I like the new color scheme personally. I think you should not fiddle with that AT ALL initially, that is an easy cosmetic tweak later, if you feel a need to do it. Let people get used to it first and then decide.

The dropdowns, I have not played with them enough, but I don't care about the 1 extra click (there are options to tweak that I suppose), but I am not a high volume player like some are. I care more about a massive performance issue, which it seems to have. I mostly take turns in between real time games on Blizzard games (while I am queuing up a match search). That is basically impossible right now.

What tends to be the bottleneck for the loading of the webgl page?

When I click play, it takes quite a while before it begins to fully utilize my cpu.

The part I find weird is that I can do it with task manager open and use a stopwatch and see that for the first 10 seconds my cpu usage stays under 5%, then it quickly ramps up to 99% around 10 seconds in and stays there for about 10 seconds, then it starts to drop, and finally finishes.

On Chrome Version 62.0.3202.94 (Official Build) (64-bit) that's about a 27 second load time, with my cpu only being put through its paces for 10 of those 27 seconds.

I saw you claim it takes you 5 seconds, what specs is that with?

My 27 seconds is on a i7-4700HQ clocked at 3.2 GHz on all 8 threads. I can't imagine anything being 5 times faster unless you're using a i7-8700K or something, and even that seems like a stretch to be 5x faster despite being a hexacore with 12 threads at 4.3 GHz. That should be more like 2x as fast.

If there was something I could do to make my laptops cpu zoom up to 100% utilization instantly and make the total time be 10-12 seconds I'd be much happier with that than a 27 second load time. But even a 27 second load time is fine, it's by no means long enough to make me want to stop playing. Many games take at least that long to load, and the webgl version is fats and responsive once loaded.

Edited 11/15/2017 00:23:26

aoc: Solid dark gray backgrounds
* Limited amount of colors (e.g. going with the new logo: bordeaux red, gold, silver)
* Clear straight borders of different interface elements
* Less eye candy (e.g. the old efficient deployment slider)

Thanks! This is probably the best design feedback I've gotten. I think ths sums up what other people are trying to say in a way that's clear and elegant.

When I designed WarLight many years ago, I intentionally tried to keep the UI as grayscale as I could (few colors), since I always felt that the map should be the colorful part that draws the player's eye. I didn't communicate this to the new designer, so that's probably how we ended up with this.

Once the most critical issues are dealt with, I will revisit the UI.

What tends to be the bottleneck for the loading of the webgl page?

I think it's just the processing of the code. I'm not a browser engineer nor did I write the Unity conversion, but the code size is huge (bigger than it needs to be imo).

I saw you claim it takes you 5 seconds, what specs is that with?

That's in FireFox 58. Chrome is much slower for me, closer to what you see. When I talked to the Unity team, they passed along this project to both Mozilla and Google, so the Chrome team has at least seen this problem and will hopefully try to figure out why Chrome is so slow. By the way see https://www.warzone.com/wiki/WebGL for tips about measuring performance.

If there was something I could do to make my laptops cpu zoom up to 100% utilization instantly

I suspect this is what the streaming compilation feature will do. Right now it's doing the entire download, then starting to compile the code. Streaming compilation, as I understand it, makes those happen simultaneously.

Are you talking about the startup time of the WebGL version?

During play too, but only if played in browsers. Tried chrome, FF, edge, all of them are equally bad. They crash and eat up memory like crazy. Standalone runs decently, no crashing and way better fps

it would be great if its lighter in the future, maybe disabling some visual effects that are unwanted

Edited 11/15/2017 01:48:46

Another UI nitpick: can we get word-wrapping in the 3-column profile? The words "alternate," "any", and "account," as well as the profile link, are split up and harder to read in my profile (see screenshot below).

https://i.imgur.com/iZ6gsqT.png

I find the new colour scheme very distracting.
While the motive of dark grey and dark green may look more "military" style, its alot harder to see things now than when it was the good high contrast black background/white text.
Things just look all over the place, and my brain cant decide what to focus on; the ads on the side, or the background colours, or the post titles.
Tl;dr: Old darker colours were much better than new colours

Loading the game took several minutes as opposed to 10 seconds for flash.
Before, there were two tabs for real time and multiday games.
Now, there is only a filter option, which takes longer to enable than simply switching between the tabs.
If you enable both to show, they arent segregated and you can have realtime games show between the multiday games.


Also, ive never played coin games as I didnt think I had the skill yet necessary to win more coins than I'd lose, but I think demonetising coins is a bad idea, and really makes coin games no more special than normal games.

Edited 11/15/2017 02:34:23

Fizzer, first of all, thank you for your constant hard work on improving the site. It has given me countless hours of fun.

