Announcing WarLight 1.09

On Sunday, November 27th at 1am PDT (8am GMT), WarLight will be upgraded to 1.09.0. While the upgrade is taking place, the website will be down for a short time. If all goes well, the downtime should last for less than 15 minutes.

This blog post contains a summary of what’s changing.

Seasonal Ladder

As announced in the previous blog post, WarLight is getting a new ladder! Once it is ready to join, another blog post will kick off the first season.

Ticking Clock

In real-time games, the clock now makes a ticking sound when it’s under 30 seconds. This helps players who play with sounds enabled tell when they’re getting close to being booted.

Forum Search

The forum now has a rudimentary search feature, which makes it easier to find forum posts. All forum pages will have a search box on the top.

The search is powered by PostgreSQL full-text search functionality. It’s not incredibly powerful, but it should be good enough for the forums.

Graph Improvements

The graphs section under the statistics window is getting some improvements. Previously, you could graph “armies received per turn,” which showed the player’s income for each turn as the game progressed. This graph is inconsistent when it came to cards, as some cards would be reflected in the totals (such as sanction cards) and other cards were not (such as reinforcement cards).

This graph metric is being split into two separate graphs: Base armies received each turn, and armies actually deployed each turn.

Base armies received each turn is the same to the old graph, except that cards are no longer counted in the total. This means it reflects the number of armies that the player would have been getting if cards did not exist.

The new graph, armies actually deployed each turn, shows the number of armies that the player added to the map every turn. Therefore, this takes into account all cards, such as sanctions and reinforcements. What makes this graph extra useful is that it works while fog games are still in progress. It will simply show how many armies that you saw that player deploy for each turn.

This may not match their total income while fog games are in progress, as they could have deployed armies elsewhere on the map that you could not see. However, this makes it easier to see how many armies you’ve seen your opponent deploy without having to navigate through history turn-by-turn and adding up all of the deployment orders you saw.

Map Design API

Map designers who are also developers can now write programs to enter details about their map, which can be easier in some cases than using WarLight’s built-in map designer. This can be used to enter territory names, connections, center points, bonuses, and distribution modes. See Map Details API on the wiki for the details.

2v2 ladder change

As previously announced, the initial armies that each player starts with in the Strategic 2v2 template is being changed from 5 to 4.

Misc Changes

– The automatic refresh now refreshes more often when you’re actively chatting in a game, which makes real-time conversations easier.
– Added a button in the map designer that shows URL you can use to share your map with other players.
– Fixed a bug with the map designer that caused uploading a SVG that had problems to create an empty map that had to be deleted.
– Fixed a caching bug that caused map thumbnails to be very slow at updating when a map was changed.
– Fixed a bug that caused the Favorite Games screen to not show archived games.
– Fixed a bug that was causing total times played with another player to show lower numbers than normal on your invite list.
– Fixed a bug that caused a boot notification that appears in the orders list to come up a turn late when players are set to turn into AIs when booted.
– Forum threads that do not get posted to for more than 6 months are now automatically deleted. Some special threads are immune from deletion, such as The Impaller vs The World ones.
– Improved the analyze window in cases where the offensive kill rate is set to very low percentages. It’s still wrong in some cases, but they’ll be far more rare.

6 thoughts on “Announcing WarLight 1.09”

  1. > Forum threads that do not get posted to for more than 6 months are now automatically deleted. Some special threads are immune from deletion, such as The Impaller vs The World ones.

    Is that necessary? Keeping old archives may be useful.

    Also, I love you for the Map Design API.

      1. True, but I like going back and seeing old thoughts from time to time. Are we able just to lock the thread so that no one else can write (also archive them?). I understand there are meaningless chat ones and also “blacklist him!” threads. I’m just curious as to what gets to stay and what doesn’t (i.e. strategies for certain single player games)

  2. The Ticking Clock is pretty buggy:

    a) You should be able to turn it off with the sound on/off button!
    b) It shouldn’t tick if you already made your turn in the game!

    Otherwise a good feature!

    Sincerely,
    bmbl

    p.s. Any official word on the android app?

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