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76

Goko Dominion Online / Re: Misc. things that still bug me about Goko

« on: February 11, 2013, 08:59:19 am »

Once you take into account different languages with different sizes, it's easier to assemble them out of parts. Plus, it makes errors easier to fix - change the part instead of making a new image file.

You know, using the actual image that was used to print the card will probably make errors impossible.

As far as other languages, well, it's just another set of images to store, plus a localization file.

I think this is an optimization point. While I agree that it is more error prone, storing the colored frames once in memory and writing the text dynamically to each copy on screen is the correct way to do this from a programming standpoint.

I think not doing this is what caused a lot of the earlier memory bloat we saw (I don't know, but I had suspected they were loading in all card images for some reason or another).

77

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Iso or Goko?

« on: February 11, 2013, 08:52:43 am »

I bought Dark Ages on Goko.  I don't want to pay for it again IRL.  Someone should mail me some cards.

You're allowed to make your own physical cards, though.

I don't think you are really "allowed" to do that. But no one is going to get on your case about it, either.

By that logic, you're allowed to code your own electronic version of the game and not let anyone know you have it up and running on a private server for free for you and a couple of friends.

78

Goko Dominion Online / Re: Not a Goodbye, but a See You Next Time

« on: February 06, 2013, 01:23:20 pm »

Replacing the front line, eh? Can't say it's unexpected. Not because of anything you did in particular, but more because it seems that Goko is generally mismanaged, and you were obviously the most public representative.

I notice Tanya has not been posting on GS either recently. Related? Looks like JQS was active recently, he oughta try to fade into the shadows if he can.

79

Goko Dominion Online / Re: ratings on Goko

« on: February 06, 2013, 01:20:12 pm »

on goko it is possible to have a negative rating and it will be shown as a rating zero. If you lose a number of games in a row, your rating might become so low, that you are paired against serf bot. serf bots rating is so far below zero, that you will lose rating points even if you win.

So you might have put yourself in a hole there. the only way to get out is to play MULTIPLAYER games. You have to avoid the single player mode, there you will be paired against serf bot given your rating.

Choose any bot except serf bot and win a couple of games in a row, and your rating should shoot up in no time.

here it is in more detail:
https://getsatisfaction.com/goko/topics/my_casual_rating_in_dominion_is_zero_and_hasnt_ever_changed_why

https://getsatisfaction.com/goko/topics/rating_wont_change_despite_how_many_games_i_play_and_win

I wonder how long it would have taken Goko to figure that problem on their own. They obviously haven't fixed it yet. How do they expect new players to figure this out?

80

Dominion General Discussion / Re: A few random tactical questions

« on: February 06, 2013, 09:17:31 am »

2 -
I think if you have a trasher that can trash 3 curses and an Ambassador in your hand at the same time, you've probably already made up your mind by way of deck composition.

Why have that trasher at all if Ambassador would've worked? I think in most situations if your hand is Chapel, Ambassador,  Curse, Curse, Curse then you've already decided to get out of the Ambassador business, so you might as well trash it too.

Unless of course the situation is that you've just played your entire deck and ended up with the chance to remodel (or expand) 3 curses into estates at the end of the game or Ambassador 2, in which case the answer should be obvious.

Maybe I'm wrong though.

81

Goko Dominion Online / Re: UI issue: Ruins and piling out

« on: February 06, 2013, 09:07:08 am »

I agree with this, but I feel compelled to mention that Goko Dominion works great on my 4th gen iPad through Safari and I have yet to have it crash. I'm sure I've played at least 8 to 12 games in a row on it at some point. They've definitely made improvements. But as you say, they do have a ways to go before delivering a professional product.

That's good too hear, but I still see choppiness on a 2nd Gen iPad, and have failures after a few games. It seems like you have to really have a nice setup to get good performance, and I don't see it being a great casual experience if people have to have a nice system, mess with port settings, clear their cookies all the time, etc. just to get things to work. Every so often I feel like I would like to kill a few minutes around lunch at work, but for me to do so on Goko requires me remoting outside our firewall as my (very nice) development PC just does not play well with Goko due to their incompatibility with strong firewalls (infinite hang on login). I've got a twenty+ long email chain with JQS, who seemed to be genuinely interested in solving the problem initially (and I am happy that someone is, because no one else technically minded there has any public visibility as far as I can tell), but I think the problem is outside of his expertise as the last few emails ended up being a canned response - 'Thanks for the info, I'll look into it tonight'. -NOT THAT I'M DOGGING JQS. I'm absolutely sure he has bigger fish to fry.

Overall, it just continues to frustrate me and I do not see an end in sight.

Addendum; @Kirian (posted while I was typing):
They should be able to use the same graphics, resizing can be done on the fly in code.

82

Goko Dominion Online / Re: UI issue: Ruins and piling out

« on: February 05, 2013, 04:37:12 pm »

It's really easy to re-size 2D graphics and change placement of graphics in a 2D plane.

Said like a programmer, not a UI designer. I'm sure it's not technical difficulty that's blocking interface redesign, but the lack of an acceptable design to change to. Keep in mind that it will need to work for tablets too, since Goko as a company ("Goko is games that go anywhere") have locked themselves into using the same interface for all platforms. Shrinking tappable regions is a big no-no on tablets.

Hey now, I did my share of UI work when I was finishing my Game and Simulation programming curriculum. Actually, considering I was one of the few people who understood what was going on, I did 3 or 4 people's share of UI work.

I guess my problem is the whole mentality of wanting to do something that will work on any platform. Build to your target, make sure that environment works properly, then think about the tweaks necessary to port to a new one. Call me old school, but I think I'd rather wait a while for each new platform then have the mess they are in now, where it functions well on some PCs and other users report spotty performance at best, and the best we've heard out of the tablet scene is 'yeah I can get through a game or two'.

