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.

WarLight has just been updated to version 1.14.1. This was just a tiny update to fix a few bugs.

Here’s what changed:

– Fixed a bug that caused the boot time in real-time games to always be highlighted.
– Fixed a bug that caused the boot time highlights to compare with “less than or equal” when the text says “less than”
– Fixed a bug that caused an error if you typed fractional numbers into some of the highlight boxes.
– Fixed a bug that occurred if you had the same game open in multiple browsers. If you committed orders in browser A, then tried to re-do them in browser B, you’d get an error message.

WarLight has just been upgraded to 1.14.0! This blog post contains a summary of what’s changed.

Game Settings Highlight

The in-game settings panel now has the ability to highlight notable settings. This has been one of the most requested features on the WarLight UserVoice forum: highlight non-standard game settings.

This is useful for multiple reasons. First, it helps reduce the amount of time it take to read and digest the settings of a game by drawing your attention to the settings that you care about the most. Second, it also helps new players who aren’t yet experienced enough with WarLight to know what all of the different settings mean. These players can be alerted to the ones they might want to pay the closest attention to.

For example, this is how the overriden bonuses section might look for a game with a few bonuses overridden:

By default, settings are highlighted if any of the following criteria are met:

• If an overridden bonuses value is raised or lowered by more than 5 armies
• If multi-attack is enabled
• If the sanction card’s percentage is negative
• If offensive or defensive kill rate is non-standard
• If the direct boot or vote-to-boot time is very low
• If vacations are not honored
• If a custom scenario is used
• If the fog level is higher than normal fog
• If the army cap is enabled

Players can change these criteria to suit their own preferences by clicking on the Settings tab at the top, then selecting the Settings Highlight sub-tab.

For example, players who prefer playing in low-luck games can configure the settings panel to highlight the luck modifier anytime it’s higher than they prefer. Just check this box and set your desired threshhold:

If there are any settings that you’d like to highlight that currently aren’t possible, please create an idea for it on the UserVoice forum.

In addition to getting highlight functionality, the layout of the settings panel has also been re-designed to use a scroll-bar.

Prior to this update, the settings panel tried to display all game settings on the screen at once. This worked well when WarLight had fewer settings, but as the number of settings increase it will eventually became very large. The panel was already too big to fit on the screen of players with low-resolution monitors, and it was a frequent complaint as it isn’t immediately obvious how to scroll around when it’s size is larger than your screen. This update added three more settings, the previous update added one, and many more are planned for the future. Clearly, trying to fit all settings onto the screen was not a scalable solution.

This update changes the settings panel to use a scroll-bar, which is a much more nautral way to view the settings than moving a big panel around.

Percentage Attacks

Game creators can now choose whether or not they want to allow issuing attacks by percentage in their game.

Normally when you issue an attack or transfer, you tell WarLight how many armies you want to attack or transfer. Under the advanced pull-down, you can change it to percentage mode, which allows you to specify the percentage of armies you want to attack with.

The primary motivation for originally adding percentage attacks to WarLight was for multi-attack games. For multi-attack games, it is recommended that players allow percentage attacks, but outside of multi-attack games percentage attacks aren’t useful too often.

Attack-Only and Transfer-Only

Game creators can now choose whether or not they want to allow issuing attack-only or transfer-only orders. The primary motivation for allowing these settings to be disabled is to make the game more approachable for new players.

Misc Changes

– Territories now flash when you issue an attack to or from them or play a card on them.
– Increased the length of game and tournament descriptions from 1024 to 2048 characters.
– Swapped the Facebook like button on the home page to the new WarLight Facebook page, at facebook.com/warlight.net
– The forum now recognizes URLs between parenthesis as links. For example, you can now write “WarLight (http://warlight.net) is a great game” and the URL will be clickable.
– On the settings panel, the following settings were moved from the core section to the army section: multi-attack, move order, and fog.
– Added a confirmation to starting a vacation.
– The luck values of attacks are now only shown if the army counts on both the source and destination territories are visible to you.
– The mini-profile popups on the tournament page no longer appear off the bottom of the screen.
– Fixed a bug that made the mousewheel scroll the lower-right players summary too fast.
– Fixed a bug that caused an error if you started to play a card with UI, but entered history or viewing your teammate’s orders before finishing playing the card.