Topics

166

Feature Requests / Board Rules

« on: March 06, 2012, 12:59:51 PM »

Discussions in this board are for the benefit of the dev team, and will only work if they are constructive, positive and focussed. For that purpose, the following rules will be strictly enforced:

constructive
No insults, personal vendettas or pet-topics. If your comment does not help in either judging or fleshing out a feature, then you shouldn't post it.

positive
Don't be negative. If you don't like something, say so calmly, in a neutral tone and with reasons.

focussed
Stay on the feature that is actually being discussed. Do not branch off into some related topic. If you think you absolutely have to (e.g. because two things strongly interact), start a new topic and post a single comment with a link there.
It also means to not take the original request and mutilate it beyond recognition. Don't add 200 other ideas and the kitchen sink to someone else's proposal. If you want to completely change an idea, start a new topic and link to the original one.


The Bugtracker

Once a feature has been discussed in the forum and approved by a dev team member, it should be posted on the bugtracker. That is simply because on the board, topics tend to get pushed downwards as new topics get discussed and will eventually be lost and forgotten. The bugtracker is better at reminding us.

Please don't put feature requests on the bugtracker without approval by the dev team. We mercilessly close unapproved feature requests on the bugtracker.

167

Development / Reworking Family Gold

« on: March 01, 2012, 10:20:39 AM »

I'm thinking about reworking the way that family gold works slightly.

My idea is to prevent some of the abuses and make the whole thing more transparent and easier.


The basic idea is that family gold should act more like a personal bank, with some limits. Instead of the current random events, families would:

• not automatically generate any gold anymore
• allow you to deposit and withdraw gold at will
• but keep a record of your balance and there would be a withdraw limit for every character (much like guilds)

I am also thinking about doing away with the "family home" and considering every estate a family home, and yes that would mean we would have "homeless" families - an incentive for people to get estates, at least one.

Basically, the whole way families work. I'd like to do more with them, make the family more important.

168

Development / Bugtracker simplified

« on: February 27, 2012, 12:25:53 PM »

I've stripped out lots of not-very-much-used fields from the bugtracker to streamline and hopefully improve the bug reporting process.

Categories are now in more user-friendly terms, the old categories were often wrong anyways.

Priority, severity and reproducibility are all gone. We didn't really use them seriously, and reporters frankly abused them in too many cases, labelling things as "crash" and "major" that affected only their characters, etc.

Not having to worry about these things should make things a ton easier for everyone.

The downside is that most of the current bugs now have "No Category". *shrug*

169

Development / Estate Names

« on: February 23, 2012, 02:40:54 PM »

Region lords can now give names to estates. This has not game effect, but allows for more personalisation and more roleplaying depth. Also, it makes it easier to talk about estates. Instead of saying "Anyone want to take an estate in my region?", you can now write "The estate of Twin Towers within Keplerville is in need of a new knight."

170

Development / More Estate Features

« on: February 22, 2012, 12:37:30 PM »

The current estate page already says that it is a placeholder and more options will be added.

I've a couple ideas swimming around in my mind, but I'd like to bounce a few off you guys. Please provide constructive feedback. I am seriously getting tired of the whining, and it does nothing for the motivation of the volunteers in the dev team. So any and all "this sucks / I hate it" comments will be sent to the forum moderators to delete and/or reprimand/lock their posters. If you fear it has a negative impact, say so in neutral terms and list the reasons why.

So, the two various ideas:

• Estates can simply be enlarged among a simple axis - tiny, small, medium, large, vast - with a prestige bonus to its owner, much like a unique item (i.e. lost if estate is lost, etc.)
• Estates can be improved with various buildings to allow its owners features that are otherwise limited. A training ground could allow for recruitment, a vault could give banking options, etc. - all of these would then be available whenever the knight is in the region. While this would decentralize the game a little, it would still limit options to specific regions, so it wouldn't break gameplay. The only big change it would bring is that it gives realms with a capital under siege a recruitment option. That is in fact a change I like.
• Make estates the actual locations of a family, creating more options to do nice things with family gold, etc. - but only at your estate. I would like to give the people who are hoarding family gold more options to spend it.

171

Feature Requests / Re: Idea: Plate Mail

« on: February 22, 2012, 10:10:01 AM »

We already have a status symbol in the game; unique items. Instead of adding another superfluous system, the focus should be on fixing that area.

Please open a new topic and tell us what you think is broken about unique items.

172

Feature Requests / Idea: Plate Mail

« on: February 21, 2012, 09:10:50 AM »

In the real middle ages, plate mail was prohibitively expensive.

