WarLight now allows players to sign in with their Facebook account!

This is simply done as a convenience since it means you don’t need to remember a separate password for WarLight. WarLight won’t post to your Facebook account or do anything Zynga-like.

Facebook will never be required to play WarLight. This is just offered as an option for those who prefer it. You will always be able to sign in with an e-mail address as you have been able to up until now.

If you want to start signing in with Facebook but you already have an e-mail based WarLight account, you can link your Facebook account to your existing WarLight account at this page. Even after linking your accounts, you can still sign in with your e-mail address and password if you choose too. This will just enable the option of signing in with Facebook.

The main motivation behind allowing this is for the mobile client. Signing in with Facebook is only a small convenience on the website, but trying to type in an e-mail address and password on a phone is much more annoying. Therefore, it’s nice to give players another option.

Notable forum posts

The Dashboard page, instead of showing all forum posts, will now only show forum posts that have been marked as notable by a moderator.

If you want to see all forum posts, you can still click the Forum sub-tab and everything will behave as it did before. However, the Dashboard now provides a way for players that only casually read the forum to get the highlights without having to wade through the fluff.

Moderators will choose forum posts that are interesting, funny, or they just think that the WarLight community will generally be interested in.

I’m not going to pretend that this is a perfect solution to all of the problems that the forum faces, however it’s a step in the right direction. It’s likely that the forum will see further improvements in the future.

A new way to report bugs

WarLight now has an official form to report bugs. The Report Bug page will allow you to report any issues you’re having with WarLight. This is linked to from the contact page and the Help tab.

Filling out this form is preferred over e-mailing me directly, even though this form really just results in an e-mail being sent to me. Often when someone e-mails me or posts on the Bugs forum they would leave out crucial information, which ends up taking a lot of my time to figure out. Often I’ll ask for additional information and I don’t get a reply, which leads to the bug not getting fixed. Sometimes so little information is provided that I can’t even figure out where they’re playing the game (WarLight.net, Google Hangouts, iPhone or Android).

This form replaces the Bugs forum, so it’s been removed.

WarLight has just been upgraded to version 1.15.0! This is a big update and there’s a lot to cover, so in order to keep this blog post from getting too long, the new announcements will be split up between a few blog posts. If you’re impatient, you can read all the changes early in the change history tab.

Improved Invite Screen

The page that allows you to choose who to invite to new games has received a major overhaul which brings a fresh look and new features.

• A: New tabs make switching between the different ways of inviting players easier. The Invite List tab is the list of players you’ve played with before (this is identical to the list of players you saw prior to this update). The E-mail tab allows inviting people by typing in their e-mail address. The Open Seats tab allows your game to appear on the Open Games tab. The AI tab allows inviting computer-controlled players to your game. The Search tab is discussed in point E below.
• B: The team controls are now right on the invite screen. This allows you to switch between FFA (no teams), manual teams, or random teams. Previously the team controls were buried in the game configuration options. It makes more sense to put them here so you can adjust the players and teams simultaneously.
• C: The invite list now splits itself between pages of 24. This fixes a big performance problem that used to occur for players with extremely large invite lists. If your invite list is large, you’ll notice a dramatic speed increase due to this.
• D: You can now search within your invite list. This allows you to easily find people by name or clan tag.

• E: In addition to searching within your invite list, there’s a new tab just labeled “Search”. This tab allows you to search all WarLight players, not just those on your invite list. This makes it much easier to find players without having to deal with getting their e-mail or adding them to your invite list.

  There are two restrictions with the global search. First, when searching you must type at least three characters of the other person’s name. This means that players whose names are only one or two characters long won’t be searchable. Second, the search will only return the best 25 matches for your search term. Since WarLight names aren’t unique, if your search target has a very common name (like Mike or John), you may not be able to find them if there are over 25 people with the same name.

• F: The “Load Template” button only shows up on this screen if you have saved templates. This allows a short-cut to getting to your templates, but it’s really no different than clicking Next -> Change Settings -> My Templates. It’s worth noting that the invite screen allows you to skip it without setting up players. You can always come back to this screen later and set the players by using the Change Players button you’ll see on the next step.

Game Creation Overhaul

The UI (user interface) for creating games has been changed quite a bit. The old process was a linear wizard with steps one through five occurring in a sequence. The new process isn’t as linear, however it’s more powerful and should be much easier to figure out for new players.

First off, I want to apologize for changing the UI. I do realize that any time you change UI it causes a great deal of pain. Humans are very habitual creatures, and re-learning how to do something that you used to know how to do is never fun. I didn’t make the decision to change this lightly; I’ve been wanting to improve the game creation UI for a long time. There are lots of improvements I’ve held off of doing over the years in order to roll them all into one big overhaul. It’s like ripping off a band-aid — it’s better to get all the pain at once, not slowly over time.

The new process centers around what I call the main screen:

This shows a “Change Settings” button on the right along with a brief summary of the settings and a “Change Players” button on the left with a summary of the players. Below is the “Create Game” button which actually creates the game. After changing either the settings or players, you’ll wind up back here.

