[Windows]AFLobby Beta 2 RC2a

[AF]

Download here

Heres AFLobby Beta 2 RC2a, packaged up in a pretty installer for windows.

Requires 0.75b2, .Net 2.0 runtime, and Sun Java 6 or later.

It has most of the basic lobby features needed to get by, and then some, including pretty and easier to use UI forms, such as posting multiline messages, or the starting box drawer that lets you move boxes around and swap them using point and click, whereas other lobbies need you to erase all the boxes and draw them again holding down ctrl/shift over a small minimap.



Including 12 colour pickers:


Animated Smileys:


Login Progress bar:


A proper map browser with big minimaps and clear translucent startboxes:


Feedback is welcome

[[Suck]suck]

that looks hot

i wanna have sex with it....

[Caydr]

Looks too mac. Make it crash randomly or something.

[AF]

It uses the Substance theme. Beta 3 has a theme chooser so you can pick another colour/theme or revert to native windows controls.

[Caydr]

Seriously though it does look pretty good, I hope its function is as good as its form. I might try it out once I get back into Spring more actively.

[YokoZar]

First of all, I like what you've done so far. Lots of good things here.

Software benefits from pedantic nitpicking, though, so like I promised earlier here's my usability report after about a week of use:

• The checkbox for "private game" when hosting is unintuitive and unneeded. It took me a few seconds to figure out I needed to click it. Just entering a password should imply the same function.
• Clicking and dragging the box to make it larger behaves very weirdly - only about half the pixels that I move the mouse "count". The result is that I need to drag my mouse over to the right and out of AFLobby's window to get a good box.
• Locked games should be moved below open games
• Team is forcibly remembered after the host changes it, and isn't even a nice default. I end up going to change my color and then discover I've been set to team 1 again after the host had switched me. I've ended up having to set myself to team 14 every time I join a battle so someone doesn't overlap me. It would be nice if AFLobby didn't "remember" its team name this way but instead got it from whatever it is currently, as well as defaulted to the next (unused) number.
• Similarly, a good ally team default is whichever of team 1 or 2 has the fewest people (since most games have 2 teams), though perhaps however many boxes are drawn could be used as a proxy for number of teams.
• The player names in the battle room are way too large. I appreciate the larger color swathes, but It's actually quite annoying scrolling up and down to manually count how many people are on each team. You could compact them to half their size by putting all the text to the right of the color swathes (which can also be about half the size they are). Also there seems to be a broken icon to the left of each color patch, and some of the text can be replaced by icons (eg arm/core)
• I've been using it for a week now, and I still can't figure out when the ready, autoscroll or accumulate messages buttons are pressed. Sometimes they behave weird, and the two different graphics aren't that different. Either way, they should be checkboxes (along with spectate). Similarly, I'd turn autoscroll into a "scroll lock" checkbox, off by default - this makes it consistant with other programs (eg online poker clients) that have a similar feature. I also still don't know what accumulate messages means, so it's not quite obvious.
• It would be nice to have the team "tab" instead be on the main window.
• Selecting a team is something commonly done, and it sucks to miss chat while doing it. I suggest either spawning a child window, or making it a lot smaller and embedding it into the main window.

Feature Requests:

• Map picker should show more, like the description and spawn points
• Game options should be remembered after hosting before, to make a nice default. It's kind frustrating picking the wrong mod or number of players.
• You should join the #main channel upon connection.
• A listing of the teams with how many players are in which would be nice. You could also rearrange the names so that the different alliances are in different columns.

Bugs:

• My older complaint about lack of spacing is still there (battle chat): YokoZarSays: hi
• Sometimes the scroll gets completely broken and I have to manually hold the scrollbar to the very bottom to read any chat - it keeps jumping back up to the middle somewhere.
• After a game is over you will be listed as "ready" but AFLobby won't know it, such that when the host relaunches your game won't start. The workaround is to click and unclick ready a couple times as soon as the game is over.

[Agon]

@YokoZar: Same for me but in the old version for Linux.
@AF: I think AFLobby is crossplatform, where is the Linux version then???
@AF: Why is .Net Required? Because of the installer?

[smoth]

no run cannot find unit sync?

[AF]

.Net is required for AFLobbyLauncher.exe which is a simple 5 or 6 line C# program. All that effort to start a program programmatically without spawning a command shell window.

And you must install AFLobby to the spring folder, and it must be 0.75b2+ because java bindings where bundled with unitsync in spring 0.75.

The linux version of RC2 is yet to be released although its sitting in svn for anyone who wishes to compile it. Ill put together a package for linux soon.

[smoth]

[AF]

You haven't pinned it to the start menu have you? That can change the working directory borkign programs, tasclient does that too.

Other than that I'd have to make sure your unit sync is what ti says it is. Which warning message did ti give? The JNI message when you login? Or the installation message when it first starts?

[smoth]

I installed my spring to a different dir, I hate having all my shit in program files. It has always been in this game dir. Tasclient works fine. Here is the error message:

Make sure you have a JNI aware UnitSync library in the same folder as AFLobby, and that it is compiled correctly using the latest svn source. AFlobby needs the unitsync library to be able to use spring. Linux users need unitsync.so Windows users need unitsync.dll Apple Mac users need unitsync.dylib (Mac is not entirely supported and upto date mac builds of unitsync arent included due to time restrictions)

image link

[AF]

If TASClient was running while you installed the updates to spring 0.75 from .74b3 then unitsync.dll wouldn't be writable and it'd skip unitsync. Then when you started 0.75b2 tasclient it would load the old unitsync and you'd be none the wiser.

Id ask someone who can run it to send you their unitsync.dll, otherwise I'd get a tool to see what functions the file exports and see if there are mentions of java or aflobby or JNI.

[smoth]

I had nothing running at the time.. I'll reinstall just to be safe.

I installed the new spring first thing when I got back from italy.

[smoth]

oh lawd it doesn't work.

[AF]

hmm, I could run it fine, as could relative, and you can start the client. Try getting someone elses unitsync.dll. I assume your java is all upto date. Can you send me your copy of unitsync.dll via email?

[smoth]

http://cs.selu.edu/~ssmith/BB/files/unitsync_148.zip

[AF]

That copy of unitsync works fine for me. What fi you run AFLobby directly double clicking on the aflobby.jar file or java - jar aflobby.jar?

[smoth]

I run the icon you see highlighted.

[Satirik]

doesn't work for me ... unitsync.dll error, tried the smoth unitsync.dll and i installed it without spring or tasclient running