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[SCSN]

Overhauled speed settings: [...] made pause times that show important information longer

I'm delighted that MF not only decides what information I should deem important, but also how long I should pause to take it in.

[markusin]

Overhauled speed settings: [...] made pause times that show important information longer

I'm delighted that MF not only decides what information I should deem important, but also how long I should pause to take it in.

It's a feature, not a bug.

But seriously, whyyyy?

[Chris is me]

On the bright side, I'm really glad they've fixed the issue with widescreen games with the log visible making the cards super tiny, and they're making small improvements to the original interface (pirate ship showing how much $ you have, chat alerts, timeout alerts!!!, etc).

Overhauled speed settings: [...] made pause times that show important information longer

I'm delighted that MF not only decides what information I should deem important, but also how long I should pause to take it in.

It's pretty clear from the linked thread on the MF forums that it was not intentional to add this huge pause every card. Just unfortunate how it lined up with the wording.

[XerxesPraelor]

Whoa, the previous version was fast enough for me most of the time (still the delay is sometimes annoying) but this version is really slow.

[Elanchana]

I'm glad that Jeff at least realized "aw crap, we made it TOO slow."

[Aleimon Thimble]

Whoa, the previous version was fast enough for me most of the time (still the delay is sometimes annoying) but this version is really slow.

Agree. It's INCREDIBLY annoying to the point I don't even want to play anymore. Every single fucking move lags and twitches like crazy. This is the first version of any Dominion program I actually hate, and I've seen people get outraged about all sorts of stuff in the last couple of months where I just thought 'meh'.

[LastFootnote]

I have not played the new version, but how in the world did they screw this up? I mean Unity can be used to make action games. How is it that card animations are so impossible to make work?

[Witherweaver]

Feature request: text-based version of Dominion Online.

[Chris is me]

I have not played the new version, but how in the world did they screw this up? I mean Unity can be used to make action games. How is it that card animations are so impossible to make work?

Honesty I gave it a try this morning, maybe I was just tired but on max speed I wasn't really waiting around all that much. Then again, I kept getting matched with the same person who would randomly resign on Turn 4, so maybe I missed the worst of it.

Sounds like it's an easy fix though, just changing some delay length variable, I'm sure it won't take long.

[Hugovj]

I actually don't seem to have this problem (or I don't notice). I do have it on the fastest speed though, and I usually get an epileptic attack after that, so the fact that isn't happening might be an indicator

[Ampharos]

It's a good bit slower, true, but I'm not experiencing the lag either.   Full speed, as other have said, makes it a good speed. 

[jsh357]

Another new version today:
http://forum.makingfun.com/showthread.php?7854-Release-Notes-v-2-0-42

Edit: I just played two fast games. Pleased with it! The game moves at an acceptable pace at the highest setting and even cards like Hunting Party are pretty quick to play. I would love them to move the End Turn button like Salvager has it, but that's minor I guess. Overheating still an issue for me.

UPDATE 10/9/15

There's a new version 2.0.42.1, which increases the top speed again. I actually changed the slider to increase speed exponentially rather than linearly, so that a good speed for casual users is still somewhere in the middle.

The acceleration profile has also changed in this version, putting it in somewhere in between the original v2 profile (which some people felt was more responsive, while others thought was jerky) and the original Goko one. Now there is an acceleration/deceleration of travelling cards, but it is mild.

Note that observations about the card animation not being smooth sounds like it has something to do with all the card speed changes, but it's actually completely unrelated. This is us playing with the frame rate, which brings down the CPU use and laptop overheating, as users have also observed. In .42 it was capped very conservatively to see how that would work out. Starting next week, our main focus for these native builds will be trying to find better ways to address the CPU problem.

[Kirian]

Have they made this self-updating yet?

[SCSN]

So far I've figured out how to make things worse:

[Cave-o-sapien]

We've reached the 4th versioning segment. Shit just got real.

[-Stef-]

Have they made this self-updating yet?

They will do that as soon as they stop releasing new updates.

[SCSN]

Does anyone here have experience with reverse engineering? I'd like to create a patch that completely removes all the animated horsecrap, but I'm not very experienced with this stuff.

The first thing I've done is use AssetBundleExtractor to load and browse through the .assets files, and more or less randomly remove entries with such evil sounding names as "Bloom", "Fire 1", "Fire 2" (as if one wasn't depressing enough), "DefaultParticles", etc. Just to see what happens. An example: the "Fire 1" entry in the file "sharedassets2.assets" seems related to that idiotic OnAboutToTrash fire that consumes your cards whenever you play a trasher. Removing the entry or doing as much as editing its values (which is quite a cumbersome procedure: you need to dump the data to a text-file, edit it there, remove the entry in the program, then import the text-file), however, turns the already dreadful fire into an even more dreadful purple mess (see the screenshot above). Because I suspect the animations are generated at runtime anyway, I doubt that simply patching the .assets files is the answer.

