War.app has just been updated to version 6.05.0! This update adds a bunch of new features and makes improvements to the game and app. This blog post describes what’s changed.
This update is live now on the website at https://war.app and on the standalone clients. It will go live on the Android app and iOS app in the coming week or two.
Many of the features being delivered in this update were directly lifted from the Feature Request Forum, where you can vote on what features you’d like to see implemented into War.app next. This is the primary way of making your voice heard, so be sure to vote if you haven’t!
Switching Teams
War.app Classic games now support the ability for teams to change mid-game! This is useful for diplomacy games where alliances change. Alliances can now be formalized using the built-in teams system, which means that they can share visibility, team chat, and can even win the game together.
A team switch can only be invoked by a mod. With this update, I’m shipping the Team Switcher mod, which works as follws: Any player can propose a new team. If all players they name agree, then a new team is formed. Additionally, any player can leave their current team at any time and become unteamed.
Team changes take effect when the turn advances and are always visible to all players in the game.
Note about cards: Since cards are held by a team, mods that change teams around need to make a call about what will happen to a team’s cards when players leave the team. For example, a mod could try to divide the cards evenly and let a player take those cards, or card pieces, to the new team.
The behavior for cards is up to each individual mod to decide how they want to handle it. War.app’s built in code won’t transfer cards along with a player who is leaving a team, but it will allow an unteamed player to bring their cards to a team when joining one. The Team Switcher mod that I’m shipping as part of this update simply treats cards with this default behavior — joining a team brings your card with you, and leaving a team leaves all cards behind.
Relations Tab Highlight
When using the new Relations tab in the Statistics dialog, you can now tap on a row or column header to highlight that row or column. In very large games, this helps you keep track of which player you’re trying to follow when scrolling around.
More Mod Improvements
There are several improvements in this update to help mod authors create high-quality mods.
The mod development dialog has been improved significantly, with features to allow mod authors with multiple mods to sort, filter, and search for their mods.
Mod authors with public mods are now sent notifications if their mods crash. This helps ensure mod authors know about bugs in their mods, rather than requiring them to pro-actively check the mod crash section. They will only be sent one notification per day with a summary of all crashes that occured that day.
If mods time-out in a multi-player game, the mod(s) that contributed at least 30% of the timeout now generate a mod crash report explaining the details about what happened. This allows mod authors to know if their mod is causing games to crash. Also, the creator of the game is now sent a notification so they know what’s going on.
I’ve created a new python script to help in developing War.app mods directly on the website, without using the standalone client or VSCode. See this project for details.
Finally, when mod authors view a mod crash report, it now contains a link to the multi-player game that caused it, if available.
Ask Fizzer Anything
This Tuesday, Sepember 1st at 11 am PDT, Fizzer will be doing an Ask-Me-Anything session live on twitch! Feel free to drop in and ask any questions you have! If you can’t make it, you can post your questions to this thread and view the recording of your question after it’s over.
Other Changes
- Classic: Adjusted threshold of “hot” filters to make them more dynamic.
- Classic: Added support to the AIs Wunderwaffe and Cowzow for games without one-army-must-stand-guard enabled.
- Classic: Fixed horizontal scroll of relations tab.
- Classic: Fixed bug that caused an error if you activated autopilot in the middle of playing a card.
- Classic: Fixed large team games on profiles so they say, for example, “200 teams of 2” instead of “2v2v2v2v2…” repeated hundreds of times.
- Unity: Added an experimental setting to enable emoji support, when OS Font Fallback is enabled.
- Unity: Fixes to shrink wrapped labels experimental setting.
- Unity: Fixes to OS Font Fallback to reduce memory pressure on iPhone.
- Mods: Custom card’s “playCard” function now takes an “icon” parameter that lets you specify the icon that appears next to the play-card order in the orders list.