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[michaeljb]

Pawn.  I have to pick 2 of 4 options with tiny check boxes.  If the options I could pick were the same size as the cards in my hand, this would be easier and faster to select.

At first I was like, "They are the same size, what is this guy talking about?"

And then I was like, "Oh yeah, people use the image interface, not the text one."

King's court.  I need to pick a card to play 3 times.  Why not just let me click on the hand cards?

I imagine this one is because it was simply easier for dougz to program it this way.

[Insomniac]

I was definetly talking about things in the interface, it doesn't count as slowing you down if its strategy related as thats a problem you have with the game (WHY is having decisions ever a bad thing?)

[werothegreat]

Might you be referring to newbs who insist on revealing Moat until isotropic starts yelling at them?

[Turambar]

Like some others I also have an issue with animations, if there is no option for both turning animations off and only playing against other players without animations, I don't think I'll bother trying it. Even many Isotropic games are too slow for my liking.

Donald X has already stated that the animation speeds shown are medium, and that there is a fast setting as well and the fast is pretty comparable. He also mentioned that he hopes that their is the ability to pair based on it for quickmatches because well if the other person is still watching you play a card then your effectively on medium.

Isotropic is too slow? How? Isotropic does the BARE MINIMUM it straight resolves actions theres no animation.

I never said that Isotropic was slow, i said that some games played at Isotropic are slow. That happens for two reasons:

1. Slow cards, for instance pawn, hamlet and scrying pool (I often veto scrying pool just because I cannot stand the 3-min turns).

2. Slow players, and I'm not talking about thinking what to buy the first rounds (or the occasional break for thinking later), but when you take ages both playing actions and buying every round you are too slow for my liking.

[Schlippy]

Animation speed will be an option somewhere. For me personally, as they have it now, at "fast" it's good, at "very fast" it's too fast, and at "normal" it's too slow. The only thing here is, whatever you have it set to, in a game with humans, you're limited to the slowest player - it doesn't matter how fast it shows the animation for you if they aren't doing anything because they're waiting for theirs to finish. So ideally this will be a criteria for matching people up or something. Anyway yes, they have "nice" animations, it was an issue for me too, and they added faster ones.

I am sure the vast majority of higher tier players would embrace an option to completely turn off animations.

[Kirian]

Animation speed will be an option somewhere. For me personally, as they have it now, at "fast" it's good, at "very fast" it's too fast, and at "normal" it's too slow. The only thing here is, whatever you have it set to, in a game with humans, you're limited to the slowest player - it doesn't matter how fast it shows the animation for you if they aren't doing anything because they're waiting for theirs to finish. So ideally this will be a criteria for matching people up or something. Anyway yes, they have "nice" animations, it was an issue for me too, and they added faster ones.

I am sure the vast majority of higher tier players would embrace an option to completely turn off animations.

Or middle tier players even.  Animations are great for graphics-based real-time games; I wouldn't want to play, say, Diablo 3 without animations telling me what's happening.  But when I play, for instance, Civ, I usually turn animations off, as they're not useful to the game.

Also, if the animation at any speed is any slower than my physically playing a card (as they are on BSW), that's just plain ridiculous.  It takes me significantly less than half a second for my card to go from my hand to the table... I should expect a computer animation to be even faster.

[Fabian]

This talk of animation kinda scares me because it tells me the developers are making a product nothing like isotropic (and yes isotropic is hard to beat) and definitely not anything like what I want out of a dominion game. I mean yeah don't judge until you try it bla bla, but who actually thinks anyone wants "animations" when playing Dominion? bleh

It makes me think of animations in poker clients, which was awesome for the first 3 days of my 6 years of playing. After that I obviously turned it off and didn't think twice about it since it's awful, except here you supposedly can't turn it off?

[Grujah]

I think we all agree that we want it very fast; either super fast animations or no animations at all.

This is not just Dom, but any card game that is transferred to virtual play. I know when I played Yu-Gi-Oh on PC, damn was I happy when I saw you can run it with -speedy argument to speed all animations up significantly (unfortunately, all the talking that your opponent done - while animation was sped up, the sound wasn't - was PAINFUL). Iso handled it great with simple, clear, generally fast interface (few bumps).

[ftl]

Well, yeah, they're making a computer game. Most games out there have some visual flair, not surprised that Funsockets Dominion will too. Honestly, making it look prettier than iso is one of the things I definitely *expected* out of it. And if "animation speed will be an option somewhere", then you can just set that on high and have it be as fast as no animation at all.

Lack of logs, well, that would be a problem, definitely. But animations aren't a problem IMO.

[Donald X.]

This talk of animation kinda scares me because it tells me the developers are making a product nothing like isotropic (and yes isotropic is hard to beat) and definitely not anything like what I want out of a dominion game. I mean yeah don't judge until you try it bla bla, but who actually thinks anyone wants "animations" when playing Dominion? bleh

What you should for sure not judge until you try it, is something that I have already said flat out will be fine.

[Fabian]

Are you saying that because you say it will be fine, everyone will think it's fine? I must be misunderstanding or something.

Anyway yeah, I hope I'm wrong.

[DStu]

Are you saying that because you say it will be fine, everyone will think it's fine? I must be misunderstanding or something.

Anyway yeah, I hope I'm wrong.

I think he says that if there is a option he feels is fast enough, and even one that is faster than he likes, maybe you should worry about something else? (LOGS!!!!!!!11111elf).

