Postpone Netplay Development

[Orm]

[:(]

Can we, please, move on now?

[paulderynck]

I think of all the comments here, the most sensible were those in Post #74.

[RFalvo69]

There is a fantastic video on Youtube about the "Beauty and the Beast" which argues, in all seriousness, that Belle is simply a victim of the "Stockholm Syndrome".

The video, of course, is made in good fun, but it is quite amazing to see how much of the analysis is factual.

Now, I didn't post a lot on this forum, but when I did it was easy to see how my approach to the whole MWIF situation could be labeled as "satirical cynicism". Sadly, not only my overall point of view is still the same, but... let's say how that fun video about "Stockholm Syndrome" is now partially integrated in my overall assessment of the situation.

Did MWIF improved since... uhm... 2013? Sure, it did. Erik, tackling the remaining problems two years after his last message, basically laid out an embryonic plan aimed at how to proceed from the current state of "early beta".

Now, before answering with comments that I could write by myself right now, right here (because they are always the same), let's remember that we are not talking about bugs like "Artillery doesn't work" or "Additional Cinese Cities is broken" or "Every time we try amphibious landings in Netplay the game crashes".

What we are talking about is "OK, we have a game with the solitaire part still incomplete (missing optional rules, missing half-map scenarios, bugs...), with Netplay just starting to creak on, and with "EU talking about what to do after Brexit"-level debates about how to proceed.

I was a beta-tester of "Command". I still consider myself under NDA, but I think there is one thing I can say: we had this sort of debates when the game was in late Alpha. When Command 1.0 was released it was by no means "perfect and totally playable", but you could play it. Eleven patches aimed at both polishing the outstanding bugs, improving the UI and the fluidity of the gameplay, and adding contents followed.

Why I enrolled in the Navy? Because, since I was a kid, the sea always held a peculiar fascination on me. I actually read "The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner" by Coleridge over and over when I was in Eight Grade, and by high-school I was able to read it in English.

Why I do mention this? Because nothing like MWIF made me understand the full meaning of the expression "Having an albatross around your neck". I think that this is how Matrix is feeling about the game.

Now, as I wrote, I do fully expect the usual answers that I get after these posts of mine. Feel free to express your opinions.

Just, please, before doing that think a minute about what I mentioned at the beginning: Stockholm Syndrome.

[vonpaul]

Still waiting for fascist tide scenario so i can seriously play the game i paid for years ago

Even if multiplayer was working 2 player global war is way too much game.

Occasionally i break out the books and dream.

[AllenK]

Stockholm Syndrome eh? It's been quite sometime since I was last considered as being a Beauty. I think I'll take it [8D].

Oh well, the guards are calling, back to the cell.

[warspite1]

I totally agree with the response (below) to the preposterous idea that Beauty and the Beast is about Stockholm Syndrome.

I haven't seen the new version yet - hopefully will go in the next few weeks - but the 1991 animated version is a tale as old as time about love and looking beyond superficial appearances. It is a beautiful film, wonderful music, clever - very clever - lyrics, a fine script and a great adaptation of a classic fairy tale that was fully deserving of the Oscar for best film for which it was nominated - but which it didn't get only through snobbery toward animation (and perhaps because Silence of the Lambs was quite good too [;)]).

Belle is NOT suffering from Stockholm Syndrome and if anyone says she is I'll grab my torch and pitchfork!

http://thefederalist.com/2016/08/10/7-r ... -syndrome/

[RFalvo69]

ORIGINAL: warspite1
Belle is NOT suffering from Stockholm Syndrome and if anyone says she is I'll grab my torch and pitchfork!

http://thefederalist.com/2016/08/10/7-r ... -syndrome/

Whoa! Some people do seem to take everything seriously these days [:D]

The video I watched was made in good fun. However, the "answer" you linked (which, IIUC, refers to people seriously considering the idea) also mentions all these "angry, sad, reviewers playing the “victimization of woman” and “male domination” card, trying to ruin another great movie (RIP Ghostbusters)."

