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Topic: Empire Mission 4

hessenfarmer
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Joined: 2014-12-11, 23:16
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Posted at: 2017-10-09, 23:41

Hi everybody, Sorry for beeing quiet. Had to support my national football team abroad ;-).
Now I uploaded the last revision with the following alterations:
- all buildings a re forbidden until first objective is cleared (thanks Nordfriese for the hint)
- defeat babarians objective is also triggered if the enemy is seen (scripted a helper function to check this if anybody else needs this)
- Bonus or malus is given depending on the decision on how to get the brewery from vesta
- did the first proofreading of the texts ( if anybody would do the second round I would be happy perhaps venatrix could do so. would love that cause it would ease up translation into german)

still any suggestions are welcome. Especially I think Lutius is somewhat quiet. any ideas for relevant diary entries?

@ Nordfriese: the port is only there to trick the player to spent valuable resources in a useless port and ship industry face-wink.png I am somewhat surprised you found it to easy, cause some posts ago you argued the scenario to be to difficult. In my opinion difficulty is largely dependent on the Ai performance which is currently somewhat unpredictable and therefore the scenario might need some balancing after a stable Ai state has been achieved.

regards
hessenfarmer


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stdh
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Joined: 2013-08-04, 22:05
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Pry about Widelands
Posted at: 2017-10-13, 00:16

With the new version loaded, I tested your scenario again - it took me 6.5 hours with some aggressive expansion. I have some remarks/suggestions:

Dismantling defective buildings to get your first building materials: great idea. For the quarries and fishers it's clear why they should be demolished, but for the wells/lumberjack's houses Amalea could explain that they're inefficient? That would make the objective look less random. Reduced productivity (percentage shown on building) is only clear after a few minutes, and there's also enough building space available, so maybe you could remove the farms from this objective (and from the numerous initial talks)? By the way, dismantling a custom lumberjack's house still returns an ax, that looks a bit weird. face-wink.png

For the farm plans: you could scroll to the artifact before you remove it.

The road network: it's certainly not as crappy as what the AI sometimes comes up with in a long game, but I understand it's not easy to invent something worse. face-smile.png I did make a patch (I'll attach it to bug #1705950) that places carriers on the roads and recruits in the barracks, because they should be there when Lutius & Co. arrive in Fremil. Concerning the objective, it may be unclear to players when it is fulfilled. I took a peek at the code, but otherwise it's hard to tell when the road network is "cleaned up".

For some time, I missed the start for the 'heroes' objective because I just continued using the low-capacity training camp.

The new enemy_seen function gave an error: "scroll_to_field(en_see) Expected a userdata, but got something else.". I had a look at the code but I didn't understand what's wrong.

After a goal is cleared, let character specify which one is done. That would help (at least for me) to keep track of objectives.

Difficulty depends on AI indeed. You could help the poor Barbarians a little bit by disabling shipyard/weaving mill for them.

About the narrative: In the beginning someone remarks it's "great to see the city walls again", but city walls are entirely alien to Widelands... Change to "the great mother city" or "the industrial core of the Empire" or something? Furthermore, as of now our heroes re-enter their homeland, but there's no context. Maybe introduce a new character, a servant/governor that bids them welcome and explains something about the situation - without revealing all there is to know? That could tie in with some of Nordfriese's suggestions. I was thinking of an evil usurpator, only interested in short term riches, that struck a dishonourable deal with the Barbarians: a part of Fremil in exchange for (temporary) peace. Maybe he banished the Vestal priestesses? This usurpator flees the scene when Lutius arrives, of course, so maybe they could meet later on.

Suddenly I think of something: where's the Emperor in all this?

Extra talk for Lutius: he could recognise certain landmarks near Barbarians, or maybe a captured Imperial fortress.

On religion: Maybe you could use different names for the gods? So they could be not exactly Roman, but inspired by history, as the imperial tribe in Widelands very much is. Vesta's punishment: burning lumberjack's homes is a nuissance rather than a pain. You could set fire to an armour smithie for a change.

Last remark: in your scripts, you're mixing tabs and spaces. Could you stick to only spaces?

Whoa, what a wall of text... Anyway, your scenario is really innovative, thank you for it!


