Space TBS: Return to Sol - testers?

[aerosuidae]

Remember the turn based strategy space games of yesteryear, like Master of Orion 1, MOO2, and similar? This is a personal just-for-the-hell-of-it project I've been meaning to try for years now, using HTML 5 <canvas> and javascript to do a simple web based TBS with an interface similar to MOO1. Its PHP/MySQL on the backend if you care about such trivia.

Return to Sol is not a clone of any previous game, but I freely admit to borrowing happily from other great games.

Anyone keen to test a game and file bugs for me?

http://returntosol.com/

All game play is free; this is a non-commercial personal project. Single player against (relatively easy) AIs is click and go, no user account needed. However, for up to 4 way multiplayer you will need to create a site account.

Browsers supported:

* Mozilla Firefox (all features run)
* Google Chrome (all features run, also fastest javascript engine IMHO)
* Internet Explorer 8 (most stuff runs - <canvas> is simulated and a bit limited).

I think Safari should work (generally because Chrome (ie, webkit) works), but anyone who can test Safari for me will receive much adulation and kudos!  Older versions of Internet Explorer will not be supported.

cheers

[Nox]

It looks really good and home page gives really the feel of something "not done as fast as possible" and that it's cared about

Looks really nice

The game feel is great too, it's responsive, quite easy to work with

Left bar should have overflow: auto or something because (Opera 10.51) it overflows at the bottom

What really bugs me is that I can't find anywhere my resources, this is something that should be highlighted all the time and visible easily

Edit: I haven't find anything "not working" in Opera 10.51 as well

[dsheroh]

Giving it a try in Safari 4.0.5 and it starts up fine.

- The crosshair cursor over the starfield is a bit faint - at first I thought my mouse pointer had disappeared completely.  You should probably use thicker lines and/or a contrasting color to make it more visible.

- The flashing "Updating" notice in the upper left is really distracting/annoying.  Unless it's absolutely vital for players to know when updates are taking place, there's no need for it, so get rid of it.  Even if it is absolutely vital, provide an easy way to turn it off.

- Keyboard handling should trigger off of releasing the key instead of it being pressed.  I have to make an effort to tap keys as quickly as possible for keyboard commands or else, e.g., "D" will toggle back and forth between "Dispatch" and "Cancel" very quickly, making its final state more-or-less random.  I think I've seen this once or twice with clicks also, but can't seem to reproduce it deliberately.

- Unchecking all ship types for AI production in the Empire screen does not prevent governors from queuing ships.

- Completion times for already-queued ships are incorrectly listed as "Infinity" when governor is set to "growth", even though production does proceed on them.

- There should be a way to collapse or scroll the column with the minimap at the top of it.  Especially with longer production queues, the list of available things to build goes off the bottom of my screen.  (I assume there's nothing more below "Dreadnought", but I don't know because I've never even seen the bottom half of "Dreadnought" itself.)


I haven't tried it in Firefox to see how many of these things apply there, but there isn't anything that stands out in Safari as "not working" at the canvas/javascript level.

What did you use for your server communication and how did you handle the spriting for ships?

[aerosuidae]

What really bugs me is that I can't find anywhere my resources, this is something that should be highlighted all the time and visible easily

So, like a heads up display or something, displaying empire savings/income/research points/population/fleet numbers. Ok, fair point. Such information should be easier to find.

- There should be a way to collapse or scroll the column with the minimap at the top of it.  Especially with longer production queues, the list of available things to build goes off the bottom of my screen.  (I assume there's nothing more below "Dreadnought", but I don't know because I've never even seen the bottom half of "Dreadnought" itself.)

That left panel should scroll with the mouse wheel. Good point though, I do need to make that obvious and put in controls for the wheel-less folks.

What did you use for your server communication and how did you handle the spriting for ships?

The different javascript page elements (jQuery code mainly) shunt text commands into a global buffer which is periodically posted to the server.  The server (PHP) processes the commands and responds with a JSON serialized object holding the resulting game state, plus any changes made by other players in the meantime.  A javascript game state handler breaks the response up and distributes relevant pieces back out to the page elements.

The sprites are absolute positioned images that get moved around using jQuery.animate() to control the CSS top/left settings, using x/y co-ordinates on the star map.

