Spring RTS Engine

http://www.darkstars.co.uk/2008/aflobby ... erimental/

Released for 0.76b1

I just downloaded and tried it.

What's cool: Most basic lobby features are implemented. You get a separate window for each private chat.

Whats not cool: As a host you can't change players teams or set them to spec. You can't kick players either. Players who left the game still appear on the player list. After joining a couple of battles and leaving them it stops working and I have to restart the program (I pastebinned the console output). Any error messages just flash up and dissapear within fractions of a second without me being able to read them. The whole interface seems slow and unresponsive.

My personal opinion: The user interface is really cumbersome, in the hosting window for example changing colors, victory condition, balancing teams, selecting map, and boxes are each in a separate tab. And while chatting, after every username it says says:, which seems really unnecessary.

Oh, and it doesn't say you have to set up the paths the first time you start it, it just starts a version where you can't host or join games. You have to go to settings and enter the stuff manually.

Verdict: AFLobby is a pretty cool IM/chat tool, but using it to actually host and play games isn't really feasible.

The setting up paths is a planend beta 4 feature, namely a pretty start-up wizard that does all that for you as nicely as possible.

Sadly it wasn't implemented in time for the emergency release.

Players who left the game still appear on the player list.

Looking into this now

As a host you can't change players teams or set them to spec. You can't kick players either

There're commands for this e.g !kick and !forcespec iirc, but a set of buttons in the table would be very useful indeed. The table is very young though so it hasn't grown a set of admin columns yet, but hopefully they'll all be intact by the time it reaches puberty.

After joining a couple of battles and leaving them it stops working and I have to restart the program (I pastebinned the console output).

Relative reported this bug while testing and I fixed it however this paste bin stack trace does not match his. Having looked at it I understand why now and I've made a minor speed improvement to that area of the lobby and corrected the bug.

And while chatting, after every username it says says:, which seems really unnecessary.

An excellent suggestion, there'll be a check box for it in the next release.


Thank you for the bug reports and the suggestions. Naturally since this release is in the middle of a development cycle things may not be entirely perfect, but it works.

And if anyone has any suggestions for changing the battle interface GUI without making it a tasclient clone, please go put them forward. Diagrams would also be appreciated.

I think what you really need to do AF is re-focus on basic features, UI streamlining in the battle lobby (look to Springlobby and Supcom; fewer tabs, right click context menus, better grouping of players [maybe create a separate box for specs, or something], etc...), and stable releases. Once you have a solid client then you can build on it with the long terms features you are going after.


AFLobby shows promise, but in terms of practical usage its not there yet. In some ways AFLobby has taken a step backwards as of late due to stability issues once though dead in the alpha releases.

AF wrote:Naturally since this release is in the middle of a development cycle things may not be entirely perfect, but it works.

So you released a buggy version that you know wasn't really ready today just to prove your point that AFLobby is indeed ready to be used?

You have completely boggled my mind for like the fourth time this week.

Okay, giving AFlobby another shot. First impressions:
Okay, like the cartoon while loading, takes a while to start moving though.
Joining a couple channels, looks good, not to try my normal list.
My name is highlighted, I'll have to turn that off, no biggie.
*restart*
90 seconds to join all the channels on my list, something even the slow mess that is tasclient can do in maybe 5.
The order of channels is also horribly horribly wrong.
Then I click on a channel to go to it. The entire list shuffles. I switch a few more times. Each time I go to a channel in a different row, they all move around. At this point I start ranting and close AFlobby.

Edit: woohoo! I changed to the default java theme and the tabs stopped being idiotic. I can put up with slow loading to have all channels visible at once. Yay AFlobby!

Edit2: I can't remove highlight options within the GUI, though I can add them. meh.

[11:20:49] logging started <--set this to output the date, and I switch to AFlobby today

Edit 2: I can never get the raw protocol window to work except on the first login. After that, it closes instantly every time I open it.
And a biggie: AFlobby fails to parse the last client in each CLIENTS message.

Edit 3: On my sucky home connection, AFlobby is far more drop-resistant

Edit 4: A channel will become marked as having new text when you still have it active.
The battle and user lists don't empty when I disconnect.
It seems it's TASServer scrambling the channel order, but why on AFlobby and not on TASClient? I'll try checking with wireshark later.

Edit 5: I don't know if it's because this is my fifth or so login, but I can't click links or join battles.

Edit 6: You really need a newline before the 'set by' text after the topic. And that font doesn't render well on my screen. Could you unbold it or something to get it to the point where it isn't aliased?

