot 2017-04-15 21.56.47.png
Screenshot 2017-04-15 21.56.47.png (30.2 KiB) Viewed 3053 times
but when i copy text to paste it here it is all ok :lol:
eg. outpost base
Unarmed vessel capable of creating an Outpost on an uninhabitable world in the system where it is produced. This vessel cannot travel through star lanes.

Cheers!!

PS. im on mac os x if it matters.

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Oberlus
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Re: General experience with 0.4.7 RC1

#8 Post by Oberlus »

Another thing, possibly a bug:

A monster traveling between two systems got stuck. It won't move. I attach screenshots from two consecutive turns, but it was like that for several turn until I noticed it wasn't moving. At least since 72 or before. I attach also the two freeorion logs (not AIs) and a few autosaves.

Edit: ah, maybe it is because it got stealthier and I keep seeing its last position?
If that's the case, I'd suggest to remove them from visibility if it was a moving fleet what became "cloaked".
Attachments
FreeOrion.zip
Logs (not AIs, I guess those aren't relevant here) plus some of the previous autosaves.
(2.81 MiB) Downloaded 148 times
Monster stuck between two systems (turn 75)
Monster stuck between two systems (turn 75)
Stuck_monster_turn75.png (528.92 KiB) Viewed 3046 times
Monster stuck between two systems (turn 74)
Monster stuck between two systems (turn 74)
Stuck_monster_turn74.png (559.78 KiB) Viewed 3046 times

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MatGB
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Re: General experience with 0.4.7 RC1

#9 Post by MatGB »

Yeah, it's the latter, the scanlines have been made much more obvious but you still have to know that's what they mean. Right click on the fleet box (not the ship box which I do too often) and it'll give you the option to dismiss ghost fleet.

There are times when knowing a fleet was there but became stealthed due to you moving away, an ion cloud, etc is very useful. If you re see the same fleet it'll update. There are many other times when it becomes clutter, and the UI basically can't be smart enough to know which is which for each player in each situation.
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Re: General experience with 0.4.7 RC1

#10 Post by Oberlus »

Ah, then it's all right as it is. Thanks for the information.

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Dilvish
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Re: General experience with 0.4.7 RC1

#11 Post by Dilvish »

biza wrote:but when i copy text to paste it here it is all ok
Sounds like you are thinking one of these representations is OK (the simpler one from copy-pasting) and the other is not (the original). To me this simply looks like two different representations with different purposes-- the original one is a raw-text representation so that one can include pedia links in the descriptions, and the result from copy-paste has had all formatting/link tags stripped out.

For this particular purpose, I actually have the opposite sensibility to what you seem to have-- if anything should be different, it would seem to me that they should both use the raw-text representation to facilitate copying a link-containing description from one design to another. I see in the code, though, that the stripping of formatting tags is quite intentional and is only done for edit-type textcontrols. Furthermore, this stripping of tags is only done if you have selected some or all of the text-- if you do a copy without actually selecting any portion of the text, then somewhat counter-intuitively it will actually copy the entire text, including tags. It would be nice if I didn't have to dig through the sourcecode to figure that out, but the actual functionality seems pretty reasonable.
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Geoff the Medio
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Re: General experience with 0.4.7 RC1

#12 Post by Geoff the Medio »

copy-with-formatting and copy-unformatted could be separate commands.
Oberlus wrote:Only a few (less than 5) times I clicked on a far away system to check its planets and UI freezed for a few seconds (normally it's instantaneous), but that may be due to Windows, and nevertheless it's irrelevant.
Often that is due to the system containing asteroids, and it needing to load a few hundred animation frames from disk to display them. After all such images are loaded (not necessarily after seeing the first asteriods in a play session), it shouldn't need to reload with that delay.

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Oberlus
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Re: General experience with 0.4.7 RC1

#13 Post by Oberlus »

Some minor thing about Combat Reports with fighters involved (although maybe it is not related to fighter's presence, but I've noticed it in many battles since updated from 0.4.6, and not before):

If I open a Combat Report directly into Log tab (because that was the last tab I was seeing from last Combat Report) everything is fine, always.
However, if I open it into Summary tab and then I switch to the Log tab I may end up seeing just black with a huge scroll-down bar, or with the log content starting at some point <x,y> with x>0 and y>0. Like this:
____________________________________________
| . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
| (dots as blank space) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
| . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ___________
| . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |Combat at R
| . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
| . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |Initial forces
| . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |Herd:7, Clus
| . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
...

At that point, if I click again on the Combat link in the SitRep (with or without closing the Combat Report first) it updates properly and I see the Log content drawed from the expected <0,0> coordinates of the tab:
____________________________________________
|Combat at Rook a on turn 164:
|
|Initial forces
|Herd:7, Cluster: 5
|
...

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biza
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Re: General experience with 0.4.7 RC1

#14 Post by biza »

Dilvish wrote:
biza wrote:but when i copy text to paste it here it is all ok
Sounds like you are thinking one of these representations is OK (the simpler one from copy-pasting) and the other is not (the original). To me this simply looks like two different representations with different purposes-- the original one is a raw-text representation so that one can include pedia links in the descriptions, and the result from copy-paste has had all formatting/link tags stripped out.

For this particular purpose, I actually have the opposite sensibility to what you seem to have-- if anything should be different, it would seem to me that they should both use the raw-text representation to facilitate copying a link-containing description from one design to another. I see in the code, though, that the stripping of formatting tags is quite intentional and is only done for edit-type textcontrols. Furthermore, this stripping of tags is only done if you have selected some or all of the text-- if you do a copy without actually selecting any portion of the text, then somewhat counter-intuitively it will actually copy the entire text, including tags. It would be nice if I didn't have to dig through the sourcecode to figure that out, but the actual functionality seems pretty reasonable.
sorry for making you dig through code for this, it is just that for me (casual player) this text with tags looks corrupted in description. I still think purpose of description is to show plain text not text that looks corrupted.

Cheers!

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Re: General experience with 0.4.7 RC1

#15 Post by LGM-Doyle »

Oberlus, welcome and thanks for all of the recent feedback, positive and negative.

I've posted this PR to fix the combat log offset problem. If/when it is merged into master/the release candidate then you should see the fix in the weekly builds.

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