Now, there is a very important point to make here: Ghostbusters 2016 sucked a golf ball through a watering cane - end of the story. It was Sony who, after the dire reactions to the first trailer (the most disliked video ever on Youtube) tried to play the card "These people just hate the fact that the movie empowers women!"

To say that this backfired spectacularly is an understatement. People were quick to cite movies ranging from Alien/Aliens, to Kill Bill, to Buffy, to Mad Max: Fury Road, to how "Resident Evil" became the highest grossing horror franchise ever (which, considering the average quality of the RE movies, it means that GB2016 doesn't even belongs to the "guilty pleasures" genre).

Even worse, Sony pulled this fumble at the height of the Clinton vs. Trump campaign. Go figure.

Some people fell for the scam (I was pretty amazed to see, among them, journalists from "The Guardian"). However, and more importantly, it were the feminists who filled the streets (or Youtube - which is the same thing), pointing out how it was important to state the truth: i.e. that the movie sucked so hard that you left the theatre physically stunned. Because if you tie your cause to a lie your cause will suffer. It is as simple as that.

This comes from someone who loves both Kate McKinnon and... er... Milla Jovovich [:D]

Anyway, my daughter just sent me this other hilarious video about TBatB; just think about the implications to this girl's reasoning:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gGRmTmA6znk

To put things in perspective, she is the same girl who did this side-splitting video about the implications if Rey is the daughter of Luke Skywalker. I hope she will become a script doctor someday:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mjHEHuNyvME

Now, back to the people who still cling to "Matrix's promises for the future of MWIF" (I want to be clear: me among them) and how we can become a case-study. [:)]

[warspite1]

There is a fantastic video on Youtube about the "Beauty and the Beast" which argues, in all seriousness, that Belle is simply a victim of the "Stockholm Syndrome

Whoa! Some people do seem to take everything seriously these days.........The video I watched was made in good fun.

You said the video - and thus the message - was made in all seriousness. There was no link so I did not see what exactly was said and simply took what you said on face value. But then you said it was just for fun so am a little confused by that.

But regardless, we are talking about a fairy tale here so all comments should be seen in that context. If some people (like those in the link I provided) want to bring in all sorts of baggage and their own personal crusades against this or that, well that's up to them, but for the avoidance of doubt in posting a response with a link, that link was only designed to counter the "in all seriousness" suggestion that Belle was a victim of Stockholm Syndrome. I am certainly not supporting any of the wider views made in that article. The only reason that I even vaguely care about that is because, as said, Beauty and the Beast is a beautiful film.

I liked the first video you provided a link for - cute kid - who made some reasoned arguments in an entertaining way. Of course, as said, this is a fairy tale so there are always going to be holes in the plot as big as planets, but the video was worth 8 minutes of anyone's time.

[RFalvo69]

ORIGINAL: warspite1

There is a fantastic video on Youtube about the "Beauty and the Beast" which argues, in all seriousness, that Belle is simply a victim of the "Stockholm Syndrome

Whoa! Some people do seem to take everything seriously these days.........The video I watched was made in good fun.

You said the video - and thus the message - was made in all seriousness. There was no link so I did not see what exactly was said and simply took what you said on face value. But then you said it was just for fun so am a little confused by that.

In satire, the form is not the content.

That girl I linked the videos of (I checked: her name is Jenny Nicholson) made a video where "in all seriousness" she examines the "unfortunate implications of TBatB". Yet, her intent is satirical.

Watch her video about what went wrong with "Batman vs. Superman". She notices how Henry Cavill's face never shows any kind of emotion - and so all the subplot about "I'm a human being!" obviously fails. Then, in all seriousness she proposes this solution: just put small animatronic devices under Cavill's face, so that - off screen - puppeteers can make him show emotion when needed.

Again, the style of the delivery is serious - and this is what makes the satire even more side-splitting.

I'm starting to guess, at the old age of 47 years old, that some people, by being unable to take things in a way different from the literal one, are actually missing a lot about what is going on around them.

