Lobby and ShoppaMap suggestions
Suggestion #1:
Implement an extra column in the lobby for "Game Mode", so you could easily see what game mode the room has set.
I have no idea why it isn't there already, when there is a Weapons and Rules column. It doesn't seem too hard to implement I guess, and it would be really handy.
Suggestion #2:
Changes to the ShoppaMap script. The way it's done now it's a game mode, the script itself works fine, but it has 2 downsides that way:
- You can't see map before playing, so you can't really choose the map lay-out.
- You can't play other modes on a ShoppaMap, like Racer for example.
I don't know if it's possible, or if it is easy to do or not, but this way it would be better and resolve those 2 problems.
Option 1: when selected "Random generated" as map type, you can see map size options (large, small, cavern,...). Maybe put an extra option there called "ShoppaMap"?
Option 2: put an extra option called "Random ShoppaMap" or something in the "Map type" item. You could also then put maybe options for sizes in the "Map size" box.
With those 2 options you could see the map before playing, and also pick an other mode to play on that map (e.g. Racer). I think option 2 would be the best way to implement it, that way you could optionally also choose the map size.
Shoppa map generation would have to be migrated into the game engine for that to work.
Right now it is Lua.
That being said, making a "shoppa map" racer would be trivially simple. Just take the racer script, copy it to ShoppaMap_Racer.lua
then copy in all the shoppa map contents into this new file.
They both use onGameInit, but for different stuff, so you can just copy the shoppamap ongameinit contents into the racer one.
--
Oh, what the heck. 1PLXzL1CBUD1kdEWqMrwNUfGrGiirV1WpH <= tip a hedgewars dev
Yeah, I agree with both of Stef's suggestions because, well, they're both things I've suggested myself before. :P
As nemo points out, merger of ShoppaMap + other scripts is pretty easy, and I think there is already a merger of WxW and ShoppaMap floating somewhere around my dropbox. Buut, yeah, not really ideal.
For most purposes, terrain generation is something that ideally should be taking place (and thus be viewable in) in frontend, but it is still cool to be able to paint in lua I suppose. It'd also be really painless to abstract tunnels, shoppamap to the scripts folder and have them be used as part of a terrain gen library.
I've also suggested this before (and it could work as a compromise) but, it would be nice to have a greater utilization of the .cfg files that are generally included with scripts. Frontend already talks to the cfg files to read in suggested scheme/weapons. All I propose is that frontend reads an additional field from the cfg and passes this to lua's onGameInit() as a custom attribute. This would allow a wide variety of applications, because then in frontend we could see for example "Flags to Capture": 2, or "Special Terrain": "Shoppa Map".
mikade
Hedgewars Developer
Thanks for the suggestion nemo, I'll make it then. But as mikade already said it isn't ideal, and everybody has to have the script in order to play ofc. But well, it's a (temporary) workaround I guess.
If a 'Game Mode' column is added to the lobby it would also be handy to have a filter for that, and maybe also a checkbox to reverse the filter(s). That way you could for example filter all the Highlander rooms out. :P (sheepluva gave me that idea)
Stef, if you'd like others to have the script, package it up and I'll toss it on DLC.
--
Oh, what the heck. 1PLXzL1CBUD1kdEWqMrwNUfGrGiirV1WpH <= tip a hedgewars dev
Can you maybe give me some more info on how to make it? I tried, but it doesn't really work. Well, it runs, but definitely not the way I wanted.
Hey. Um. Sure. Stop by IRC, but don't quite quite so quickly next time?
(I got back to computer to check the channel about 5 minutes after you'd left)
--
Oh, what the heck. 1PLXzL1CBUD1kdEWqMrwNUfGrGiirV1WpH <= tip a hedgewars dev