I fell in love with Warlight because it was simple and elegant. The black background and no-frills setup gave it a pleasant air of seriousness. The old design was saying: "Yes, we don't care about some fancy design because it's all about playing the game."

Now it's all gone out the window. The chaotic color scheme and the ridiculous background "paper scrolls" look like something out of the games I played on Amiga in the early 1990s. It all looks incredibly amateurish.

The new design is a big step backwards. If you paid your designer $10, you paid $10 too much. Your original design was way better.

I personally like the new logo a lot, but i think the brush metal design in it should also be the theme of the site overall. Its more simplistic and still looks cool. camo isn't my thing.

i will say that the icon for the standalone app is muddy. maybe replace it with a version of the WARZONE logo thats just the W and Z.

Fizzer,

Here are some images from my post above.

Arrows cover armies


Army Count and Cards Hidden by the background


Why is the font so freaking tiny? Everyone has big monitors now, real estate is no longer the issue it once was.


I am not sure about recording screen video for click, I will look into it. I am using Chrome Version 61.0.3163.100


The busy marque. The first spot I can remember is when the gameboard is loading and you direct people to use firefox 58(this is a beta version, right. strange thing to suggest). Nothing happens, and my proc fan spins to hell! So I know your eating up memory and crushing my bandwidth, but its just a blank screen. The progress bar never changes.

https://imgur.com/a/BHPfo

Just downloaded the android version. I agree the colors are not great. The neon-ish blue and green don't really match the new scheme. I like the colors on the forums, but the mobile app button colors don't look good. I will try to mock up a suggestion tomorrow.

The app itself seems cool. I did not enter orders, just looked around in a game already submitted. The side pop outs seem nice, the player gui, etc. The chat one is all i noticed a big lag on. I clicked public chat, did not load any old messages, and when i clicked to private or team it took a LONG time to switch...at least 30 seconds.

The history on android is WAY better than the old app. I used to have to click A TON of things to get anywhere, and lots of scrolling in menues. The new interface will be much better once we are used to it.

As i said, need some fix on the chat tabs, very slow. Also some work on button colors, which i will mock up.

I need to play some more with the other environments, but i like the android app so far.

Warlight 1 graphics

https://imgur.com/a/9figy

Got your free 90 mins of AOL CD in the mail?

Your broken connection dialog is not modal. It persists as you navigate pages. The above link shows it present on the game list page, I like to call this "home" but I do not know what you consider home. The dialog poped up in a game, it persisted on the game list page and when I clicked on another game, the dialog was still present until I hit "OK"

In deploy mode, on several maps, clicking on the army bonus should highlight all the bonus territories. Its not consistent, but often the click does nothing. I think this is related to my above issues of click not being cached. Let me attempt to explain again.

In the previous version, you could double click the target territory to attack with everything. In large games with many attacks this was a nice feature. Often the UI would lag behind mouse clicks, but your click would appear to cache or queue. Meaning, I could quickly run through my territory(one click) and the territories I wanted to attack(double click). The UI would often take some time time to respond with the animation, but the clicks and their locations would persist. My attack would register as I intended.

Now, when I quickly click my terr and then the target territory, if I get ahead of the animation for the attack arrows originating on my terr, then my intention to attack does not register. But rather 2 clicks on the target I intended to attack.

Dont get me wrong the animations appear quickly in the grand scheme, but I dont want to wait up to 1 second for every click. this is user pain, I know what I am doing and what I am after, animations are frivolous nonsense. Slowing down game play when you upgrade to a new framework is a big no no.

To surmise, with the point of this thread, it appears click are synchronous and the response time of the server is SLOW.

My machine is not modern gamer box, but not terrible either
Quad core AMD 2.9Ghz
6GB ram
AMD Radeon 7800 series video card 2GB onboard ram.

Here's my wish list for the new setup. I'll probably add more things as I explore more. Listed in order of preference:

• A way to get to tournaments/ladders/forums/other community things from the Unity dashboard. Not sure whether it's a bug or not, but I'm using Chrome and currently have to keep two tabs running - one for games, and one for accessing other things. The dropdown menus don't appear for me I'm using Unity, which makes navigating impossible.
  
  
• An "Are you sure?" dialog for the commit button. In the old version, you could only commit after going through the deployment and attacking phases, which served as a natural barrier to accidentally committing early. As it is now, it's easy to accidentally click "Commit" before I'm done with my turn. And I know this is partially because I'm still getting used to the new setup, but there will always be new players who aren't used to the site. I'd personally like an "are you sure?" dialog to pop up when I click commit, preferably as an option, even if it's not the default. As ViralGoat said, the way it's set up now could easily lose games.
  
