Now what I also need is a clock down by the year/turn counter or better yet one of those timers like I seem to recall in Civ IV so I can keep track to remind myself to stop playing this.
edit: btw, just finished a campaign, the replay option at the end was a nice addition.
Yeah, its awesome. And a fun read.
Huh, there is a pdf of it on the internet archive. I wonder if that was authorized. I know they have a bunch of stuff like old general magazines and cgw on there.
I can’t remember if mine got tossed in a move or is sitting in a cardboard box mouldering in the basement. I should go digging.
I’d forgotten or didn’t realize that the tutorial in the guide is built in to the game. Fired up MOO from gog, typed alt-TUTOR, and sure enough it popped up.
Also congrats @Ray_Fowler . I see that explorminate put in a good word for Remnants when discussing MOO as their #2 game of all time.
Just fired up Remnants for the first time in a few betas (btw, maintainers of Chocolatey packages who don’t update $PATH as part of their install scripts for command-line utilities are bad people and should feel bad. Anyway!) and it’s looking great!
@Ray_Fowler not sure if here is a good place for feedback, but I have grave UX concerns with how “flashy” the info panel on the right side is since it redraws entirely whenever you mouse over something in the main view, and then back to the last explicitly selected thing as soon as the mouse leaves the bounding box for a infopanel-enabled entity on the map.
I would vastly, vastly rather lose the mouseover ability entirely and only have the panel update when an entity is clicked on than the current behavior. Better yet, hide mouseover updates behind a modifier key (i.e. hold shift and mouse over things and the panel will update) or a user setting or something.
Cloning the repo from github now, might take a spin through it when I have a minute to see if I can figure something out.
e: oh hey, this code is quite neat! Nice and friendly. Easy enough to mess around with the mouse listener in the SystemInfoPanel. Getting build errors in apachemath trying to hack a build together with ant and pulling the config out of the Remnants.jar I just grabbed from itch.io though :/
e2: i’m a smart person, I swear. Got a local build running with a dumbass simple gradle buildfile. Whee!
Usually smart people don’t have to say it. It goes without saying. I’m just saying.
Update: Hey @Ray_Fowler I made a PR with the change to only update the system info panel while holding Shift. Do with it what you will :)
Meant it in the Simpsons sense of “I am so smart! S-M-R-T!” since I was bouncing off almost the literal easiest Java project build in history (Ray has managed to make ROTP with no dependencies, which is delightful!). I just haven’t messed with Java builds forever, heh.
Don’t take this the wrong way, but that is not going into the base game, lol. However, I am super happy that instead of complaining about something you didn’t like in the game, you instead chose to fix it on your end. That was one of the main reasons I wanted to open-source the code.
This was intentional, but I have also been criticized for this as well.
Not at all. My goodness do I have feelings about the UX of the current behavior though ;)
e: oh dear, i have misunderstood the state management of the UI, hahaha
If everyone criticizes or praises you for the same thing, you know you’ve done well. At least in arts and crafts, where I’d categorize games.
I still have yet to post my thoughts on the game, might have to play again…
I think the main issue is that there are a lot of professional Java programmers who work on teams (hey, I was one too) and they follow a lot of rules designed to facilitate good coding practices on a shared codebase.
When I created ROTP, it was literally a one-man hobby project so I had the luxury of finally shedding all of that project overhead. Now I occasionally get a “you’re doing it wrong” from someone who has been trained his whole professional career to do things a certain way and I just shrug it off. I know exactly what I am doing, lol.
One man’s overhead is another man’s safety harness. You can’t have done it wrong if it’s finished and it’s still clean, maintainable code. Programmers like their hammers, which is mostly fine, but tend to forget it’s not a science past some basic/intermediate phase, and their tools are just what works for them and their goals. Just doing what you know, and focus on doing it well, is its own “doing it right”. After a while, it’s just tradeoffs about something you’re not quite sure what it will be.
If it’s in a reasonable state of “finished” while being expandable, I’d call it a good job.
Ray, I’m not a programmer and I don’t really understand this discussion but let me agree with Adam B on two points:
and
It is the single thing about the UI that I can’t stand; I find it very difficult to handle. Don’t mean to pile on, you’ve done an amazing job and I’m thrilled you’re doing this. Thanks.
I was serious about the suggestion of adding a Civ IV style timer by the turn counter so I’d have something to pop up reminding me to stop playing.
Current campaign, fighting my way out of a corner I got boxed into by 3 other AIs.
Hahah, you know I’ve actually been doing that with my iPhone. Hey, you already did something I’ve been asking for since the beginning of time, a simple place to jot a note. So I’m all good.
I’ll just be not so patiently waiting for the opportunity to buy this!
Well I made the hover thing into a Settings toggle instead of the “hold shift to toggle” thing (which ran into some UI lifecycle issues that I frankly don’t have the will to dig into any further right now).
Certainly a lot simpler, heh. And hey, I can play the game without getting a migraine now!
As to your concern on the pull request, I don’t have a standardized process for accepting pull requests. I take everything on a case by case basis.
With regards to your issue, I think I am going to write some sort of mouse motion speed detection for the hovering behavior so the game will not display items that you are simply passing by with your mouse on your way to somewhere else. That should theoretically result in less unnecessary flickering of the display panel.