Now, let's return to talk about the "now we are serious - no really!" plans about finishing MWIF - and let's the satire emerge by itself [:)]

[warspite1]

ORIGINAL: RFalvo69

ORIGINAL: warspite1

There is a fantastic video on Youtube about the "Beauty and the Beast" which argues, in all seriousness, that Belle is simply a victim of the "Stockholm Syndrome

Whoa! Some people do seem to take everything seriously these days.........The video I watched was made in good fun.

You said the video - and thus the message - was made in all seriousness. There was no link so I did not see what exactly was said and simply took what you said on face value. But then you said it was just for fun so am a little confused by that.

In satire, the form is not the content.

That girl I linked the videos of (I checked: her name is Jenny Nicholson) made a video where "in all seriousness" she examines the "unfortunate implications of TBatB". Yet, her intent is satirical.

Watch her video about what went wrong with "Batman vs. Superman". She notices how Henry Cavill's face never shows any kind of emotion - and so all the subplot about "I'm a human being!" obviously fails. Then, in all seriousness she proposes this solution: just put small animatronic devices under Cavill's face, so that - off screen - puppeteers can make him show emotion when needed.

Again, the style of the delivery is serious - and this is what makes the satire even more side-splitting.

I'm starting to guess, at the old age of 47 years old, that some people, by being unable to take things in a way different from the literal one, are actually missing a lot about what is going on around them.

Now, let's return to talk about the "now we are serious - no really!" plans about finishing MWIF - and let's the satire emerge by itself [:)]

Warspite1

If one doesn't know it's satire - because one hasn't seen the video (there was no link) and there was no [;)] or similar to suggest the comment about seriousness was not meant - then one only has what they are told to go by.

There may well be some people who do not understand satire - I am not one of those.

[brian brian]

We are all just prisoners here, of our own device.

We can check out any time we wish, but we can never leave.

[CrusssDaddy]

This is exactly the kind of discussion this game deserves. Thank you for letting me laugh at you. (Not satire.)

[warspite1]

ORIGINAL: CrusssDaddy

This is exactly the kind of discussion this game deserves. Thank you for letting me laugh at you. (Not satire.)

warspite1

You are most welcome - we are here till Thursday, try the veal (I paraphrase from Shrek).

[joshuamnave]

ORIGINAL: Erik Rutins


- It is time for another "state of the game" post and I apologize for keeping you waiting. Steve and I are in regular communication, but we were hopeful that we'd be able to get to a stable netplay release before now and were continuing the cycle of testing and iterating with the expectation that we were closer to a stable release than it turned out.

Yes it is. But that was over a month ago and you haven't been heard from or seen since. Erik, if you were a customer instead of an employee, what would your reaction to that be?

[Shannon V. OKeets]

Ah, sorry, that is my fault.[8|][>:] I owe Erik more information/data so he can write the report. But being in Philadelphia presently, I won't able to do that until next week.

[Erik's family had health problems and he is dealing with that right now.]

On the plus side, the reason I forgot about the report was that I took a week+ to work exclusively on Production Planning. I fixed a few minor bugs but the bulk of my time was spent rewriting the code for routing resources overseas. The program now finds the path using the minimum number of convoys. The last major bug in Production Planning - which I know how to fix - is to remember changes to routes that the player makes and reuse them before trying to find a 'new' route. That shouldn't take more than half a day, once I get home. A new public beta with all those fixes is most likely a couple of weeks away.

The rewrite of the overseas routes was a royal pain to change (high risk of introducing new bugs too) because it had been 1 recursive routine. I split it into three parts: resource to port, overseas, and port to destination. The first and third parts are still recursive while the middle part has a new search algorithm. Thinking that through gave me headaches and I had to stop every 4-6 hours just to recover my aplomb.

[Erik Rutins]

Sorry for the delay on that, Zartacla. It was mostly due to family health issues (my mom had two major surgeries, one with less than a week's notice, the other unplanned) on my side that led me to be out of the office for most of the last three weeks. I'm back in the office this week while still helping to care for her but also catching up with work. Steve is also back and I plan to review the planned State of the Game with him both int terms of updating everyone on the official update plans and for the forum post I promised.

