Feedback Messages

[Ykkrosh]

Looks like lots of people have used the feedback message box on the menu screen of the last release (578 messages in about 2 months), and I think now's a good time to try to summarise it and see what we can learn. (The original messages are here but only accessible to WFG people - it's meant to be an anonymous feedback system, and some people have sent their email addresses etc, and also I don't want to encourage spam, so I don't think we can make the raw data public). We should probably make Trac tickets for any sensible bug reports or good design suggestions, but I'm not going to bother doing that myself now since I'm lazy

Some common comments:

* Vast numbers of people saying how totally awesome we are for making the game.

* Lots of users want saved games.

* Some common reports of known bugs/feature requests: Ships moving on land; ships unloading into water; gates not working; wall placement; camera altitude problems; control groups; campaigns

* Several people want to zoom out further.

* Some asked for visual feedback when clicking to order units.

* Several complaints about multi-monitor fullscreen covering both screen. That's a known problem with SDL on Linux; not sure if we can work around it somehow. (A couple mention NVIDIA TwinView but seem to be on Linux too.)

* Lots of users (more than a dozen) complained about the mouse being too slow. One complained about it being too fast. All seem to be running Ubuntu (not all the same version). One said "i made adjustments in Ubuntu's mouse preferences, and it made mouse speed fast everywhere else on the desktop except within the game". Some kind of Ubuntu-related bug where fullscreen SDL is ignoring the standard mouse settings?

* Minimap problems: "Is it possible to make the coloured dots on the map more distingishable? Some of the colours are too similar, ie. red and orange."; "The mini map could scale; too small to see anything on it."; "It's hard to see Player 2's buildings on the mini-map."

* Feedback system: "I just wrote a bug / improvement suggestion here, and then I selected it and pressed a key on the keyboard and it was gone. Please enable / add a way to undo?"; "It would be nice if this feedback box were available in game using some key combination to enable it mid game."; "i wish to know how to remove this window asking me to add some feedback"; "it might be neat to add this feedback box in-game, with a capture-screenshot function for those of us who always forget, or even in the post-game menu."

* UI design issues: "the kill troops button should not be so close to the garrison button, it gets annoying if a missclick is made. maybe make a larger gap or make the icons larger or even swapping positions of the buttons around would work."; "Cannot see a Quit option in the main menu (on the map), even though there is a Quit button"; "When in a game, the menu is a bit confusing, instead of having two options next to each other saying "Quit" and "Close" I would have: "Quit" and "Back" or even "Back to game""

* UI ugliness: "The GUI (map, building, etc etc) felt kinda cheap. Needs a better texture in my humble opinion"; "The background for the popup UIs doesn't look very nice IMO. I think it would look a lot better with a different one. The background for the loading screen looks good, though; very sleek and professional."; "the UI standard background image is too busy. Either the texture needs to be toned down in the form of some heavy smoothing, or the UI elements between it and the text need their opacity increased."

* Sound volume: "Music (all sounds) should stop in pause mode (ie: on the phone, boss coming...)"; "NEED TO TURN DOWN SOUND TOO LOUD TO PLAY WITH"

Misc suggestions:

* "When hosting a game, it would have somewhere to write you IP adress, that you can easily send to another players."

* "Why would I make "normal people" when I can make fighters that can gather food... and build things?"

* "Why can i not make slaves of captured peoples?? Slavery IS a huge part of our human heritage."

* "Why do the buildings and lands not have a measure of culture to overcome after my insurgence? Obviously, the people's lands and and their buildings have their cultural mark and inheritance to overcome." - I'm not really sure what that means.

* "Why can i not capture buildings? Why do i have to raze them? If i can capture lands... why not all the possible buildings?"

* "I played your game for the first time and right off I didn't like how only the women were villagers and the men were military. I think it would be better to have male and female villagers and have the option to later spen additional resources to convert those villagers into military units."

* "About constructions, it could be great when you try to place them, that the game blocks it nearby an other construction. For example: near a house, block the one I am placing so I can built it with no space between each other." - maybe they meant "so I *can't* build it with no space"?

* "Hi I have some ideas about the soilder ranking system, one idea would be to let every soilder of the same type start with a random piece(s) of equipment(s) and when they die they would drop it so other soilders can loot it automatically when not in combat(you would still need to click on the corpse for them to start looting the corpse and other corpses near it) (if it is a weapon it must match the type of the unit in order for the unit to be able to loot it). Another version of the idea would be to let every soilder of the same type start with the same equipment but when they die they would drop random extra or upgraded equipment(s) for other units to loot. Thanks P.S. I think 3 ranking systems are way too few. I would suggest 8-10 ranking systems because it would really add to the atmosphere of the game. If you want to see a small example of what I mean try the demo of the game Overlord and watch the minions equipping themselves with various items."

* "The names for the units are too complicated. I am Greek and even if they are historically accurate and it's my native language (meaning I know these words and I can pronounce them) it was really annoying for me to read through these names. They need to have simpler yet accurate names, so that players can distinguish them by their names. Otherwise all units will have a strange uncomprehensible name for them, they cannot remeber or pronounce. If you would like, I can help with the unit names providing suggestions or alternatives."

* "If I select mulitple buildings and create a number of units only 1 building will make them. It would be great if by making 1 unit when you have more of the same kind of building selected you would make 1 in every building not just in 1 of the buildings."

