Release Note for Colossus 0.11.0
Some new features (see detailed descriptions below):
- Player colored angels and captured legion markers.
- Confirmation dialogs (optional) for omitted/forgotten split,
move or recruits (Thanks to David Partridge!).
- Possibility to mark legions as "skip" for split, move and
recruit (just made it "somehow", there's room for improvement in the
usability)...
- "Need Lord for Battle Control" (Thanks to Bruce Sears!).
... plus the usual usability & stability improvements:
- Closing BattleBoard does not kill that player (for not involved player
nothing happens at all, for involved player means conceding that battle).
- Public Game Server rejects now Clients older than 0.10.3.
- In Concede/Flee and Negotiation dialog, don't allow "x" dialog closing
- need to click on of the actions.
- Server (game itself) sends pingRequest regularly (currently about every 30 seconds).
- Server (game itself) should not hang any more when can't write to a certain client
- instead stops trying, informs other clients that one client is temporarily in trouble,
and registers to selector to be notified when client becomes writable.
- Check Server connection shows round trip time
- In Remote clients (= also when playing with Public Game Server),
do not show the Pause (earlier: Suspend) button.
- Numerous small changes to improve reliability / avoid server side
warnings/errors/log messages.
- Admin can trigger re-reading of login message without server restart
- Changes to building, jar signing, keystore, local JNLP files, etc.
Player-colored Angels and captured legion markers
Prior to this release, all Angels were always blue and captured legion markers
(when one player eliminates another, he "inherits" all the markers that player
posessed) remained in their original color - as in the real board game.
Because this was asked so frequently, now this is finally changed: Angels are now
displayed in the player's color (= same as his Titan), and the captured markers are
re-colored to match that color as well (but they keep their original marker id, e.g.
Gr01 - Gr12 for the markers of originally player Green, Rd01-Rd12 for the markers of
the red player, etc.).
Right now this is not controllable via an option, but if there is demand it might
be implemented to be optional.
Confirmation dialogs
It has regularly happened that a player forgot to handle one or more legions
for split, move or recruit, especially on large maps which do not fit well as
a whole to the screen.
The new release provides a protection against this type of "accidents": if you click Done
and there is one or more legion(s) not handled,
Colossus will prompt you whether you really want to end the phase. This is an
optional behavior, but enabled by default. You can control all three of them in
Preferences window, confirmations tab.
See also the next feature about marking legions as "Skip".
Mark legion as skipped
There are frequent situations where you do want to leave a legion without split,
move or recruit. In that case, you should mark them as "Skip" so that they do
not trigger the confirmation; i.e. the confirmation appears only if you really
forgot some legion(s).
For Recruit, there is a "Nothing" button in the Select Recruit dialog. After
that it is not highlighted any more. If you change your mind, just click legion again
and the "Nothing" is cleared and legion is highlighted again. Using Undo
("U", or from Phase menu) will reset this as well.
For Split, there is a "Skip" button in the Split Legion dialog (where you click
those creatures which you want to be in the split off legion). (Sorry, you still have
to pick a marker first)-; If you change your mind,
you can at any time still click and split it. If you really really want to get it
highlighted again so that you remember it e.g. after a save and load few days later,
you need to consecutively "Undo" all splits (or "mark as skip") which were done
after this marking as skip.
For Move, I haven't found any nice way how to integrate that; there is no
nice dialog at hand. To mark a legion as skip for Move, do the following: click on
the legion as if you want to move it, so that the possible target hexes are highlighted.
Now press either "S" on the keyboard, or in Phase menu there is a Skip action.
If you change your mind, as with all moves, there is no other way than to undo all
moves until you reach the point where you did the "mark as skip".
Mode/option "Need Lord for Battle Control"
See the description for it in
Get Players / game startup dialog documentation.
Suspend button
The "Suspend" button is only meaningful in local games (e.g. you against several AIs).
It would cause the server side thread to stop processing data - to give you time to inspect
legions, because otherwise the AI's proceed quickly.
Since this button is meaningless if are only a "remote" client (like when playing on
the Public Server), that button is now disabled in this case.