  
• History defaults to the beginning of the game rather than the end. This used to be an option, so I'm assuming you'll add it? Would save me a click every turn, though, and this setting is also ideal for streaming. It was so awesome when you added that, and I got used to it. :(
  
  
• A way to preserve settings for users when switching to Unity. My first impression of Unity was that all those annoying features like sound effects and camera zooming were turned back on, so I had to go find the settings and switch everything back. Not a big deal, since we won't always be switching, but that would've been nice. I'm still not sure I've gotten everything.
  
  
• Better starting maps for Quickmatch. Don't get me wrong, I think the Quickmatch feature is amazing. And I know there are a lot of people who like Small Earth. But the problem with Small Earth is that it's REALLY prone to stalemates. My first game took 35 turns, and this isn't atypical, in my experience with this template. Maybe I'm just not very good. :P Also, I understand that you're trying to keep it simple for new players, but for that reason I think you should use the more common setting of turning "One Army Stands Guard" on.
  

Thanks for all your hard work! I love the Quickmatch feature. Also, I noticed you added team statistics for team games, which I've been secretly hoping for for a long time. :D

Edited 11/15/2017 06:52:48

Thank you so much for all your hard work! I know a lot of players have been giving you a hard time, and while I have a few disagreements in terms of design, and a few tiny other tiny dissatisfactions I feel that the update is definitely a great step in the right direction with lots more positives than negatives. And one more thing before the feedback, I want join the chorus telling you that you are the most incredible, community-loving, player-supporting developer I have ever heard of, and I wish that other developers of games big and small could learn from your truly amazing example. I have never gone longer than a day without a response from you when I ask something and never once have I been made to feel like an idiot for not knowing someone I frankly should have.

Now, in terms of specific feedback:

This is a small thing and should be dealt with after more important matters, but similar to our discussion earlier about copy-pasting chat messages (for diplomacy games) I think it would be nice to be able to have the option to copy-paste the settings (for the host message specifically as it usually contains important info such as starting wars, alliances, etc.)

Another thing, as a documenter of happenings in diplomacy games, I occasionally need to use the older chat button to get older chat stuff, and in diplo games where the chat is quite long, I have found that the scroller is too sensitive and moves too fast/far when I try to just go a few lines up.

Those are my only bigish things right now, and I want to reiterate that I am mostly in love with the new version.
Seeing the icons representing important game settings at the top of the screen when in a game: Awesome.
Seeing teammates orders all at once: Awesome.
Faster history: Awesome
Changed private chat system: Awesome
Making a new, special window for warzone: Pretty neat for someone who gets too tempted when working to just click on that open warzone tab
New Name: This is like the one design thing I don't like, as it reminds me of Halo 5: Guardians' huge moneygrubbing lootbox style gamemode with the same name. I know its too late to go back to WarLight but I just had to say this once to get it out so I can then learn to live with it :P

Another UI nitpick: can we get word-wrapping in the 3-column profile?

Yes, I'll fix that, thanks for pointing it out.

In the previous version, you could double click the target territory to attack with everything.

You should be able to now, too. This is actually one of the benefits of unity, which is that now iOS and Android have that feature whereas before it was desktop-only.

Why is the font so freaking tiny? Everyone has big monitors now, real estate is no longer the issue it once was.

Interesting, I didn't find it small. Try tapping the head in the top right corner, then Settings, and drag up the UI slider slightly until it feels comfortable.

Now, when I quickly click my terr and then the target territory, if I get ahead of the animation for the attack arrows originating on my terr, then my intention to attack does not register. But rather 2 clicks on the target I intended to attack.

I'll see if I can fix that.

it appears click are synchronous and the response time of the server is SLOW.

The server is identical to what it was before. Only the client changed.

A way to get to tournaments/ladders/forums/other community things from the Unity dashboard.

I agree, it's in the plan.

History defaults to the beginning of the game rather than the end.

Try using the "home" key on your keyboard, that's the hotkey.

I think it would be nice to be able to have the option to copy-paste the settings (for the host message

Yeah, Unity sucks at copy/paste (text handling in general). I was really disappointed with this as well.

I have found that the scroller is too sensitive and moves too fast/far when I try to just go a few lines up.

You can also just grab the chat area and drag. You don't have to use the scroller. That's the best way to scroll slowly.

I always get the coinwheel popup after a game. Could that be disabled on the settings altogether?

2 Things i recoginized 1st. And i dont like them.

1. No direct dashboard link anymore. Why? Its enough place in the line.
2. Players profiles r not comfortable to read. U need to open a big window, but also than its not the overview we know from the past one. I mean, its enough space there, so why 50 lines and uncomfortable to read instead of 15 lines with an good overview?

May i can get this in settings but didnt found until yet.