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hessenfarmer
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Posted at: 2017-10-13, 08:27

Hi
Thanks for all the input I will have a deeper look this evening
For the beginning could oyou please tell me the exact revision you were testing with
Ithought I fixed the enemy seen bug and vesta should only burn medium sized buildings. (should ne in rev 8429)
A log File and /or savegame would help either

Alain Thanks for the feedback


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hessenfarmer
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Posted at: 2017-10-14, 00:35

ok started fixing the things

vesta now really burns only medium sized buildings
used the suggestions of stdh's patch now road network is prefilled and I tried to worsen it further
now I scroll to farm plans before remove
forbade weavin mill and shipyard to babarians

still to do:
adding objective to build training camp and upgrade to colosseum
introduce the character explaining the chaos a bit --> problem is I really could use new and different pics for new characters
Storyline could be:
emperor left fremil to defend agianst babrians in the north -- his surrogate was dumb and selfish and created the mess -- after realizing this the people forced him to leave -- now the mayor of the capital is doing his best and welcomes Lutius with great relief.
does this sound ok? Any changes? lutius will comment on important achievements in his diary.
with removing the ax from dismantling the difficulty will increase but its worth a try. Although we should keep in mind that this is still a very early scenario and should not be to difficult.
will leave the gods as they are cause already used neprune in mission 3
still would love to see a savgame or log for the crash, cause can't reproduce it.


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GunChleoc
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Joined: 2013-10-07, 15:56
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Posted at: 2017-10-14, 17:39

stdh wrote:

Last remark: in your scripts, you're mixing tabs and spaces. Could you stick to only spaces?

That can easily be fixed by running utils/fix_formatting.py - this script is run every time we merge into trunk with our bunnybot, so you won't need to spend a lot of time on his.


Busy indexing nil values

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stdh
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Joined: 2013-08-04, 22:05
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Pry about Widelands
Posted at: 2017-10-26, 12:34

With some delay...

I had another look at enemy_seen, I'll attach a savegame to the bug. With a (somewhat) clearer mind I noticed: if you haven't seen the enemy border yet, this function returns an empty table which is True, booleanly speaking. Do you have some code locally that you haven't yet uploaded to the repo?

Your story idea sounds good. But I can't draw a portrait for the new characters that looks remotely human. face-smile.png For Lutius' arrival in Fremil, maybe that could be animated with a ship again? The capital would need a port then, assuming our general's ship doesn't crash again...

Regarding the cluttered road network, maybe you could be explicit in both objective and story, and say that the dead ends must be removed? And a suggestion for Vesta's monastery: if handled peacefully, it would be best to avoid the yellow refugees on the map. Maybe that could be achieved by removing personnel from the buildings before removing them?


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hessenfarmer
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Posted at: 2017-10-26, 23:13

hi,

thanks stdh for the savegame and the hint with the table. I thought I had the thing working but missed this part obviously. now the helper function has an else branch delivering a "false" avoiding the crash. Still need to check whether it still wil work if enemy is really seen. By the way moved the check for enemy in seperate function which gives more freedom when to start the checks. will upload new revision after successful test. BTW sorry for the delay but was to busy with real life.
Will try to use Lutius head with different hair on saledus body as this is currently what I am able to do in gimp. Any help with the images still would be very welcome.
Don't think I'll use the ship again cause there is no city on the map and nothing what looks like a harbour. I think the dotted line in the starting picture is explaining enough that we are sailing from the islands to fremil. tried to make the maps in a way to reflect the big loading image.
I don't like to be more specific on the road network cause I want the player to really think about an optimised network. Evntually will think about another way to determine this objective might be fulfilled.
Already thought about the yellow people but weren't succesful in avoiding the weird spilling yet. Perhaps Gun Chleoc or anybody with more experience could help.

thanks for the feed back and the savegame again

best regards hessenfarmer


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hessenfarmer
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Posted at: 2017-10-30, 23:28

hi everybody,

thanks to the leisure time at the weekend and an intensive test game I finished the fixes that stdh suggested.
Except I did not manage to avoid the yellow people running around. But I still have some ideas let me give it another try. Would be happy if someone could playtest and have a look at the dialogues. Wouldn't mind if someone would pull it, add fixes and push it again. just would be fine to give me a notice that I will consider there is something improved.
Did the best I could with image editing to create the new character but he still looks like Lutius younger brother. face-wink.png

Still looking for feedback before doing a merge request.
regards
hessenfarmer


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Ex-Member
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Joined: 2014-09-12, 10:53
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Posted at: 2017-10-31, 10:29

I would like to help but due to life problems I no longer have access to a decent machine to do much on, I cannot even get the basic game to load and run so I cannot even test it.


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kaputtnik
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Joined: 2013-02-18, 20:48
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OS: Archlinux
Version: current master
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Posted at: 2017-10-31, 21:08

I played the campaign but when i should build a new trainingscamp and have to upgrade the colloseum, the game begins to stutter. Every 2 to 3 seconds the Game stops (all workers are standing still for a short time).

Maybe some scripting takes to many cpu?


Fight simulator for Widelands:
https://wide-fighter.netlify.app/

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