Nox, dsheroh - thanks for testing!  Some of your points are definite bugs or required features, and others tell me I need to document or design things more clearly.

cheers

[Sunchaser]

No time to test, but just want to tell you "good job". I am doing a game myself and keeping this quality it's a lot of work.

[Marek]

Welcome to the forums!

I'm a huge fan of MOO, so I had to check this out. Wow! Fantastic interface, and very impressive use of the javascript canvas. It runs flawlessly for me and the interface is really well designed and very responsive. Thanks for sharing it with us, it's projects like this that get me even more excited about the new potentials for HTML 5 in browser games.

[Harkins]

Just finished a game against some AIs. Good presentation and the basic gameplay is solid. I think you're building a great game and I'm going to braindump my notes:

• if a player loses all their colonies and colony ships, kill all their ships to tidy the display
• if only one person has colonies/colony ships left, give them the win, it's a slog to finish otherwise
• if a gas giant colony has nothing to do, it's sort of annoying to have 40 scouts in the queue
• actually, queues seem unreliable - a number of times I left a few big things in a planet's queue and then later noticed it making missle bases, colony ships, fighters, and bombers instead
• advanced tech 3 is missing - actually, what are these? didn't seem to do anything
• it looks like research doesn't stack - so if I get the Population 20%, there's no point in getting the 10%. UI should hide the worthless options.
• if the research queue is empty, treat it like a colony queue - pick the first unstarted technology and work on it
• research/colony queues could use drag and drop reordering - or at least for reordering to work the same
• and with drag and drop, there'd be no reason to have the research queue be a separate UI element from the list of technologies
• it'd be nice to know how much an investment will do before spending it - there's no info or in-game feedback
• I'm not sure how useful the 'growth' governor is - I never selected anything else for a colony until its factories were full, never selected it again. I get why it exists, but it's not a meaningful decision.
• specific icons for all-scout and all-colony ship fleets, and small/medium/large fleet would be go a long way towards displaying the most important info on the ships moving around
• a ship on auto-explore should pick the nearest star that is unexplored and does not have your other ships header there (not a random one) and, if all stars explored or about to be explored, stop moving (this is more noise reduction)
• at the start of a turn, display a lightbox with detailed event info to click through - look at Spaceward Ho for a good example
• I think all research may be underpowered or overpriced, but I should play more than 1.5 games to be sure
• would be nice to get some indication of other players' research besides the graph so I can tell if I'm falling behind in a particular area
• tutorial refers to a non-existent transport ship
• actually, all references to troops in the tutorial, UI, and research seem useless - nothing appeared to change the game. I think the game works fine without any troops at all, just ships, I'd just remove all the references to them.
• the tutorial would be better titled 'manual' as it's the sole reference for everything
• if you close the help sidebar, there's no way to get it back and it's hard to find the docs again - add a small pair of links at the bottom of the sidebar
• building feels slow compared to how quick the ships move
• can't resize the browser to see more of the game - this would be really annoying in any galaxy bigger than small, I think
• stars are often generated overlapping each other, very hard to click on systems sometimes
• when I click a star in, say, the planets window, don't recenter the display if the system is visible in the viewport, just highlight it
• refer to planets as SystemName/PlanetName - Because I can't change any names, it's hard to know where any planet is

I wrote more than I thought, so let me repeat: you're doing a great job on your game. Most of this is just polishing, I hope it doesn't sound like I'm complaining, I had fun playing.

[aerosuidae]

Awesome feedback, Harkins.  Thanks.  A couple questions below regarding a few points (note the points to which I have not responded are not ignored; I think most are apt and I'll act one way or another on them).

if only one person has colonies/colony ships left, give them the win, it's a slog to finish otherwise

A slog defeating the nanobugs, or just clearing up remaining enemy ship stragglers?

if a gas giant colony has nothing to do, it's sort of annoying to have 40 scouts in the queue

What alternative would you like to see?  Ship models can be turned off from the Empire screen if this is merely a matter of preferring fewer larger ships.

actually, queues seem unreliable - a number of times I left a few big things in a planet's queue and then later noticed it making missle bases, colony ships, fighters, and bombers instead

Ok, thanks. I think dsheroh mentioned something similar. though I have yet to spot the glitch.

advanced tech 3 is missing - actually, what are these? didn't seem to do anything

Each advanced tech level increases every thing -- planet population/industry caps/growth, ship and structure speed/range/combat, ground forces combat -- by about 10% for each level.  The whole advanced tech thing borrowed from Civ and MOO1.  I'll think of a better way to do this eventually.

