Oograh Boike and I had a few thoughts for future features during a game today (sorry if I'm stealing your ideas OB, I just thought I'd get all the points down together). Please do correct me or add bits I've missed.
1) A possible birds eye view of the board, to add to the side on views
2) Either a button to replay the last few (5 or 6???) moves, or perhaps a log of all the moves in a text format, so that you can find out what happened when you werent looking
3) I finally worked out a viable way to deal with people coming in and out: for weeks I'd thought
- noises for each comment made when you arent viewing (a la IM clients) wouldnt be appreciated once there start being several people chatting at once
- time stamps on comments are all very well, but wont get someone's attention (they'd tell you how long ago you missed someone, but not prevent you from missing them)
- challenging people to get their attention works, since theres a little pop up box which they see, no matter what they're looking at elsewhere on the computer, but it only works if you a) aren't already playing and b) actually want a game
so put them together, shake it all about, come out with:
- an extra button next to "challenge" so you can select another person in chat and send them a buzz/pop up message (the former is probably better since it might even be noticed by someone who's moved away from the computer*)
Its quite late, so I hope all of this makes sense...
Mr Scrub
* hard though it is for me to accept, I do realise that some people occasionally leave their computers... no-one knows why...
1) A possible birds eye view of the board, to add to the side on views
Trevor Truran has requested much the same thing: since great minds think alike (and I do think his is a great mind), your suggesting these can only be a testament to your own greatness
Trouble with that is it means more graphics - hence larger download size, blah blah. However, I'm working on making it "skinnable", so that various different graphics can beloaded in, at your whim.
We're considering making the default skin a top-down one. Depends what the players think, maybe?
2) Either a button to replay the last few (5 or 6???) moves, or perhaps a log of all the moves in a text format, so that you can find out what happened when you werent looking
At the moment the only way to do this is to close your game window, and then challenge your opponent to resume the game.
When your game is resumed, you'll see it rapidly replay to the point you'd got to, in an unfortunate "jerkovision", which I hope to find a way of making smoother.
It might be possible to store that history in the client and have a slider where you can move back and forth through moves... then a "request backtrack" button if you wanted to move back to that point. But that'd be a fair amount of work. To undo a move, you need to either replay the whole game from the start, minus one move [expensive in terms of processing], or save a snapshot of the game at each move [expensive in terms of storage]. You can't just store the movement "A3->B4", since the move may have affected perhaps seven other pieces (if a troll moves into the middle of a clump of dwarfs). You could store the takes as well, I guess, which would be less storage than storing the whole board layout: the entire list of takes for a game would be less than storing the board layout once.
Also, if you backtracked, I personally wouldn't want to delete your previous set of moves: I would store the backtrack as a special kind of move, instead. And that makes for a fair bit of server complexity (since it has to store them), and complexity when replaying the game.
3) I finally worked out a viable way to deal with people coming in and out: for weeks I'd thought
an extra button next to "challenge" so you can select another person in chat and send them a buzz/pop up message (the former is probably better since it might even be noticed by someone who's moved away from the computer*)
Yeah, a "buzz" button - I like it!
Though I can see the significant potential for abuse there, so that can't happen until 1) there are stored per-user ignore-lists, and 2) there are user-logins to store those against. Even then, guests should not be able to buzz people: only registered (though not necessarily paying) users.
Bots should perhaps only be able to buzz their owner (we intend to make a botting policy, since the whole "making a bot that plays thud" thing is SUCH a fun idea to programmers, but could annoy others... more on that when we've given it some thought, but please do feel free to suggest stuff!)
We're considering making the default skin a top-down one. Depends what the players think, maybe?
I would say, make it top-down, from ThudBoard experience
If you want to use the gfx already there, just download the .tar.gz file...
Ciao, Marc.
Since 2005i, with the new gfx and smaller pieces on the board, visibility has improved a lot. No need for the top-down skin to be the default one, at least not for me anymore. But as an option, it would still be nice.