My next attempt was to load the .dll and .exe files into various .NET decompilers. The standard Unity .dll files decompiled splendidly, but they only contain standard Unity functions, the altering of which would be of little help. Dominion.exe, on the other hand, is apparently not a valid .NET assembly file, even though it's listed as using .NET 4.6, which either means my tools are lying to me or MF have used some sort of obfuscator.

The next step was to load Dominion.exe into everyone's favorite IDA Pro and try to find and remove the animation calls from the assembly code, but as it turns out, assembly isn't quite my mother tongue. Any help here would be greatly appreciated.

Another option might be to inject code at runtime that fills the memory locations of those malicious movies with transparent bliss. However, while I do know how to locate and change numerical data and strings, I'm not sure how to do the same with graphical information, even without the additional difficulties of possible GPU acceleration.

As an absolute last resort I could re-iterate my request to MF for an option to simply turn all this horrible nonsense off, but yeah... dream on.

[drsteelhammer]

That's some dedication right here. Have you tried playing with a blindfold yet? It makes the animation 95% less annoying.

[Witherweaver]

Does anyone here have experience with reverse engineering? I'd like to create a patch that completely removes all the animated horsecrap, but I'm not very experienced with this stuff.

The first thing I've done is use AssetBundleExtractor to load and browse through the .assets files, and more or less randomly remove entries with such evil sounding names as "Bloom", "Fire 1", "Fire 2" (as if one wasn't depressing enough), "DefaultParticles", etc. Just to see what happens. An example: the "Fire 1" entry in the file "sharedassets2.assets" seems related to that idiotic OnAboutToTrash fire that consumes your cards whenever you play a trasher. Removing the entry or doing as much as editing its values (which is quite a cumbersome procedure: you need to dump the data to a text-file, edit it there, remove the entry in the program, then import the text-file), however, turns the already dreadful fire into an even more dreadful purple mess (see the screenshot above). Because I suspect the animations are generated at runtime anyway, I doubt that simply patching the .assets files is the answer.

My next attempt was to load the .dll and .exe files into various .NET decompilers. The standard Unity .dll files decompiled splendidly, but they only contain standard Unity functions, the altering of which would be of little help. Dominion.exe, on the other hand, is apparently not a valid .NET assembly file, even though it's listed as using .NET 4.6, which either means my tools are lying to me or MF have used some sort of obfuscator.

The next step was to load Dominion.exe into everyone's favorite IDA Pro and try to find and remove the animation calls from the assembly code, but as it turns out, assembly isn't quite my mother tongue. Any help here would be greatly appreciated.

Another option might be to inject code at runtime that fills the memory locations of those malicious movies with transparent bliss. However, while I do know how to locate and change numerical data and strings, I'm not sure how to do the same with graphical information, even without the additional difficulties of possible GPU acceleration.

As an absolute last resort I could re-iterate my request to MF for an option to simply turn all this horrible nonsense off, but yeah... dream on.

Maybe we could just copy the cards and print them out on paper or card stock, and then play in person and keep track of the game state by hand.  You'd have to shuffle, sure, and maybe you'd need to use some coins or bottle caps for tokens.  But maybe. just maybe, it would work.

Heck, if someone decided to print these out to production quality, I'd probably be willing to pay money for it.

Eh, it's a pipe dream.

[AdamH]

Does anyone here have experience with reverse engineering? I'd like to create a patch that completely removes all the animated horsecrap, but I'm not very experienced with this stuff.

I have experience with RE. If something like what you were doing was even possible, it might be illegal. It would also likely not work if the software was updated, which is frequently happening. I'm actually pretty decent at disassembly forensics but I'm not willing to help with this.

Also, if you talk to them like reasonable people they actually listen to you and incorporate your feedback, but I guess most of us have already burned that bridge. Sure, it takes a while, but they haven't shut down Goko yet. I won't be mad until that happens.

[SCSN]

For US citizens its legality depends on whether the license agreement expressly forbids it; for EU citizens it's legal regardless of what that thing says (as long as the software was legally obtained). I've talked to them during the private Beta phase; my request for an option to turn all the nonsense off is still on a list somewhere, so maybe something comes from it some day, who knows.

In the meantime I've managed to create a proof-of-concept. This soft white glow replaces the abhorrent green nonsense:



#FuckYeah

[jsh357]

Can you replace the white with transparent? (Not sure how the colors work in the game code) If you can, that might be useful on a range of animations.

[SCSN]

In principle you can do whatever you want, it's just a matter of figuring out how.

Unfortunately the how is quite non-trivial when you're forced to use CIL instead of C#. But be assured that getting rid of the annoying animations is high on my list, and I might well get to it before MF does.

[Chris is me]

Honestly, now that I've downloaded the speed patch, I really don't have any problems with the MF beta. The animations are a little flashy but the useless ones are pretty ignorable, and you're never waiting around for them at max speed. I think it's either the same or slightly faster than Very Fast on the old client. Give it a try.

[Awaclus]

The biggest problem by far is that you can get forced into games without the VP counter.