Umm, I don't think we'd accept that idea. The whole idea about the
current set up is to to encourage players to think about probabilities
and act accordingly. If you mess up, you shouldn't just be able to
undo and try to get a better result... we might as well just strip RNG
out of the game if that was the case. For single player, the current
system prevents re-rolling for a better outcome by forcing players to
go through an involved process if they want a redo, but not too
involved. Its a good compromise in my mind. Moreover we'd never accept
this for a competitive game because probabilities management is THE
core skill that determines who wins. Your proposal weakens that
significantly. More often than not there is disagreement over what is
considered bad luck, so adding a system that allows subjective
judgements to influence outcomes is a whole can of worms I'd rather
avoid.
Noy
On 10-Mar-10, at 9:34 AM, Greg Boggs wrote:
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 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. (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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