Clicking “Change Settings” will ultimately lead you to the new configuration screen:

Several options that used to be dedicated wizard steps have been moved into the configuration screen. For example, the map is now just another tab instead of its own wizard step. The boot times, practice game checkbox, and private messages checkbox are now just additional settings on the “basic” tab. Other than what’s been mentioned so far, everything should be pretty similar to the previous UI.

Need help?

The best way to learn the new UI is to go play with it. If you can’t figure out something, post your question to the forums. I’ll be watching and will be able to help out. Feel free to also chime in if you like or dislike the new UI.

Players Mythonian and kcscrag have been recording their recent foray into the 2v2 ladder and posting them to YouTube. The result is an excellent game analysis, which is great for seeing what the 2v2 ladder is like or improving your 2v2 game. It’s a lot of fun to watch and they do a great job with the recording and analysis, so check it out:

Also check out their other WarLight videos.

Live 1v1 Tournament this Saturday

This weekend Lolowut and Mythonian are hosting a LIVE 1v1 tournament. It begins at 6pm GMT on the 15th (11am West Coast US) There will be a live stream shortly after it starts analyzing the games. Seeing your game get analyzed is a great learning experience.

Anyone is welcome to join as long as you’re online when it begins. Post a reply in this forum thread if you’re interested in playing. Once it begins, this thread will also have a link to the live stream if you just want to follow along.

I just released a quick update for the mobile client that fixes a bug. The bug was causing any games that used negative bonuses to not load. If you’re not playing in games with negative bonuses you don’t need to install this if you don’t want to.

Members can install this update via the usual method.

WarLight can now be played on Google Hangouts! Using your webcams and microphones, this allows you to replicate the board-game experience of having everyone in the same room, without actually needing to be there.

It’s completely free, so give it a shot and let me know what you think!

Technical Details

WarLight on Google Hangouts is a slightly scaled back version of WarLight. It supports most game settings, but it’s missing the member-only ones. It can only be used for real-time games, obviously. It supports 8 maps.

This works completely independently from the WarLight.net website. This means you can’t play your WarLight.net games from Google Hangouts, and wins don’t count towards your profile. Its primary goal is to serve as an introduction to WarLight.

Season V will take place on the Battle Islands V map!

This is a slightly bigger map than Medium Earth, plus having fewer wastelands means there will be more room to work with than what we’re used to in Strategic 1v1. The wastelands will be size 15 instead of 10, however. We’ll keep the no-luck settings from last season since they proved to be popular. Next season will probably go back to normal luck.

As a twist, and to offset the larger map, this season will also feature Reconnaissance cards. These are the cards that let you spy on a single territory as well as all adjacent territories for a turn. Choose where you spy wisely!

You can begin practicing in the new settings using this template: multi-player, single-player.

The season will begin on the 21st at midnight GMT (effectively the 20th for those in negative timezones). Good luck!

Whoops! Last night’s Android release had a bug that caused the map to not re-draw correctly when anti-aliasing was enabled. This caused army numbers to not update and other visual artifacts.

I just released an update that fixes this. To fix the issue, you can either disable anti-aliasing in the Settings menu or install the latest version from the wiki which fixes it properly.

Thanks to everyone who reported it!

WarLight has just been updated to version 1.14.3! This blog post contains a summary of what’s changed.

Linking Territories/Bonuses

It’s now possible to send other players links of territories/bonuses through chat! By holding down the control or shift keys on your keyboard while clicking a territory, its name will be inserted into the chat window:

When another player gets this message, they can click on the territory or bonus name, and the game will show them where it is on their map. This is great for coordinating within teams, especially on maps that players might not be familiar with.

In team games, use the Control key to insert the territory or bonus into team chat, and the shift key to insert it into public chat. In non-team games, you can use either control or shift. For private chat, you can use either button, just make sure that the private chat window is the only thing open so that the game knows where to put it.

Game creators auto-join

When creating a game, WarLight no longer requires you to manually join your own game. This helps alleviate a point of confusion that’s sometimes felt by new players when they don’t realize they need to explicitly tell WarLight they want to join their own game. It was a bit silly since they already told WarLight that they want themselves in the game on the invite screen.

The exception to this is when players don’t get their color. In this case, WarLight will prompt them for their alternative color right after creating the game, and join them to the game once they select their color.

Start Game button and the Auto-start setting

Also related to the auto-join feature comes two new features: In the game lobby, there’s now a “Start Game” button that’s usable by the game creator, and there’s a new setting at game creation named “automatically start once all players join.”

Up until now, all WarLight games have always automatically started once all players join it and all open seats are filled. Now, game creators can override this behavior, and make the game wait until they click the new Start Game button. This useful for team games where the game creator wants to ensure that the teams are even before starting the game.

The Start Game button can also be used before everyone has joined. This will start the game right away, even if there are non-accepted players or unfilled open seats. Using it in this way isn’t really a new feature, it’s just a shortcut to using the add/remove players button and removing all non-accepted players and all open seats.

Displayed Turn Number

The meaning behind the turn number that’s displayed in the upper-left corner has changed. Previously, this number displayed the number of turns that had passed in the game, not the turn number that was being built. This is a bit counter-intuitive to some players, so it’s being changed to represent the latter.

