Dear Globulation 2 gurus, I have just discovered Globulation 2 and spent a bit of time playing it. So far I have tried 0.8.16 (current Ubuntu Dapper Drake version), 0.8.21 (from the .deb on the web site), and 0.8.22 (compiled from source).
Congratulations! It is a very nice game. Furthermore, it seems like it has a lot of potential to get even better and I can see that you all are doing a good job of making it better. I have taken notes during my few games and have lots of comments for you on issues or problems I encountered that I hope you will find helpful in your quest to make Globulation 2 ever better. Because I have so many comments, I have organized them into sections. My comments are below. And, yes, I understand that I am suggesting lots of things to do but not volunteering to do them. Sorry! I just hope my suggestions might help others see what points would be most helpful to work on. At least, these are the points that would make the most difference to me. Maybe the points I mention could be included in lists of things to document, lists of user interface changes to make, etc. Thanks very much for making such an interesting game! -- Joe Wells ====================================================================== Documentation: The documentation (this is mainly the Wiki pages) inconsistently uses "globuls", "globules", "globs", and "units". It would be better to use just one of these words throughout to reduce user confusion. The tip for inns says they help "food your units". The word "food" should instead be "feed". The tutorial script needs various grammar and spelling fixes in the messages it prints for the player. The tutorial mentioned that higher level inns feed faster, but this is the only place I have seen this information. In general, I have the feeling that the information on the Wiki is highly incomplete. This puts players who are not developers at a disadvantage, as they have no easy way of knowing these things. It would be better if players did not have to read the source for this kind of knowledge. The documentation for map editing would be improved by including additional hints about fixing randomly generated maps. For example, it is important to make sure there are gaps in the stone along the coastline that are close enough to similar gaps on the other islands. Otherwise it is almost impossible to get across the gaps. And I am sure there are other things that should be done as well. The documentation should explain that if you destroy a building, you don't get any of its resources back. (Yes, one quickly discovers this, but it would be nice for it to be in the documentation.) I've seen mentions of the "fog of war" option on the Wiki, but I can't find any place to turn this option on or off. Help? I have seen a mention of a "discovery" option. What is this? What effect does happiness have? The documentation seems to indicate that fruit-induced conversion is governed only by what food is available and not by past history. Am I missing something? What happens to globules that are inside a building at the time it is destroyed? ====================================================================== User interface: I have so many comments in this category that I needed to put them in subcategories. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Miscellaneous: BUG: Typing "+" (on my keyboard this is "Shift" together with "=") doesn't work. I can only use the keypad "+". This is a bigger problem for me because my particular keyboard (which is on my portable computer) doesn't actually have a keypad and simulates one by using the num-lock key to temporarily turn many ordinary keys (7, 8, 9, 0, u, i, o, p, [, j, k, l, ;, m, ",", ., and /) into keypad keys. Quitting the map editor with unsaved changes should prompt for saving them. Standard X Window System copy-and-paste with the mouse does not work for the file name entry field when saving a game. (Using a standard toolkit like GTK+ would solve this problem.) It seems that human players ought to have access to some of the mechanisms used by the AIs. For example, the human may think, "I need another inn, so please suggest a good place for one.", and this would be done by using the AI's algorithms. Or the human may think, "I would like my buildings to have a good number of workers assigned to each, so please tell me where you think the current assignment is high or low and give me an easy way to follow your advice.". Overall, it seems that it could be much better for human players to be based on an AI with human intervention at key points. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Requests for new visual displays: It would be nice to be able to have the graphs shown at all times (simultaneously with all other displays). This could be done by adding another column at the right for the graphs. It would be nice if there were also graphs for the percentage of globules at each skill level. It would be nice to be able to be alerted when enemy units are seen, even if no fighting occurs. It would also be nice to be alerted when explorers cause damage, so that I can see how effective (or not) they are. It would be nice to have visualization tools for gradients. I once somehow got gradients associated with my swarm displayed every time I selected the swarm, but it was with numbers. (By the way, how did I do this? What key stroke or mouse action did this?) It would be nice to see colors. It would be nice to have animations of globules inside buildings eating, studying, being trained, etc. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Screen size: In fullscreen mode, I can no longer switch virtual desktops with window manager hotkeys. This basically makes fullscreen mode not an option for me. I can only select a few screen sizes in the settings menu. It would be better to be able to type an arbitrary size. In particular, if I start with a custom size using the -s command-line option (e.g., "glob2 -s 1344x736"), and I switch away from this size in the settings menu, I can't switch back to it except by restarting glob2. Rather than selecting size by pixels, it would be nice to select size by giving the number of map units displayed in the main viewport. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Sliders: There are no keyboard controls for controlling most sliders. There are only "-" and "+" for the number of assigned workers (and "+" doesn't work for me due to some bug). For example, you can't switch swarm production percentages by keyboard but instead have to use the mouse. This makes management very tedious and tiring as one ends up spending most of one's time moving the mouse back and forth. The tabs on the left and right of a slider do not give any visual cue that they allow you to change its value. They should have little arrows on them so that this control can be easily discoverable by the user. Holding down the tabs on the left and right of a slider should autorepeat. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Problems with current visual indicators: When a building has been marked for an upgrade, and there are still globules inside it, the row of white dots on its upper right is missing and you have to click on the building to find out how many globules are still inside it. When a globule's destination changes (e.g., because something has been forbidden or used up), the old path continues to be shown on the screen. Building walls and supplying defense towers doesn't seem to use up stone, and clearing flags don't allow specifying to clear stone. I've got one that reports as Stone 2/5 and it just stays that way no matter how many walls I build. If stone doesn't get used up, then why does each stone resource have a number like "3/5" or "4/5"? This number is confusing as it seems to imply that one could clear away the stone by using it up. I wasted a long time trying to clear a path through some stone by building walls from it. I think this is a GUI issue because the GUI misleads the player into thinking that the stone can be cleared away by being used up. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Moving around on the map: Dragging the viewport indicator off of any side of the mini-map should wrap around to the other side. Or, better, the minimap itself should scroll to handle the wraparound. There should be keys for moving in all directions by full screens. In particular, Page-down and Page-up should scroll up and down by a full screen, but there should also be keys for moving right and left, so I propose Control-arrow for this. Currently, moving by arrow key or mouse dragging is tediously slow (perhaps because I don't have hardware graphics acceleration on my portable computer?), and moving by dragging the viewport indicator in the mini-map is too fast and difficult to control (especially on big maps). There is no easy way for the user to discover that he can select a type of thing to create and then use the Tab key to go to one of them, as though he had selected an actual building or flag. (By the way, this feature seems not to work for schools, swimming pools, and racetracks. Perhaps a bug?) Before I discovered this feature (accidentally!), I would place dummy clearing flags (i.e., flags with workers and range both set to zero) everywhere so that I could select a clearing flag and use the Tab key to cycle through all locations. If Tab cycles one way, then Shift-Tab should reverse it. It should be possible to use Tab to cycle through explorers (or other types of globules). (Yes, I know you can't control any kind of globule, but there is no easy way to find all of your explorers on the map.) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Controlling buildings, flags, and, areas: It would be nice to make a building which will be automatically upgraded as quickly as possible to top level. Right now, if you don't notice a building has been completed right away, then some globule might start training in the building before you can mark it for upgrading to the next level, and then you have to wait for that globule to complete its training course (which is anyway a waste of time as it will just have to repeat the course for the next level). It would be nice to be able to have buildings be automatically upgraded to the next level as soon as there were enough workers with the skills to upgrade it. It would be nice if starting or upgrading a building would automatically place a clearing area for the needed space, instead of forcing one to do this by hand. Right now one can not pick a building site or ask for a building to be upgraded until all resources are cleared from the necessary area. It would be nice if forbidden areas, guard areas, and clearing areas were automatically removed when built on. Once a building is on them the area markings just make it harder to see things. (And if the building is destroyed the situation will have changed enough that the player probably does not want the old area markings back anyway.) It should be possible to set the number of workers for upgrading a building while waiting for the globules inside to exit. Currently, the control for the number of workers disappears while waiting for globules to exit. It should be possible to set the number of workers for a new building while waiting for globules on the building site to move away. At this stage, the building site only shows up as a forbidden area and none of its settings can be adjusted. It would be nice to be able to copy an existing building/flag with all of its settings. It would be nice to be able to copy the settings from one building/flag to another. It is hard to tell which resources will be affected by the circular region of a clearing flag. Right now, one must simply wait to see what the workers end up clearing. It would be better to have visual feedback at the time of placing the flag or adjusting its radius. When one places a new flag, in addition to the possibility of placing another flag, the one just placed should be immediately selected so that one can immediately start adjusting it without needing to deselect the placement tool and then select the new flag. I very rarely place multiple flags, but I almost often adjust them immediately after placing them. For example, with clearing flags I almost always change the resources to be cleared (usually by removing either wood or wheat). And with war flags, I almost always immediately set the level of warrior needed to the highest level of warriors that I have. It would be nice to have a feature that layed out clearing flags along a path. Or better, it would be nice to have clearing areas that summoned workers, because clearing flags are very tedious to use for keeping a path clear. It would be nice to be able to adjust the settings of a flag _before_ creating it. Right now, I have to adjust the flag settings as quickly as possible before any globules get wrongly assigned to it. It would be nice to have an area control that _toggles_ the state of a area (turns it on if off and vice versa). Currently one must make many mouse trips to the right side to switch between the control for turning areas on and the control for turning areas off. Right now one must move the mouse all the way to right part of screen to change the kind of area marking or unmarking one is doing. This is very tedious and slow. It would be better to be able to make these changes by keyboard. There are many difficulties when using the checkerboard pattern for making forbidden areas for farming. Placing the pattern correctly is quite delicate. If one accidentally uses the pattern one location away from where one should, the pattern gets completely messed up and one has to make several mouse trips to the right area selecting different tool options to clean up the mistake. What