How time flies when you are developing! Between the holidays and all the work being done on Conquest!, I had forgotten how long it has been since my last post. Let's get right to all the new stuff!
The first item is the guild now keeps the last 5 spy reports. I severely underestimated how useful this is until I started playing! Before the change, spy reports were limited to just the last one and they were lost when you logged out. Now they are stored on the server and can be retrieved by clicking "Reports" from the guild. Like combat reports, I added a timestamp to you know how stale the information is. In the future I might expand the history a bit more.
Next, I continued work to remove popups and reduce scrolling by tackling combat orders and statistics. Previously, these were two separate popups with the former showing your army's food and gold upkeep, as well as options to set surrender and auto-enlist, and the latter showing all of the numbers the game tracks about your player (battles won/lost, troops killed/lost, etc.). I decided to combine these into one and remove the food and gold upkeep (it is available under the kingdom overview):
The first item is the guild now keeps the last 5 spy reports. I severely underestimated how useful this is until I started playing! Before the change, spy reports were limited to just the last one and they were lost when you logged out. Now they are stored on the server and can be retrieved by clicking "Reports" from the guild. Like combat reports, I added a timestamp to you know how stale the information is. In the future I might expand the history a bit more.
Next, I continued work to remove popups and reduce scrolling by tackling combat orders and statistics. Previously, these were two separate popups with the former showing your army's food and gold upkeep, as well as options to set surrender and auto-enlist, and the latter showing all of the numbers the game tracks about your player (battles won/lost, troops killed/lost, etc.). I decided to combine these into one and remove the food and gold upkeep (it is available under the kingdom overview):
One screen, no scrolling.
The next useful feature was (finally) adding tooltips! I was watching MEIT Dev's feedback for Conquest! and noticed he tried selecting items to get more information. There is no mouse over for mobile clients but now clicking on items in the HUD or your character class, pops up a small 1-2 sentence description. For example, I clicking on the "house" in the HUD:
The next useful feature was (finally) adding tooltips! I was watching MEIT Dev's feedback for Conquest! and noticed he tried selecting items to get more information. There is no mouse over for mobile clients but now clicking on items in the HUD or your character class, pops up a small 1-2 sentence description. For example, I clicking on the "house" in the HUD:
The tips work on every screen and add some much-needed aid to new players. On the backend, I also got around to improving the network performance of the client. When the UI was first launched, I put in a kludgy solution to read data coming in from the server. It was fine for launch, but now I'm using a proper event driven read. This also removed the worker thread from the client, which also had the side benefit of making Conquest! web based via HTML5. Or so I thought; HTML5 doesn't support direct socket connections. Doh!
The next improvement came from adding friendly reinforcements to the combat reports. This has been asked for on several occasions but a certain stubborn developer resisted (for some reason). I finally added these:
The next improvement came from adding friendly reinforcements to the combat reports. This has been asked for on several occasions but a certain stubborn developer resisted (for some reason). I finally added these:
Friendly reinforcements are shown in blue, while enemy reinforcements are shown in red.
The biggest usability issue addressed was auto-scrolling to the bottom of the chat and event windows. It took me a while, but I discovered that modifying a ScrollRect's verticalNormalizedPosition property was much better than trying to accomplish the same thing by modifying the RectTransform of the same object. I also discovered the ForceUpdateCanvases method under the Canvas object. For chat, I call this prior to adjusting the normalized position. Using this same method, I corrected a bug where the travel map would scroll too far and be out of bounds for some resolutions.
The other nice feature was adding an option to reverse sort your journal. A small change, but a large improvement in usability.
Finally, the weather screen got its makeover. Like the other popups I removed, it became a full screen window. I also added a quote regarding the season and an overview of the effects (none, light, moderate, severe).
The biggest usability issue addressed was auto-scrolling to the bottom of the chat and event windows. It took me a while, but I discovered that modifying a ScrollRect's verticalNormalizedPosition property was much better than trying to accomplish the same thing by modifying the RectTransform of the same object. I also discovered the ForceUpdateCanvases method under the Canvas object. For chat, I call this prior to adjusting the normalized position. Using this same method, I corrected a bug where the travel map would scroll too far and be out of bounds for some resolutions.
The other nice feature was adding an option to reverse sort your journal. A small change, but a large improvement in usability.
Finally, the weather screen got its makeover. Like the other popups I removed, it became a full screen window. I also added a quote regarding the season and an overview of the effects (none, light, moderate, severe).
Like what you see? Have a suggestion to make it better? Email me here: emperor@conquestgamesite.com
Sign up for the Conquest! mailing list here and follow the journey on Facebook or Twitter. Until next time, I hope to see you in the game.
Sign up for the Conquest! mailing list here and follow the journey on Facebook or Twitter. Until next time, I hope to see you in the game.
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