Anyway, I remember having read costumizable AI, so I won't complain on anything until I see it.

[kn1tt3r]

As I said before, things like speed and animations are always issues for compromises, because experienced players will always have other wishes and demands than the common casual player. And such a product is of course made for the big market and not just for a group of online Dominion geeks like us. Keeping that in mind, the mentioned options to set up your speed preferences, are as close to the best compromise as you can get, and I'm quite pleased with the solution.

[Donald X.]

Are you saying that because you say it will be fine, everyone will think it's fine? I must be misunderstanding or something.

Anyway yeah, I hope I'm wrong.

Someone said, I am paraphrasing, "I am worried about animations."

And I said, "I know what you mean but it will totally be fine, I have seen to it."

And you said "oh now I'm worried about the animations."

Makes no sense.

[Fabian]

I'm glad you find the animations sufficiently fast and think they'll be fine, but I don't understand why that means I will agree. Different people have different tastes, and nothing you have written makes me think that "disabling animations" is a bad idea any more than I thought an hour ago, just like I think it would be a horrible idea to not have a "disabling animations" option for poker clients or Magic Online or whatever.

[Donald X.]

I'm glad you find the animations sufficiently fast and think they'll be fine, but I don't understand why that means I will agree. Different people have different tastes, and nothing you have written makes me think that "disabling animations" is a bad idea any more than I thought an hour ago, just like I think it would be a horrible idea to not have a "disabling animations" option for poker clients or Magic Online or whatever.

Why does "someone who can get stuff done cares about this issue" *increase* your amount of worry?

You can't completely disable animations without adding an in-game log, because some of those animations convey information about what's happening in the game, e.g. what card your opponent gains with Workshop. But you don't need an in-game log as long as you have time to see that card.

[Fabian]

I haven't said it increases my amount of worry. I learned about it a few minutes before I made my first post, then following your latest couple posts I guess the amount I worry has either stayed the same or decreased slightly.

Well, until this latest post, which I guess does increase the amount I worry. The only way of finding out what an opponent gains with Workshop being to follow the action at all times or risk missing it sounds like a really bad decision which I hope is reconsidered before launch. I'm glad you're reading this and other feedback and (obviously) care about the quality of the program though, so I'm definitely still hoping for the best.

[kn1tt3r]

I haven't said it increases my amount of worry. I learned about it a few minutes before I made my first post, then following your latest couple posts I guess the amount I worry has either stayed the same or decreased slightly.

Well, until this latest post, which I guess does increase the amount I worry. The only way of finding out what an opponent gains with Workshop being to follow the action at all times or risk missing it sounds like a really bad decision which I hope is reconsidered before launch. I'm glad you're reading this and other feedback and (obviously) care about the quality of the program though, so I'm definitely still hoping for the best.

I think what the game tries to do is to be as close as possible to real life play. And there you don't have logs, and you've got to pay attention to what your opponents do in real time.

Probably we all should try to get rid of the thought the official version will be anything like isotropic. It version will probably rather be something like the BSW thing, but with all (or most) of its disadvantages eliminated.

[ftl]

Maybe even if we don't have logs, we can get replays? Like, some way of saving the game and then uploading it so someone else with the app can watch it. That would at least work for discussing existing games, though not for parsing them for councilroom stats.

[Geronimoo]

I think the developers have other things on their mind than adding logs. This app has the potential to be downloaded Xmillion times. We isotropic players probably make up less than 1% of the target audience. The more casual players will be happiest if they get to play their Village, have it slide into the play area, have a cool sound effect of a bunch of Villagers shouting, play their Smithy (with the sliding and the sound effect of a hammer hitting metal) and do it all over again. I'd even encourage them NOT to work on some of the stuff we suggest and instead try to make the most succesful product. That way they'll have all the budget they want to add all the features isotropic users would like to see.

[Donald X.]

Maybe even if we don't have logs, we can get replays? Like, some way of saving the game and then uploading it so someone else with the app can watch it. That would at least work for discussing existing games, though not for parsing them for councilroom stats.

They plan to have game logs in a machine-readable format. There just isn't an in-game log. Replaying games sounds nice but I do not expect it to start with such a feature.

[Grujah]

Actually that's fine if we can also get those logs, than somebody can make a (web) reader of those logs, easy-peasy.

[DStu]

Actually that's fine if we can also get those logs, than somebody can make a (web) reader of those logs, easy-peasy.

I would even expect that they have one themselves. Not much point in making some sequence of zeros and ones public without a method to read them.
I read this announcement (or plan) as that the logs are ALSO machine readable, like some XML or JSON or whatever, in contrast to isotropic where you have to parse the text to get it into the database.

[Donald X.]

I would even expect that they have one themselves. Not much point in making some sequence of zeros and ones public without a method to read them.
I read this announcement (or plan) as that the logs are ALSO machine readable, like some XML or JSON or whatever, in contrast to isotropic where you have to parse the text to get it into the database.

No my best guess is it will be text. They considered trying to match the isotropic logs.

[WanderingWinder]

Why does "someone who can get stuff done cares about this issue" *increase* your amount of worry?

That Donald can get stuff done makes me feel a lot better. It was definitely NOT a given, and as far as I'm aware, he fits into that category of 'high-level players'. And just seems to have pretty good sense about the game and what's important. So, eh, it won't be perfect I'm sure. But still, I'm cautiously optimistic.