A related idea to this is to allow you to redo a move if you both agree
to it. When your playing with someone trying to teach them, and they
make a bad move, it would be infinitely valuable to be able to take back
their move without having to quit and reload the game.
This option would also be very fun in competitive games. When horrible
bad luck strikes the other team, and you want to give them another shot,
so that you can continue the game.
Gabriel Morin wrote:
Hi everybody,
Last year I couldn't get my Wesnoth GSoC submission
<http://wiki.wesnoth.org/SummerOfCodeProposal_gabba> accepted, but I'm
very motivated to get in this year. I've been wanting to contribute to
Wesnoth for a long time, and the GSoC seems like the ideal kickstart
to get to know the codebase.
Unless I get conflicting course schedules next session this will me my
last summer as a student - next year will be my fourth and last in
software engineering at École Polytechnique de Montréal - , so it's
now or never!
I've been posting a few ideas on the forums, and this one in
particular has been well-received
<http://www.wesnoth.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=29102&start=0>.
(I'll copy the text at the bottom of this email to allow for easy
commenting.) Since apparently you devs don't frequent the forums that
much, I'd like to have your opinion on:
1- Whether this is a desirable feature
2- Whether this is a good idea for a GSoC project: how much work, how
many things to modify?
3- Which are the areas of the code I should start looking at?
4- What would be an easy coding project I can use to show what I can
do, and get to know these areas of the code better?
After browsing the GSoC 2010 current list of ideas, I find this one
more motivating, because it would have a direct effect on my wesnoth
gaming experience. This said, some of the other ideas look interesting
as well, so I'm not putting all my eggs in one basket, i.e. I'm open
to other options. I'm even thinking of making several proposals, but
from my experience last year making a detailed one is very
time-consuming, so we'll see.
Without further introduction, here's my proposal:
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Main idea: Share undoable moves with allies
Currently when playing a coop game (either RPG or more standard
multiplayer campaign), there are several things that really irk me
when it's not my turn:
* You wait a long time before seeing anything happening
* When your ally who's taking his turn finally attacks an enemy or
makes another non-undoable move, you have to sit through a
delayed replay of his moves. If he already finished his turn,
your ally has to wait while you watch this.
* After a few undoable moves by either allied player,
communication is completely out of sync. If you tell your ally,
"look, I'm encircling his leader", he has no clue what you're
talking about: he doesn't see what you're doing. If your ally
asks you "should I move my white mage here to heal you units
next turn", you 1) have no clue about which hex "here" is
supposed to mean 2) even if you did, you can't adequately
counsel him, since you don't see how he positioned his other units
I think the reasonable solution is simply to add an option called
Share undoable moves with allies. Both you and your ally need to
enable it for it to work. If you both have it enabled, what it does is
it shows you your allies' moves exactly as if you were staring at the
same screen while he plays his turn. Net effect: you don't wait
forever for something to happen, you don't sit through a replay and
make others wait in the meanwhile, and you can actually shout to your
ally on skype "NO idiot, don't move your white mage there!" before
it's too late.
When sharing undoable moves, some mild confusion might happen when you
ally undoes a move: if you're not paying attention (after all the unit
just changed from "red" movement status to "yellow" or "green" orb),
you might think you're witnessing a move instead of an undo. This is
why extra visual clues would be needed in that mode, possibly just a
red UNDO text that floats up from the unit, or alternate red footsteps
symbols that the unit gobbles up backwards as it goes back to its
previous location.
For the true "over the shoulder" experience, I think this option
should show you everything, down to the attack dialogue your ally gets
when he attacks an enemy. This way you can discuss which attack he
should use, while you both see the attack stats and odds. Same thing
for the recruit and unit upgrade dialogues. All those would make for a
more interesting coop experience, and would be especially good for
teaching newbs to the game.
Oh yeah, and those chargen menus from Bobs' RPG era and the like would
also fall in this category: help your friends choose their class and
starting items instead of staring blankly at the screen.
Optional, secondary idea: Share undoable moves with enemies
I don't expect this second idea to be very popular, but the thing is:
if the first one is implemented, this one will almost be free to
implement. So we might as well discuss it, too.
A "Share undoable moves with enemies" option would simply show your
opponents all your moves as you do them, even those that can be
undone. It does remove some waiting boredom, like the first option. It
would be useful when you want to play chess-style (where a moved piece
is a moved piece, no undo), but without fiddling with the scenarios
options to disable undo. And contrary to a fixed scenario option, it
allows you to still agree on "friendly undos" from time to time: "this
was too stupid, can I move it back?" --"Sure, go ahead".
A second use is when you just don't care if the opponent can read your
mind by seeing your every move, either because your skill level is
greatly superior, or the game is very casual (i.e. you're playing with
your younger brother), and you just want to make the game less boring
by minimizing the waiting factor.
Sharing undoable moves from enemies would probably make "delay shroud
updates" useless, but after all they are somewhat incompatible ideas.
----
P.S. I don't use mailing lists that much and I don't know if any of
you use old-fashioned mail readers, so if I commited a capital sin by
using html formatting (from the gmail editor) such as hyperlinks or
bold text, please let me know.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
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