A roleplay posted by a player today gave me an idea. What if new characters started out with only, basic armour, and you had to acquire better armour over time? It would mean players need to split their money between troops and personal armour, and a full set of plate mail would be a symbol of prestige. It could have various "levels", as in cheap, regular, well-crafted and excellent or whatever.

It shouldn't be a major money drain, and it should be visible to others on inspection of your character. It would have an in-game effect, namely affecting your chance of getting wounded in battle.

173

Development / Statistics

« on: February 17, 2012, 12:03:07 PM »

You may notice updated and much improved statistics graphs.

174

Development / Feature Cut: Mentors

« on: February 06, 2012, 11:16:30 AM »

This hasn't been working properly for a very long time now, and I think it's time we cut mentors as a class.

I still think the basic idea is solid. But maybe it shouldn't be a class. I am thinking of a message channel.

175

Development / Updating Stable

« on: February 06, 2012, 11:14:43 AM »

stable and testing have been growing further and further apart over the past months.

I plan to change that and return BM to something more similar to the ways it used to be. That means testing receiving things first, with them moving to stable as soon as they are, well, stable. Not two years later.

This means picking one moment and updating stable to what testing is right now. That moment is not yet come, as there are still too many bugs on testing, but it is coming.

This means a huge amount of changes for stable, all in one go. New estate system, new trade system, new taxes, food - well, everything. I will announce that some time before it happens, but I wanted to give you a warning as early as possible that it is going to happen.

176

BattleMaster Expansions / Beyond the Blight - Paperback

« on: January 31, 2012, 02:25:49 PM »

I'm working with Createspace to get an actual paperback book of Beyond the Blight published.

Based on sales numbers from the e-book (abysmal, to be honest), I've decided that this is basically a collectors item, so it will be 70 pages, colour print, I've designed a new high-resolution version of the BM logo and the cover artwork specifically for it, but it will be $12.95 - which I totally agree is rather expensive for a slim book. But as discussed in the other topics, getting something printed in low volume at all is not easy at all.

I'll let you know when it's available. You should be able to order it from amazon.com world-wide, or through the createspace store. If you want to support the game, order via the later, as I get almost no royalties from the former (else I would've had to make it even more expensive).

177

Development / Editor Issues

« on: January 31, 2012, 11:17:03 AM »

I think I've finally found what causes the issue with the new editor that makes linebreaks disappear from some messages.

It turns out that when you use the simple textarea - for example because your browser gracefully degrades down to it - then linebreaks are swallowed.

This will be interesting to sort out.

178

Development / Why I did the food/trade system change

« on: January 28, 2012, 08:40:43 PM »

A bit behind-the-scenes into my thoughts:

The old code was a horrible mess, and very buggy. Transporting it to our new code system (Doctrine2) would have worked, but would have been more work than this complete re-write was. In addition, we can now get rid of several very specialized database tables and code fragments and instead re-use things that are already there - the new granaries are just another workshop building.

I am not talking a little bit here. I have literally replaced hundreds of lines of code with maybe a quarter that, and completely eliminated another 500 or so lines of caravan handling. This is a tremendous reduction in potential bugs, and the new code is so much cleaner and easier that when people demanded an overview page for the banker it literally took me 15 minutes to write one.

There will certainly be a few more bumps in the transition, and likely a few bugs here or there, but I can already see the advantages of the new system in the backend code handling, and that alone was worth it.

179

Development / New Trade System Feedback

« on: January 28, 2012, 02:27:01 PM »

Please post your feedback below. Please try to be constructive - I'm tired of whining and "I hate everything because something has changed from the way it was before" comments. I value positive feedback and constructive criticism. If you think something might be a problem, remain calm and state in neutral an specific words why you think so.

180

Development / Feature Cut: Paraphernalia

« on: January 27, 2012, 10:40:38 AM »

No, not what you think. We will keep them. But I would like to dramatically simplify them.

Here's the concept:

• Paraphernalia should be a flag, not a counter. You decide if your unit has banners, siege engines, scouts, etc. - and your captain will handle the details about the exact numbers, etc. etc.
• Costs will be based on your unit size, and will mostly be maintainance costs
• Workshops don't construct numbers of them, they either have some or don't - we will add another state to workshops, "sold out". Basically the idea is that every workshop can supply one unit with its product per turn. So if there is only one Banner Manufacture, and someone else added banners to his unit this turn, you have to wait until next turn.

The purpose of this change is to make these things more hassle-free and much simpler to code. With simpler code come more options for us to do interesting things. There's a few things that I have not yet good answer to, like how scouting works if we don't have scouts as a "depletable" resource, but that's not a showstopper.


Comments?