All this means is that it’s now one higher than before. For example, it will show “Turn 1” when a game first starts, and “Turn 2” once one turn has passed.

Misc Changes

– Added icons to buttons and orders.
– Added a new open prerequisite, “prevent WarLight members from joining”. This is useful for creating free-membership tournaments.
– Minor updates were made to Small Earth, Earth, Medium Earth, Double Earth, and Double Medium Earth maps. No changes affected gameplay, this was just for fixing a few small visual problems and renaming a couple territories and one bonus.

Android Changes

Players running WarLight on their Android devices can install this new version via the usual method.

An anti-aliasing feature was added to the mobile client. This smooths out the map and helps it look better, particularly on low-resolution devices or when zoomed out. This defaults on and at 2x, but it can be turned off or increased to 4x in the settings.

If you try anti-aliasing, please let me know how well it works for you, along with what type of device you’re using. Anti-aliasing requires more memory from your device, so if you encounter any slowdowns from the previous release you can try turning it off in the settings.

Other changes follow:

– When the orders list is extended, the map now centers the action in the center of the visible area instead of the center of the screen.
– The screen now waits 3 seconds to dim after animations stop playing instead of dimming immediately.
– Bonus link numbers are now rendered at a higher resolution
– Added settings for invite list mode and e-mail visibility.

WarLight has just been updated to version 1.14.2! This is a major update to the mobile client and a minor update to the website.

Website Changes

The biggest change everyone will notice are that the deploy/attack/confirmation links have been replaced with icons. I never liked the look of the blue underlined links that used to be there, and introducing icons to represent the three phases is useful for the mobile client since it won’t have enough room to display the words in some places.

Here are all of the other changes made to the website in this update:
– When inserting territory/bonus names into the chat box via the shift/ctrl hotkey, the caret now moves to the end of the line.
– Creating a game from a map’s page now skips the map selection step and goes straight to the customize settings step.
– Adjusted the tense of text that’s displayed in the orders list to be consistent. Future tense while you’re building your turn, and past tense when you’re watching a turn play out.
– When instant surrender is enabled, the player popup no longer shows text about who has accepted their surrender.
– Added a link to the map page from the map previewer.
– Added a scrollbar to the single-player level screen for small resolution screens.
– Added a scrollbar to the map design screen for maps with long descriptions.
– The orders, players, and selection areas of the game screen are no longer transparent. The selection panel is now hidden when nothing is selected.
– Fixed a bug that made the number of teams default to 0 when copying a team game’s settings.
– Fixed a bug that occurred when your internet connection died while trying to load a tournament.
– Fixed a bug that made the attack/transfer dialog default to -1 if you tried to issue an attack from a territory with 0 armies.
– Fixed a bug that caused the following settings to not save in single-player saved games: rounding mode, transfer/attack only, percentage attacks.

Mobile Client

When the mobile client was first announced, it was originally stated to be targeted at phones, with a tablet version coming out later. I’ve since changed my mind on this. I’ve decided to combine the tablet and phone functionality onto one release. Now, both phones and tablets will be supported when the mobile client is done.

The last time that registrations were open for iOS devices, it was only open to iPhones and iPod touches. Now that iPads are officially on the radar, members with iPads are welcome to sign up for the alpha preview via this link (EDIT: Link removed – thanks to everyone who signed up!). If you have an iPhone or iPod touch you’re welcome to sign up too.

This release of the mobile client brings a bunch of improvements for tablets. Notably, the map no longer gets completely obscured by the attack/transfer dialog, and instead it pops up in a small window like the browser version does. Other tablet-related improvements have already been seen in previous releases, such as the orders list being able to co-exist on the map screen instead of being accessed by the menu.

Players running WarLight on their Android devices can install this new version via the usual method.

Here’s the full list of changes in this release:

– Added the ability to view game settings.
– Updated the look to match WarLight’s theme.
– Large-screen devices now have three buttons in the lower-right allowing them to switch between deploy, attack, and confirmation phases.
– The orders list no longer defaults extended on large-screen devices.
– The orders list now shrinks the map down if you open it while zoomed all the way out. This allows tablets to play with the full-screen map with the orders list up.
– While the deployment slider is up, the selected territory is now indicated on the map so it’s easy to remember which territory the slider is affecting.
– Increased the sensitivity of opening the orders list so it shouldn’t happen by accident anymore.
– Maps now scale their army numbers up along with other on-map items and bonus links. Maps default to a 20% scale up, but map creators can control this value and some maps are higher.
– Very large-screen devices now include a back button and the game title on the game screen.
– The settings panel can now change your e-mail address, password and name. You can also activate vacations.
– Fixed a bug that made Vote To End selectable when it shouldn’t have been possible.
– Fixed a bug that caused some maps to have an invisible stroke on some parts of some territories.
– Fixed a bug that made private messages you send not show up on your own screen.
– The hardware menu button can now be used as a substitute to clicking the on-screen Menu button.
– The Back button now works properly for pop-ups.
– The game now works on devices that don’t support gl blend modes.