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From: minar@reed.bitnet (Nelson Minar,L08,x640,7776519)
Newsgroups: comp.sources.games.bugs
Subject: Re: Does Stanley Shebs exist? (was Re: xconq docs)
Message-ID: <15356@reed.UUCP>
Date: 21 Aug 90 17:40:43 GMT
References: <1990Aug14.202517.12939@viewlogic.com> <7575@ucdavis.ucdavis.edu> <15341@reed.UUCP> <9835@goofy.Apple.COM>
Sender: news@reed.UUCP
Reply-To: minar@reed.bitnet (Nelson Minar)
Organization: Reed College, Portland, OR
Lines: 68

Good to hear you are alive, Stanley.

I, too, am interested in making sure that xconq is properly moderated, and NOT
by the person who 'released' xconq version 5.3. The simultaneous movement is
good, but other things are messy. I do recommend that we use xconq 5.3 for a
starting off point.  I would offer to moderate xconq myself, but I am going to
be a very busy college student this fall, and I know almost nothing about X
programming (yet).  I would be happy hacking on the sources, though.

Here is a partial bug list for xconq 5.3, both small things and big things:

mouse selection of the unit production was broken. Patched at reed.
units being carreid by other units could still produce things (put an infantry
  in a bomber, and have it building bases while it is being carried). Patched
  at Reed, but patched wrong (it should be setable in the .per file)
weird bug that prevents units with < 10% chance of hitting other units to
  succeed (preventing, for example, bombers from attacking each other even if
  they have a 9% chance to hit). Patched at Reed.
units from teams numbered > 6 do not have the proper numbers attached to their
  icons. This is the result of a sloppy patch to allow more than 7 players,
  and should be easily fixed.
the period programming currently limits you to only 14 unit types, presumably
  because of "limitations in the view mechanism" (maybe only a nybble for the
  unit type?) A preliminary look through the source code did not show any
  obvious built in limit.
xconq 5.3 has no documentation, and no working maps. Working maps exist, but
  the xconq 5.1 documentation needs updating.
xconq occasionally breaks its own map files, causing core dumps when trying to
  restore.
Restoring multi-player games is nonintuitive.
An odd bug that occasionally lets pieces move farther than they should be able
  to.
The game is too damned slow. In an 8 person game, with one other human and 6
  computer opponents, if I have 80 units and put them all on sentry, it can
  take the game more than a minute and a half to go through all of the units
  and say 'oh, its on sentry, do nothing with it.'  This leads one to having
  frequent waits while the game decides to let you move a piece. I suspect that
  it is the result of nonclever integration of multiple players moving at the
  same time, either on the X side or the machine side.  Or else someone is
  losing a pointer somewhere, and taking a long time to recover :)

Most of these bugs are fairly simple to fix, really..


There are also some 'features' I would not mind seeing:

give transports (cities, bombers, troop transports) the ability to be protected
  by what is inside them. It is awfully unrealistic to read "You have captured
  the Italian city Obnazgul, (killing 8 i)."  Those 8 infantry should be able
  to defend their city (while the same 8 infantry might not be able to defend
  the transport they are aboard).
stacking pieces in a hex. There is no obvious reason why a fighter cannot be
  in the same hex as an infantry, other than the programmign headaches it
  causes. There are multiple schemes for handling this sort of thing.
preemptive choices of moving pieces.  Now that we have simulatenous movement,
  I should be able to say "I want to move these pieces at the beginning of
  the next turn."
an interface for finding pieces (maybe).  Seeing that your 280th infantry is
  being pummeled is nice.  Where IS that 280th infantry? This might be a bad
  idea.
better order programming for troops. Maybe a bank of little buttons to hit in
  addition to the key commands (do you remember if its little e or big E to
  wait for a transport?) It would also be nice to give troops little programs,
  rather than one order.  This might be too big of a feature.


Anyway, these are some of my ideas for xconq 5.4 (6.0?) I'd be willing to try
to make some of them happen, but I really can't moderate the changes.