* "When we scroll the map with the mouse on the borders of the screens, the direction of the scroll must depend on the direction of the vector formed by the center of the screen and the position of the mouse. Currently, the maps scrolls only left/right/up/down, imo the player should be able to scroll in any direction with the mouse." - I happened to play Sol Survivor (demo) yesterday which seems to do scrolling like this, and it felt pretty weird (though I didn't spend long trying to get used to it) - I don't think I've seen it in any other games.

Misc bugs:

* "I have to monitors, which leads to me not being able to scroll in the direction of my second monitor, because the mouse-pointer is not captuured (it mvoes to the second screen and therefore I can not scroll)" (on Windows).

* "This game does not recover from sleep on my laptop."

* "if you garrison units into a siege ram and don't unselect them befor garissoned your not abel to control/select any other units or buildings"

* "I paused the single player game and left for 45min. When I came back, the game was unpaused and I was defeated "

* "Gaul towers (not outpost) do not fire and an error message appears"

* "After I installed the game, I chose to run it right away. I was given a notification that there was unsigned driver that was installed. You may want to look into this, if you haven't already. I am running Windows 7 x64."

* "Doesn't seem to support the use of Wacom tablets very well... (the cursor jumps all over the place)."

* "Assertion failed: "GetLastError() == 0" Location: wutil.cpp:512 (wutil_AppWindow) Call stack: 01347D5F 013491C8 0131F27B 744A1CFC 0131F684 0131F85E errno = 0 (?) OS error = 487 (试图访问无效的地址。 )"

[feneur]

* "About constructions, it could be great when you try to place them, that the game blocks it nearby an other construction. For example: near a house, block the one I am placing so I can built it with no space between each other." - maybe they meant "so I *can't* build it with no space"?

I actually think the person meant it like he said it, but that he was meaning snapping. As in, when a house gets close enough to another house it should snap so I can build them right next to each other. Could perhaps be useful for houses, but other buildings are rarely all that useful to put right next to each other.

"When we scroll the map with the mouse on the borders of the screens, the direction of the scroll must depend on the direction of the vector formed by the center of the screen and the position of the mouse. Currently, the maps scrolls only left/right/up/down, imo the player should be able to scroll in any direction with the mouse." - I happened to play Sol Survivor (demo) yesterday which seems to do scrolling like this, and it felt pretty weird (though I didn't spend long trying to get used to it) - I don't think I've seen it in any other games.

Not sure why one would like any random (ok, not really random, but it seems like it would feel a bit random) direction, perhaps to have an area in the corners that would scroll diagonally, but apart from that I don't think it would feel all that useful, seems like one would get lost I could be wrong though, haven't played any game that does it as far as I know.

* "Doesn't seem to support the use of Wacom tablets very well... (the cursor jumps all over the place)."

I have never had any problems with this. Not that I can remember using the stylus though, only the mouse, can't see why one would use the former. Could be on Linux perhaps? Though I do remember having problems in other games, but that was when zooming, was really jumpy/spinning/weird in RTW and a few other games.

[Pureon]

* Minimap problems: "Is it possible to make the coloured dots on the map more distingishable? Some of the colours are too similar, ie. red and orange."; "The mini map could scale; too small to see anything on it."; "It's hard to see Player 2's buildings on the mini-map." An option to make the mini map expand to full screen would be useful actually, especially for the bigger maps.

* "If I select mulitple buildings and create a number of units only 1 building will make them. It would be great if by making 1 unit when you have more of the same kind of building selected you would make 1 in every building not just in 1 of the buildings." Agree this would be useful.

* "If you garrison units into a siege ram and don't unselect them befor garissoned your not abel to control/select any other units or buildings" Is this true? If so, that's a bug that needs fixing.

* "Gaul towers (not outpost) do not fire and an error message appears" If still broken I'll fix this. Edit: Fixed in r9403.

[k776]

Can someone with time (I've run out of time for today) please take the workable, valid suggestions/bugs and file tickets on Trac into the backlog please? Thanks.

[Mythos_Ruler]

* "If I select mulitple buildings and create a number of units only 1 building will make them. It would be great if by making 1 unit when you have more of the same kind of building selected you would make 1 in every building not just in 1 of the buildings."

Yeah, this is something that should be included. I've been wanting that for a while, but felt other things were more important.

[plumo]

Yeah, this is something that should be included. I've been wanting that for a while, but felt other things were more important.

I think they also use that system in Age of Empires Online. It works well.

[janwas]

Wow, a treasure trove of comments Should be enough to keep us busy for quite a while, hehe.

* "I have to monitors, which leads to me not being able to scroll in the direction of my second monitor, because the mouse-pointer is not captuured (it mvoes to the second screen and therefore I can not scroll)" (on Windows).

Can't confirm this one - the mouse is successfully captured in fullscreen mode here. Maybe they were running in windowed mode? (But the whole point of that is NOT to capture the mouse)

* "Assertion failed: "GetLastError() == 0" Location: wutil.cpp:512 (wutil_AppWindow) Call stack: 01347D5F 013491C8 0131F27B 744A1CFC 0131F684 0131F85E errno = 0 (?) OS error = 487 (?????????? )"

Oops, that was probably due to some rather dodgy code in the name of "saving some time". Turns out to have been only ~150 us, so I've made it less dodgy locally. Will commit later once the LibError/Status thing is ready.