I'm not sure how useful the 'growth' governor is - I never selected anything else for a colony until its factories were full, never selected it again. I get why it exists, but it's not a meaningful decision.

This may be a poor communications issue on my part. The growth governor is useful when starting a colony, and when being sieged and bombed by an enemy; both times you want maximum population and industry (re)growth.

a ship on auto-explore should pick the nearest star that is unexplored and does not have your other ships header there (not a random one) and, if all stars explored or about to be explored, stop moving (this is more noise reduction)

Actually it tries to do this currently, but it does need tuning.  Scouts explore both new unexplored stars and also re-explore known stars that you have not colonised.  The latter is like a patrol to check whether enemy colonies have been established since the last visit. Scouts not always picking the closest unexplored star is a bug.

actually, all references to troops in the tutorial, UI, and research seem useless - nothing appeared to change the game. I think the game works fine without any troops at all, just ships, I'd just remove all the references to them.

Troops and ground combat will stay in the game. The gaps you've noted are right, but actually symptoms of something unfinished. My intention is to have bonuses available for taking the time and effort to invade a planet, rather than quickly bombing it. For example: capturing enemy tech or gaining profit from pillage.

can't resize the browser to see more of the game - this would be really annoying in any galaxy bigger than small, I think

This would be a bug. The game should resize to fill the browser window, or display the full galaxy map; whichever is the smaller.

Thanks again, Harkins.  Braindump much appreciated!

[Harkins]

I'm happy to hear you enjoyed my feedback and found some use in it, even if some of it is just things I was confused about.

if only one person has colonies/colony ships left, give them the win, it's a slog to finish otherwise

A slog defeating the nanobugs, or just clearing up remaining enemy ship stragglers?

Both. I mentioned that I thought the ships of players without colonies/colony ships should be destructed, that's one slog, mostly about killing scouts. Fighting the nanobugs is another slog, building up a fleet and getting it there.

if a gas giant colony has nothing to do, it's sort of annoying to have 40 scouts in the queue

What alternative would you like to see?  Ship models can be turned off from the Empire screen if this is merely a matter of preferring fewer larger ships.

Yeah, I didn't understand what that was when I first saw it in poking around and didn't remember it when I had finished my first wave of colonies and had idle colonies.

This may be a poor communications issue on my part. The growth governor is useful when starting a colony, and when being sieged and bombed by an enemy; both times you want maximum population and industry (re)growth.

No, not a communication problem, I understood perfectly. It's just that in those two situations I would never choose a different governor because low population/factory mean they can't do anything else. I've always like the definition of a game as "a series of meaningful choices" and this one isn't meaningful - it's a (small) chore, not a choice.

Actually it tries to do this currently, but it does need tuning.  Scouts explore both new unexplored stars and also re-explore known stars that you have not colonised.  The latter is like a patrol to check whether enemy colonies have been established since the last visit. Scouts not always picking the closest unexplored star is a bug.

Huh. It seemed to me that if I'd once explored a system I'd always be notified when a new colony was founded. Maybe it was just that I had colonies in the system or scouts that wandered by.

[aerosuidae]

I'm happy to hear you enjoyed my feedback and found some use in it, even if some of it is just things I was confused about.

I consider the confused feedback just as important as the informed feedback, particularly when it comes from someone with a technical and gaming background The game has to be clear and easy for the unwashed masses to use, so it indicates a documentation or presentation lapse on my part.

I mentioned that I thought the ships of players without colonies/colony ships should be destructed, that's one slog, mostly about killing scouts. Fighting the nanobugs is another slog, building up a fleet and getting it there.

After thought and coffee, I agree with the first idea of destructing ships of players who have no way to create another colony, and this has been implemented.  The nanobugs slog I'm still thinking about.  Ideally there should be some reason to defeat the bugs before the endgame.. perhaps a technology cache reward, or Earth itself could be dramatically more valuable to acquire.

[Harkins]

The nanobugs slog I'm still thinking about.  Ideally there should be some reason to defeat the bugs before the endgame.. perhaps a technology cache reward, or Earth itself could be dramatically more valuable to acquire.

Oh, I assumed from the bit of backstory and the big initial starting fleet that whoever colonized Earth won. I just found it easier to kill my opponents before I tried, but in a busy game it might be better to try to sneak in and take Earth.