Edit 7: Not only do I have a triple battle list... Chat shows up normally, that's the log file.

Edit 8: It locked up, using 100% CPU

Boirunner wrote:

AF wrote:Naturally since this release is in the middle of a development cycle things may not be entirely perfect, but it works.

So you released a buggy version that you know wasn't really ready today just to prove your point that AFLobby is indeed ready to be used?

You have completely boggled my mind for like the fourth time this week.

I'm not sure what you are talking about, this version was released as experitmental because the previous versions were incompatible with 0.76b1 due to changes in protocol and script generation.

The point is that this version logs in, the previous one does not.

The doubling up of the battle list has been corrected.

The tab control has been changed from wrap to scroll which should help with your problem lurker, however in substance looknfeel there's a magnifying glass which if pressed shows every single tab as a thumbnail with its title, and each thumbnail zooms in and gets bigger when moused over.

I'll add the date to logging too

Other than changing the topic header to non bold what else would you suggest? Can you show me a screen shot of the foobarness? I'll add a new line as suggested, here is the html string used with an added <br> for good measure:
Channel joining was slowed down for stability in alpha 20, and since then I've been fixing swing golden rule breakages and haven't upped the speed since. I've removed all that now and its near instantaneous, far faster than it used to be and still faster than tasclient.

I also noticed a bug where it would add extra newlines between lines in the start-up commands which slows it down too which Ill fix now.

I've also fixed the last user in CLIENTS being missed.

Dedicated "PING" timer thread ftw

All the lists are scrambled, they're returned by TASServer in the order they were added to the server not alphabetical. Infact tasclient still returns them in this order. I've yet to figure out how to set the default column sorting on tables though but it can't be that hard.

Channels are also removed from the event loop correctly now.

Thanks for all the reports.

some things i've noticed:

• clicking the user coloumn in channels tab doesnt sort the list, but order indicator appears
• changing the gui theme doesn't always change it for new windows, tab contents are get mixed up, colors don't change
• bug report button always opens two tabs with the page in firefox
• no indication that you cannot host if unitsync isn't loaded properly
• error message on join without loaded unitsync just flashes, no chance to read it
• couldn't get any mod recognized, must be a path issue. what are the two paths for Spring and Single Player for?
• is it possible to remove a channel from autojoin?
• i can't see third coloumn's title in player list tab (too narrow --> three dots)
• i might be blind, but is there a single player option? maybe not displayed because no map/mods were loaded?

find me in #springlobby if you'd like more info on sth

I've also found that clicking links causes an error window that says I need to end the current session of firefox.

that sounds like a firefox bug relative

The ... isnt truncated it is actually ... mainly because its sued for special icons like bot or admin spanners.

I'll look into sorting of users.

I might just remove the instant looknfeel changing and make users restart the lobby as its unreliable.

It is possible to host and play a game without unitsync if you set the glest path, if a unitsync path isnt specified its assumed spring isnt installed and your a glest user or a chat only user. Agin this was supposed to be handled by a start up wizard which hasnt been implemented yet.

The spring path is the path to spring.exe or whatever spring binary you're using. It may be of note that the unitsync path does nothing under windows as aflobby.jar must be in the spring folder under windows. Setting the single player and settings paths will enable their respective buttons in the startup screen.

There's a dialog for adding and removing/editing start up commands which include joining channels in settings. You could tell it to join 50 channels, say something rude, then leave them all and pm a handful of people if you wished.

I'll probably change the url opening code back to the old method too.

I'll explain it a bit better. It doesn't always happen and a new tab or window is always opened. But when the error window doesn't appear two tabs are open with the same page. So I think its calling firefox twice, causing the error window complaining about sessions to appear or making duplicates.

Boirunner wrote:So you released a buggy version that you know wasn't really ready today just to prove your point that AFLobby is indeed ready to be used?

Hey, everybody does this all the time.

AF wrote:The tab control has been changed from wrap to scroll which should help with your problem lurker

NOOOOooooo......
It works perfectly on the java default theme; having 5 rows is infinitely better than scrolling.

AF wrote:Other than changing the topic header to non bold what else would you suggest? Can you show me a screen shot of the foobarness? I'll add a new line as suggested, here is the html string used with an added <br> for good measure:

I expect just making it not bold will be fine.

In that case I shall redirect you to the substance looknfeel website to file a bug report with their library. This isn't something I can fix in aflobby if it's looknfeel dependant as the issue is inherited from another project.

https://substance.dev.java.net/

And I shall unbold my topic code, although I would still like to see a screenshot, what you see may not necessarily match what i see.