TripleA Changes for PBEM

[rjclayton]

@tonez:

Hey Frood, this is exactly what I’ve done now, and it works great.

Yep.  Tested it yesterday and it works great!

[frood]

Sweet. Love to get my hands on a zip file!

[tonez]

@froodster:

One problem is that the engine sometimes doesn’t always pick correct waypoints (or recognize that a route exists). I’ve tried to declare combat moves and been told “You can’t move there”, but I can do it moving one territory at a  time. So sometimes you need non-combat moves to successfully make your combat moves.

Hey Frood, have you tried holding down CTRL when you left-click a territory while moving a unit?  It allows you to choose your own waypoints, one territory at a time.  It is also mentioned in the Help section under Movement Help.
I agree that the automatic waypoint selection algorithm seems to choose the wrong path sometimes.  Perhaps this could be fixed.

However, given the availability of manual waypoints, it should be possible to completely eliminate support for non-combat movement during combat movement phase, I think, by fixing the other issues first.

[tonez]

Just a quick note since both rjclaytont and frood now have my latest jar file:

• In edit mode, the movement phases allow you to move any unit from any player, to any legal place on the board, more or less.  There are still some kinks to work out though, so use this cautiously (save first).  One known issue is moving inf to a sea zone might put them in life preservers!
• rjclayton reported a problem with calling Save Screenshot twice in a row - it was crashing his tripleA with out-of-memory errors.  I believe I’ve fixed that (works for me), but please give it a try.
• there are still some cases where POSTing to the forum is failing.  If you get an Ethereal trace of a failure please send it to me.  In such a case you can just View the report and then post it manually via copy/paste.

[frood]

That’s AWESOME! Just tried it out. Edit mode basically turns TripleA into Battlemap on steroids. You can now use it with any other dicey I guess (or real dice if you like, for FTF without the fuss of all the money and units etc.)

Is there a way to manually post a turn summary / unit summary if you have not started a PBEM game, but just a normal game?

Also, my triplea dice server at http://www.frood.net/aacalc/triplea/ is not yet listed as an option. It uses basically the same syntax as the MARTI.PHP one.

[frood]

Has anyone tried to make TripleA export screenshots as GIF or PNG? With the large areas of flat color, it might actually be a smaller file than the JPG, and much prettier. Flat-color unit sprites would also make this smaller.

[tonez]

@froodster:

That’s AWESOME! Just tried it out. Edit mode basically turns TripleA into Battlemap on steroids. You can now use it with any other dicey I guess (or real dice if you like, for FTF without the fuss of all the money and units etc.)

Is there a way to manually post a turn summary / unit summary if you have not started a PBEM game, but just a normal game?

Also, my triplea dice server at http://www.frood.net/aacalc/triplea/ is not yet listed as an option. It uses basically the same syntax as the MARTI.PHP one.

Glad you like it.  It’s still a work in progress… I’m hoping to add a few more features for edit mode.

If you go into the History tree, you can right-click on any node and view the history summary of that node.  There’s still no unit summary… but will be soonish.

I still haven’t got around to adding your dicey.  I’ll try and do that soonish as well.

[tonez]

@froodster:

Has anyone tried to make TripleA export screenshots as GIF or PNG? With the large areas of flat color, it might actually be a smaller file than the JPG, and much prettier. Flat-color unit sprites would also make this smaller.

I didn’t try it, but it shouldn’t be too hard to try.  Currently I have it set to JPEG at 50% quality, which is why it only looks ok.  I don’t know much about image formats so if there are tricks to doing this with a reduced palette then I’m all ears.

[frood]

I bet a 16-color GIF would be very functional - but GIF might be proprietary. PNG is open-source and better though I think, but I don’t have a clue how you make TripleA generate any kind of image file.

Even fancier would be exporting to SVG, SWF or PDF (vector-based instead of bitmaps - smaller files but also require special software to view.)

But a screenshot I guess is much better for game summary anyway than a unit summary anyway.

[rjclayton]

My only issue with the screenshot posting is that when the web server is offline (or if the site dies), it is very difficult to follow the game.  I think posting a UDR (Unit Deployment Report) at the end of each full round listing all units in each territory would be a useful compromise.

[rjclayton]

Here is another request from Frood:

@froodster:

With TripleA my one frustration is that often I move into unit placement only to realize I had not yet done all my non-combat moves. I wish there was a way to step back into non-combat after moving on to unit placement. A workaround I guess is to save the game immediately after combat so you can reload that if you forgot something. I appreciate that you can’t go back to combat declaration once combat resolution has started, but that’s different.

[rjclayton]

Another request, this one from Mateooo:

@mateooo:

I tried Triple A and liked it, except it is very unforgiving. I kept on clicking one too many times and skipping the noncombat phase. And last time I tried, it seemed there were problems with Ftrs moving and landing on AC. The program required an AC to be within range of the FTRs before combat starts, though I found ways around this by undoing moves.

I also wish it would allow you to set up the map how you want, to fix mistakes and whatnot. Nice program though.
Mateooo

[rjclayton]

2 bugs in triplea:

1. Gulf of Mexico in classic should be a valid square, and allow placement their from the WUS IC, but it isn’t.  Doesn’t allow movement there either.
2. classic allows 2 aa guns in the same square.  shouldn’t.

[tonez]

In response to frood’s question, stepping backwards is not likely to happen in triplea.  It will require significant game engine changes. 
I’m not convinced it should be allowed, either.  If you were playing a head-to-head game your opponent might not let you go back once you start placing units.
At any rate, as you said, you can save it.  But there’s also the autosave.tsvg file, which I believe at that point in the turn will be saved at the beginning of your non-combat movement.  So, you could load that and start your non-combat movement over again.  Try it out on a test game to confirm these wild claims of mine though.

[tonez]

@rjclayton:

2 bugs in triplea:

1. Gulf of Mexico in classic should be a valid square, and allow placement their from the WUS IC, but it isn’t.  Doesn’t allow movement there either.
2. classic allows 2 aa guns in the same square.  shouldn’t.

#1 is fixed in my playpen and I’ve sent you the files
#2…. boohoo.  get over it.  ok, i might fix it eventually but its neither challenging nor interesting so it probably won’t happen for a while :-o

I might get around to fixing the AC/ftr tracking too as that bugs me somewhat. 
Obviously the edit functionality that mateooo wants is well underway and at this point pretty useable for most things… though still some bugs to work out.

[frood]

I’ve tried Edit mode and all it lets me do is specify # of casualties during combat. How do you use it for other things?

[tonez]

In Edit mode during combat movement and non-combat movement, you can move any unit on the board (owned by any player) to any territory/seazone on the board as long as the end-state is legal. You can also do combat movement in the non-combat movement phase (again, for any unit/player).
So, you can fix non-combat movement on behalf of an opponent, or even do an extra battle (or blitz through africa) for them that they forgot to do.  If you turn off Edit mode for the actual combat phase, then you can use the dicey for the battle instead of fixed outcomes.

[djensen]

Where can I get a copy of this new version you guys are working on?

Also, I’m going to move this topic to Software Development.

[rjclayton]

Thanks Dave, I’ve been meaning to request moving this topic :)

You’ll have to talk to Tonez about beta testing these TripleA changes.  He’s recently “given up the goods” to a few other people on these forums, so while I can’t promise anything, chances are pretty good he’ll capitulate.  If not you could always ban him :mrgreen:

[frood]

Oops, I already gave it to djensen - hope tonez can forgive me. I figured it would be okay. After all, the new features involve TripleA being able to post and upload files to his site, he should probably have a chance to look it over.