Regards,

- Erik

[Joseignacio]

ORIGINAL: Klydon

I believe the mark given (only 5% are solitaire) is way below the mark. It seems to me that there are far more players using the solitaire version than doing the net play. One of the big reasons why is the solitaire version is the one being used for multiplayer and also by people that believe it is further along than the net play version. They simply use the solitaire version with other devices/work arounds instead of the net version.

I also believe that Joseignacio may misunderstand the issues from the solitaire point of view.

Working towards net play has broken the solitaire version of the game to the point it isn't really playable (until some of these recent fixes went in). To go back to the previous stand alone solitaire version would be going back well over a year and have that version be missing a lot of things that were taken care of in subsequent versions of the game.

The bottom line is until some work is done on game stability to eliminate some of these game breaking bugs, neither version is going to be any good. It makes sense to get the simpler version (solitaire) going first, then get back to work on the net play version.

There are two matters here:

1- There are bugs that belong only to netplay. Netplay has it's own glitches from day one, I remember having problems of connection from 2 years ago when we first tried it, and they are still there. No advance has been made in solving the (synchronization?) problems that make the game have mad except errors, due exclusively to connection problems or the lobby, which are both Multiplayer issues. Or at least not enough, since critical errors persist for some of us from minute one of the game - setup.

2 - If every time the game version for MP creates a new bug the priorities are solving the "SP (& MP)" errors and never the MP own problems, the game will never advance to a MP stage. Or maybe yes, but let's say it clearly: "we'll not be addressing the MP problems if they don't affect SP".

When we are speaking of advancing from SP to MP one would say that some of the major items would be connections. IMO this is what would need to be worked on first if we want to even be able to beta test properly.

Is it worth to beta test like this? When you have a specific MP problem and it's not addressed so you cannot pass from setup (or some other early phase) , as far as it doesn't affect SP, because then SP players will moan that they want their version to upgrade and so Steve has to stop all pure MP bug solving and give the SP players an upgrade...

I understand that if Solitaire is not stable we may not be ready for MP, but we did, and now it seems we are stuck with MP because SP players who had their own SP version, now want the MP version to upgrade theirs. It's insane.

[Centuur]

ORIGINAL: Erik Rutins

Sorry for the delay on that, Zartacla. It was mostly due to family health issues (my mom had two major surgeries, one with less than a week's notice, the other unplanned) on my side that led me to be out of the office for most of the last three weeks. I'm back in the office this week while still helping to care for her but also catching up with work. Steve is also back and I plan to review the planned State of the Game with him both int terms of updating everyone on the official update plans and for the forum post I promised.

Regards,

- Erik

That's not good news with your mother. I hope she will recover soon.

And I believe we should not rush that offical update, since there are some nasty bugs around in both solitair and netplay....

[Centuur]

ORIGINAL: Joseignacio

ORIGINAL: Klydon

I believe the mark given (only 5% are solitaire) is way below the mark. It seems to me that there are far more players using the solitaire version than doing the net play. One of the big reasons why is the solitaire version is the one being used for multiplayer and also by people that believe it is further along than the net play version. They simply use the solitaire version with other devices/work arounds instead of the net version.

I also believe that Joseignacio may misunderstand the issues from the solitaire point of view.

Working towards net play has broken the solitaire version of the game to the point it isn't really playable (until some of these recent fixes went in). To go back to the previous stand alone solitaire version would be going back well over a year and have that version be missing a lot of things that were taken care of in subsequent versions of the game.

The bottom line is until some work is done on game stability to eliminate some of these game breaking bugs, neither version is going to be any good. It makes sense to get the simpler version (solitaire) going first, then get back to work on the net play version.

There are two matters here:

1- There are bugs that belong only to netplay. Netplay has it's own glitches from day one, I remember having problems of connection from 2 years ago when we first tried it, and they are still there. No advance has been made in solving the (synchronization?) problems that make the game have mad except errors, due exclusively to connection problems or the lobby, which are both Multiplayer issues. Or at least not enough, since critical errors persist for some of us from minute one of the game - setup.

2 - If every time the game version for MP creates a new bug the priorities are solving the "SP (& MP)" errors and never the MP own problems, the game will never advance to a MP stage. Or maybe yes, but let's say it clearly: "we'll not be addressing the MP problems if they don't affect SP".

