I am not a big fan of board games so I didn't play it much, though I noticed that the speed was really slow even on my uber laptop (in 3D mode), also there are those odd black shapes in the background…
I really love the art-style. I've always been very fascinated with board-games, even made some of my own. Risk (which seems to be more or less the equivalent of this game; a correct assumption?) was always one of my favorites. The board-game can take a whole lot of time to play to the end though, so I'm hoping I won't be forced to sit and play for several hours. Gonna give it a go now!
I managed to play a few games last night, so now some more concrete feedback.
I like this game a lot. This is a great example of a board game that would be to complicated to play on the board. The rules are complex and easy to grasp at the same time.
There is one thing that I would change for multiplayer games: Although I find the feature to revert moves important (because then the game does not throw obstacles in my way) in extreme cases this leads to the opponent trying all possible combinations (which asuming backtracking takes a lot of time). I would include options to limit time for one round and maybe (for experts or so) to disable taking back moves.
In my opinion the 3d view is rather useless, because it does not provide sufficient overview. The camera movement behaviour is confusing. You should change the WASD keys to move the camera along the X and Z axex (asuming that Y is the board's normal), keeping the distance from the field. The mouse wheel would then provide lowering and raising the camera. Currently one has to point the camera towards the board to be able to see something. Moving the camera around requires first changing the view direction.
To give a prominent example: World In Conflict manages smooth and intuitive camera controls using a similar perspective.
Unfortunately I experience problems with the game:
I keep getting Exceptions, but I didn't figure out yet when this is the case.
The sound is cracking, but this appears to be a problem with jME/OpenAL. I replaced the libopenal.so with another one linked somwhere here in the forums and this works for me.
I am running Ubuntu 7.10 (32 bit) on a dual core machine.
There's another thing I noticed today. The game appears to pretty much run my cpu to the limits. I don't have the impression that it is necessary. Maybe there can be done some logicrate limit or so…
I tried running it on Windows today and unfortunately I have another sound problem there. This is rather interesting: It is a pulse like cracking that has nothing to do with the actual music being played. There are some games, usually 3d shooters, that exhibit this behaviour. I have absolutely no clue what they all have in common, but it appears to make my system unstable in the long run. My guess is driver problems though.
Man, why did you post this here. Now I'm playing it all the time instead of doing any work.
By the way…: You guys are German, aren't you? "Waiting on enemy" like "Warten auf Gegner"? It's rather "Waiting for enemy".
I just checked my dictionary. "waiting on enemy" actually means to "act as a servant of the enemy".
just a follow up about the music. some of those "glitch" sounds in the pregame background music are actually deliberate. it's the preferred style of the two composers who created the game's soundtrack to deliberately mess things up a little :)
After playing some more, I have three further suggestions:
When playing in window mode on smaller resolutions one cannot read the field labels. Would be nice to to have higher resoltuion on them and the current field label displayed in the info that pops up on hovering field with the mouse.
It's hard to notice the chat messages, because they look like status information and appear at the far bottom of the screen.
There should be a cleaner way to give up when a match is lost anyway. Currently just exiting the game looks rather rude and does not declare one's opponent the winner.
we seem to have a problem running the example from the beginning. It appears to work fine on newer machines, however, when trying to run the example on machines with older graphic chips, the sample application does not run.
The application gets stuck at context.waitFor() which in turn calls canvas.waitFor() n the LWJGLContext class. This method then calls waitFor() in the LWJGLCanvas class of the JMEContext system which gets caught in a while loop there. startupLock seems not to be released as no renderer can be obtained. What might be the cause of this problem?
Also, we tried to update the lwjgl package but had no success with this either; there are only two grey and nothing gets rendered on them.
yes that confirms my experience: the game doesn't run on older machines (i.e. machines without a graphics card, or machines that have certain models of graphics cards that are not supported). as game developer, i'm not sure there's much i can do about this. but if you or jme people have suggestions, please let me know.
your feedback is most welcome.
No Linux version!?