Bugs in the Multiplayer Test

[Stephen]

K9: I was trying to make different versions compatible with each other but there is always the possibility of some incompatibility creeping in, and I don't have time to test all the different versions with one another before release. In future I plan to just force different versions to be incompatible (so that an error message appears telling you to upgrade). Hopefully it will not be too much of an inconvenience for people to have to upgrade every so often.

Moo:

5. This is not a bad suggestion actually. The idea is that your knight only makes a map of the current room when nobody else is around. But if he walks into another room, he still knows roughly where he is, even if he hasn't made a map yet (i.e. the dot should still appear on the map, but the room itself shouldn't be mapped). When you teleport, your knight gets disoriented so he doesn't know where he is at all (i.e. even the dot shouldn't appear). So yes, let's do it that way.

7. Agreed. It's especially bad if two entry-points are "back to back" as then it looks like there is a corridor you can walk through, when in fact it's blocked. I'll see what I can do about this (hopefully without making it look too ugly).

BTW, I've added your suggestions to Trac, so they won't get forgotten. I'm not promising to work on them right away but hopefully I will do at some point.

For the shooting-yourself-with-crossbow thing, I tried to reproduce that, but couldn't. I'm getting a lot of these "unconfirmed" reports, I'm starting to wonder if there should be an option to "record" games so that people can send me recordings as part of a bug report. (This shouldn't be too hard to add, we just need to record all network packets sent/received, and possibly the random number seed, and then it should be possible to reconstruct what happened in the game.) Any thoughts on that?

[Moo]

Strange bug today.. Loads of spammy messages as if everyone was changing the quests very fast, but seemed to be happening even if no one was changing anything.. If I typed anything it took a long time to actually appear..

[Stephen]

Hmm, that looks nasty. I'll have a look into it.

[Moo]

Few more things.. Some aren't really bugs, but I thought it was better to post them here instead of starting more threads..

1. Most troublesome one, but a bit odd... Might just be me? But it's happened a few times now... I can move, but the "action" button doesn't work. Then suddenly it starts working again. Today it happened and I discovered I couldn't type either, but could still move and suicide. Very odd..

2. I think when the exit is set to "total random", it should try to avoid having the exit in the same place as someone's entrance. When that happens, that player has a big advantage.

3. "Entry point" selection in single-player isn't useful.

4. The spurious map marker thing happened to me today. It was showing where I was when I died, I think, and when I went back to the room, the marker disappeared and the space (doorway between two rooms) remained black instead of the yellow mapped colour.
Another one happened when I died when I had the "show book position" spell active. The dot was solid red this time, not flashing, and stayed there even after I'd moved the book. This was in single-player.
Also related to this.. Is there a potion/scroll effect that lets you see a single other knight's position on the map? This has happened several times for me. I think there's a book that does this, but its also happened on games with no books.

5. It would be nice if the chat from the quest selection screen could be carried through into the game, as well as the other way round.

6. It seems the crystal ball is also shown as "floor" instead of "wall".. This can make it look like there are passages on the map which aren't really there, too.

7. A little suggestion. Could it show a message or make a different sound or something, when you open a locked door/chest? As it is now, its the same as opening a non-locked one.

8. Not a problem.. A good thing! Lots of new players in the last few days  :). Has it been mentioned somewhere? A few weeks ago, I could sit in the server all day and not see anyone else. Now it gets very busy at times, and I've had a few 6-player games.
But.. I think it would be nice if the tutorial could be extended to include all the quest types. Also, if the game could start when there was one player and one or more observers, that would be good for new players.


As for the recording thing, that would be good. If only one person is seeing the problems then logging at the client end would be a good idea, I guess.. But wouldn't it be simpler to log everything at the server? Then if someone sees something odd they could say something, and tell you what they said, and you could search for that..

[Stephen]

Thanks for these bug reports. You are keeping me busy :)

1. I've never seen that. What specifically doesn't work: attacking? picking up / dropping? opening the action menu? (Created Trac #74)

2. Good idea. Trac #75

3. Good point. Trac #76

4. This is a known issue: #3.

As for seeing a single knight's position on the map, this is caused by the "reveal location" scroll effect which broadcasts your position to all enemy knights. (This is the opposite of the "see knight" effect which allows you to see the position of the other knights.)

5. OK. Trac #77

6. Thanks for pointing this out, I added it as a comment to #67.

7. I added #78 for this, but don't expect me to implement it for a while as I think the other stuff is more important.

8. That's great! Although I did mention the game here and here, I haven't been seeing that many more downloads than usual. Instead I think we're seeing a higher percentage of downloaders actually going onto the server and playing online. I think this is the result of the tutorial -- before, I guess a lot of players were giving up without learning how to play, while now they are doing the tutorial and then trying the online game.

Regarding extending the tutorial, my initial intention was just to get something minimal working without too much effort. It seems to be having the desired effect! You are right that it would be nice to have an extended tutorial, I have created #80 for this.

Allowing one player games (with observers) on the server: created #79.

Recording: Yes I suppose it would be easier to just save all the games onto the server. On crawl.akrasiac.org (different game, but same idea) they record all games played and anyone can download the recordings and play them back at any time. This could also be useful for advertising purposes (YouTube video anyone?).

[Moo]

1. I've never seen that. What specifically doesn't work: attacking? picking up / dropping? opening the action menu? (Created Trac #74)

The action button had no effect.. so couldn't do any of those things. Or chat. But could move and suicide. Odd.

As for seeing a single knight's position on the map, this is caused by the "reveal location" scroll effect which broadcasts your position to all enemy knights. (This is the opposite of the "see knight" effect which allows you to see the position of the other knights.)

Aha, thought so.. Much more obvious when there's more than two of you.

Re the other stuff, cool :)

[Moo]

It happened again yesterday..

And another strange thing.. I was an observer in this game, and another observer had joined too.

[Moo]

Today..

[Stephen]

Yes, I know about that one. It only affects observers so I didn't consider it too serious...