Another Online Game

Played another online game last night, this time with four online players! Though I wont detail the game here, it went fairly well. The Druid, Wizard, Captain, and White Knight explored a good portion of the Realm without getting killed. We saved the game (it was getting late), to play another day.

At one point, the player playing the Captain had a problem with the interface: it said he was playing his turn, but in fact nothing appeared on his screen. A game killing bug? I suggested dropping out and rejoining, knowing that there was at least a chance that it would resync itself, and get going again. In fact, it worked, and the game was off and running again.

Some problems we noted:

• Each time a new player joined, all the enchanted tiles flipped back to their normal side. This is a bug, and quite annoying to the magic users!
  
• At one point, the Captain (unhidden) discovered the Altar, and no-one else in the clearing got the discovery. Argh, I know this USED to work. At least the "trade discoveries" feature worked, so we were still able to save us some searches, and get to looting.
  
• Something strange happened when a person tried to log on with the wrong password. It didn't affect the game, really, but it left a strange ghost row in the Connections window.
  
• People couldn't log on during a turn. Apparently, there is something preventing a new player from connecting to the server during a turn. The solution was to tell them to wait (we were using TeamSpeak to communicate) until the turn was finished (Midnight), and then it worked fine.
  
• Its frustrating when someone (including myself) forgets to press "Send", "Next", or "Done". At least the character list window makes it clear what is happening, so you can shout at the person who has forgotten, and keep the game moving. I'm thinking about adding a feature that flashes the button after a few seconds to remind you that you haven't yet pressed it.

Version 0.15 is moving along. I've already had to fix a game killing bug where casting Small Blessing with more than one character in a clearing will crash the game. There's also a problem with Magic Sight again, although this time it has to do with some debugging code I forgot to remove (sigh). I'll probably do another release next weekend just to get these bugs out of the mix. I finished the Curse spell (my first V), and I may be able to finish Power of the Pit by then too.