would be better would be to use solid patterns but have an option that caused turning the area _on_ for locations whose x and y coordinates summed to an odd number and _off_ otherwise. Then one would could quickly drag the tool across a large area to set up the checkerboard pattern. It would be nice to be able to undo changes to settings of buildings and flags and also changes to areas. ====================================================================== Areas/flags: I need an area that means "clear this if it is forest, protect this if it is wheat". Otherwise I spend too much time micromanaging the areas. It would be nice to have areas that are forbidden only for harvesting and that if empty can be moved through. (Yes, I know that this might prevent a new resource from growing there if a globule is on the location at the wrong time.) BUG?: Clearing areas appear to override forbidden areas. Is this correct? It would be nice to have clearing areas that will attract workers like clearing flags do. The circular areas of clearing flags are very tedious to use. It would be nice to have clearing areas/flags which made their resources preferred for building purposes rather than caused the resources to be chopped down and thrown away. ====================================================================== Individual globule AI: When a building is set to X workers, and X is more than the number of resources needed to finish construction/repair/upgrading, then it seems that some worker effort and resources often ends up wasted. It is very tedious to have to micromanage the number of workers assigned to a building as the building nears completion to keep this from happening. It seems like it ought to be possible to auto-reduce the number of workers assigned to a construction site so that the number of workers is limited by the amount of resources still needed for the construction. Explorers summoned to distant exploration flags tend to not have enough smarts to know when to go back for food, and thus frequently die when this is done. It would be nice to be able to request that explorers follow coastlines. Or they should do this on their own, simply finding coastlines interesting. Right now to do this I have to keep moving an exploration flag to coax an explorer along a coast. This is quite tedious and prevents me from doing anything else. If I am guiding two explorers, then I have to ignore everything else. Plus, the explorers typically die in the end because they are not smart enough to go back for food. Even if you have 100s of explorers, they will leave large chunks of the world unknown even though they can get there and back without starving. Explorers left on their often seem to wander aimlessly. It is very hard to get workers to mass migrate to distant islands. BUG?: I've seen a bunch of fully fed and healed workers just moving around aimlessly while clearing flags that are in a direct line of sight of the workers are ignored. Sometimes, when the workers are halfway out of food, they will then notice the clearing flag, go towards it, and then run out of food just as they reach it. Why couldn't they notice it earlier while they were goofing off and still well fed? Workers seem to know where to find resources that are in unexplored areas that are not yet visible. It seems inconsistent that workers can see things that the player can't. Workers that have picked up a resource that ends up unneeded often seem to end up discarding it for another type that is needed. In many cases, it might be better for them to hang on to the resource for a while, because it will likely be needed. (Or maybe there should be some way to stockpile unused resources?) It would be nice to be able to force individual globules to abandon their current activity and try picking a new one. ====================================================================== Bugs (or possible bugs): BUG: glob2 sucks CPU like mad even when it is doing nothing. For example, when it starts up and displays the main menu, nothing whatoever is happening but glob2 is taking more than half of the CPU. It also sucks CPU in the middle of games even when the game is paused. I'm guessing this is a bug in the main event loop. BUG: If the disk is full, glob2 will happily save a game as an empty file on the disk without warning the user at all that the saving failed. BUG?: Upgrading racetracks and swimming pools has a strange quirk. While waiting for the globules inside to exit, it seems to work normally (like other buildings) but once they have exited (or if the building is already empty), it goes into a strange state for a while (up to a minute perhaps?). There is no bar to set the number of workers (and the dots do not appear above the building site). There are still dots below the image indicating its hit points, but no dots to the right, above, or to the left. The image of the building remains the same. When the building is selected, in the details display on the right it shows this (if your font is not fixed width my diagram will look funny): +----------------------+ | Racetrack (player 0) | | Level 1 | | | | +------+ Hitpoint | | | pic | 270/270 | | | here | Inside | | +------+ | | | | Armour: 5 | | | | ===BROWN BAR HERE=== | | | | | | | | Cancel Upgrade | +----------------------+ Eventually it seems to get unstuck and proceed, but this is strange. For a while I was convinced it wasn't working and I kept cancelling my upgrade and trying it again to see if it would work on a second try. Eventually I learned that I have to be patient. It would be better if this quirk simply didn't happen. ====================================================================== Miscellanous: AINumbi has an annoying tendency to die all on its own if started in a location that is not close to resources. It would be better if this just slowed it down, rather than causing it to die. glob2 fills up my hard disk with log files and as a result all sorts of other programs start failing. How do I stop glob2 from doing this? Right now I have to remember to periodically empty the log files (e.g., by copying an empty file on top of them) while I am playing. This is very tedious. glob2 (version 0.8.22) uses 1.2 gigabytes of memory just to edit a 512 by 512 map! I don't understand how harvesting fruit works. For example, in one game I had only 3 cherry trees, zillions of globules, and yet all my inns had lots of cherries in them and most of my globules had some fruit the last time they ate. How does this happen? This seems impossible. The "Swarm" should be called a "Hive" instead. The English word "swarm" is just wrong for what clearly acts as a "hive". The word "swarm" would be reasonable to describe the entire population of globules. _______________________________________________ glob2-devel mailing list [email protected] http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/glob2-devel