When we are speaking of advancing from SP to MP one would say that some of the major items would be connections. IMO this is what would need to be worked on first if we want to even be able to beta test properly.

Is it worth to beta test like this? When you have a specific MP problem and it's not addressed so you cannot pass from setup (or some other early phase) , as far as it doesn't affect SP, because then SP players will moan that they want their version to upgrade and so Steve has to stop all pure MP bug solving and give the SP players an upgrade...

I understand that if Solitaire is not stable we may not be ready for MP, but we did, and now it seems we are stuck with MP because SP players who had their own SP version, now want the MP version to upgrade theirs. It's insane.

Well, what's insane is the fact that there is only one developer having to take on all the bugs. There is no easy solution, and to be honest, I believe we will see that netplay has suffered from the fixing of solitair bugs. It's possible that we'll end up in an indefinite loop if we are not careful. At some point, someone should say that it's time to fix bugs in an area, whether or not they are only solitair or netplay. Fixes should be tested against all modes of play to see if the fix is complete for all modes of play.
The one debug tool that is really missing here, is one in which one could change a solitair game into a netplay or hot seat game so that we could test fixes in all modes of play. That would speed things up a lot, I believe...

[Joseignacio]

ORIGINAL: Centuur

ORIGINAL: Joseignacio

ORIGINAL: Klydon

I believe the mark given (only 5% are solitaire) is way below the mark. It seems to me that there are far more players using the solitaire version than doing the net play. One of the big reasons why is the solitaire version is the one being used for multiplayer and also by people that believe it is further along than the net play version. They simply use the solitaire version with other devices/work arounds instead of the net version.

I also believe that Joseignacio may misunderstand the issues from the solitaire point of view.

Working towards net play has broken the solitaire version of the game to the point it isn't really playable (until some of these recent fixes went in). To go back to the previous stand alone solitaire version would be going back well over a year and have that version be missing a lot of things that were taken care of in subsequent versions of the game.

The bottom line is until some work is done on game stability to eliminate some of these game breaking bugs, neither version is going to be any good. It makes sense to get the simpler version (solitaire) going first, then get back to work on the net play version.

There are two matters here:

1- There are bugs that belong only to netplay. Netplay has it's own glitches from day one, I remember having problems of connection from 2 years ago when we first tried it, and they are still there. No advance has been made in solving the (synchronization?) problems that make the game have mad except errors, due exclusively to connection problems or the lobby, which are both Multiplayer issues. Or at least not enough, since critical errors persist for some of us from minute one of the game - setup.

2 - If every time the game version for MP creates a new bug the priorities are solving the "SP (& MP)" errors and never the MP own problems, the game will never advance to a MP stage. Or maybe yes, but let's say it clearly: "we'll not be addressing the MP problems if they don't affect SP".

When we are speaking of advancing from SP to MP one would say that some of the major items would be connections. IMO this is what would need to be worked on first if we want to even be able to beta test properly.

Is it worth to beta test like this? When you have a specific MP problem and it's not addressed so you cannot pass from setup (or some other early phase) , as far as it doesn't affect SP, because then SP players will moan that they want their version to upgrade and so Steve has to stop all pure MP bug solving and give the SP players an upgrade...

I understand that if Solitaire is not stable we may not be ready for MP, but we did, and now it seems we are stuck with MP because SP players who had their own SP version, now want the MP version to upgrade theirs. It's insane.

Well, what's insane is the fact that there is only one developer having to take on all the bugs. There is no easy solution, and to be honest, I believe we will see that netplay has suffered from the fixing of solitair bugs. It's possible that we'll end up in an indefinite loop if we are not careful. At some point, someone should say that it's time to fix bugs in an area, whether or not they are only solitair or netplay. Fixes should be tested against all modes of play to see if the fix is complete for all modes of play.
The one debug tool that is really missing here, is one in which one could change a solitair game into a netplay or hot seat game so that we could test fixes in all modes of play. That would speed things up a lot, I believe...

This is mostly what I mean.