I don't mean to keep dumping on Goko, I know I got a rep for being negative, but man, I like things that are done well, and it hasn't really hit my standard yet.

83

Goko Dominion Online / Re: Player order...

« on: February 05, 2013, 04:21:34 pm »

˙(ǝɯıʇ ɹǝʌo uǝǝɹɔs ǝɥʇ ɟo ɯoʇʇoq ǝɥʇ ʇɐ dn dɯnlɔ ʇ,uop ʎǝɥʇ os) ʎluǝʌǝ slǝxıd ǝɥʇ ǝʇnqıɹʇsıpǝɹ oʇ spɐǝɥ ɹıǝɥʇ uo sɹoʇıuoɯ ɹıǝɥʇ puɐʇs oʇ ǝʞıl ɹo 'uʍop-ǝpısdn pɐǝɥ ɹıǝɥʇ ɥʇıʍ ɥɔnoɔ ǝɥʇ ɟɟo uɐǝl ɹǝɥʇıǝ oʞoפ ʎɐld oɥʍ ǝldoǝd ʇsoɯ ʇɐɥʇ pǝʇɔǝdxǝ s,ʇı 'ʎlɹɐǝlƆ

Wait, is there an app for that?

84

Goko Dominion Online / Re: UI issue: Ruins and piling out

« on: February 05, 2013, 04:16:55 pm »

Why not simply put more cards on the first page?

The normal layout, with Platinum and Potion, takes up all of the space except a small band at the top. There's some space that sometimes looks empty, but other times has a text message, a lot of cards in play, a big hand, or your opponents in a multiplayer game. If you want to add more things, you have to give up some of what you've got - shrink stuff, cut stuff off. So I mean, they should put the 11th card on the first page, but "simply" isn't how I would describe it.

Alas, the 11th card problem is something that all but necessitates a complete layout change, which is probably impossible at this point.

I just don't get a good feeling out of the short-sightedness that it takes to build a layout around 10 Kingdom Cards, 3 Victory Cards, 3 Treasure Cards, and Curse; when you know full well to begin with that sometimes there are more cards than that. It's not like Young Witch was announced after Goko implemented all this stuff. Same with Potion, Colony, etc. Maybe they didn't know about Ruins when they started this... but surely they knew it was possible that more piles would be added in the future. I've helped design and implement lots of web-based layouts, and you always have to ask yourself "how is this going to work when we need to add more content to the screen?"

Yeah.  It was impressively short-sighted.  Alas, failing a complete redesign...

I don't get this resignation. It's really easy to re-size 2D graphics and change placement of graphics in a 2D plane. I really fail to see any difficulty in adding in a small amount of shrinkage and adding a 6th kingdom column at the very least. I would do it dynamically if I were on the project, so the cards are bigger when it isn't necessary to have a 6th column.

A 6th column at least allows a Bane and Ruins to be on screen at the same time, which are the really important ones, as they count towards a 3 pile.

All we are talking about is 2D UI manipulation. It's incredibly simple. It's not like we're avoiding gimble lock by using quaternions to do 4 dimensional math in a 3 dimensional workspace transposed to a 2 dimensional surface. This is simple stuff that people solve every day.

85

Goko Dominion Online / Re: UI issue: Ruins and piling out

« on: February 04, 2013, 12:49:41 pm »

See, this, to me, is not a problem.  Whenever there is a second page, the next page button is there, and it instantly attracts my attention.  Now that I'm used to a 2nd page, I almost never forget about what's over there.

To me, the BIG UI issue is that I'm so trained to hit "play treasures" during my Buy phase, so that when my entire hand is Fool's Golds, I automatically hit "end turn" since that's the only button there.  I mean, honestly - would you ever have a reason not to play Fool's Gold?  At the very least, put in an iso-style "are you SURE you want to end your turn?" warning when you do something like that.

Certainly there are worse issues, but I don't see that as a reason to be complacent with a poor layout.

86

Goko Dominion Online / Re: Goko game speed

« on: February 01, 2013, 10:28:35 pm »

With 2 players, if you count how many Provinces you have, you can figure out how many they have.

My problem comes when I see green, but don't notice the numbers change. Then I have to figure out if something bad just happened, open the log, figure out what that green flash was, then I lose my flow.

87

Goko Dominion Online / Re: Goko game speed

« on: February 01, 2013, 02:57:56 pm »

My biggest problem with the speed is that either the important things are not slow enough when playing at the only acceptable speed (very fast) or the lack of perma-log.

If they are set in their ways that the log has to be pulled up and down and cannot be open all the time or integrated like a normal person would expect, then the amount of time cards pause as they are gained/trashed/etc when they are magnified needs a floor, no matter what speed you play at (like the Ascension app).

Sometime you see a green flash at the end of an opponents turn, check the numbers of the piles and realize you've just lost count of the VPs somehow and have no idea what was bought despite having a firm grasp on it a few seconds ago.

88

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Random city question

« on: January 30, 2013, 01:23:59 pm »

55/54.  Seems like the guys from the neutral response have hijacked this voting...

Edit: 55/55. balance restored

I didn't even know this was a thing. Memes change faster than a woman's fancy.

Well, then early indications were that 1/2/3 was out ahead, but by a small amount IIRC (3/4 votes most of the time. I saw it at a +6 I think at one point). I think post-wise 1/2/3 came out ahead too, so that is probably the majority.

89

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Random city question

« on: January 30, 2013, 11:45:24 am »

...

This has too much burden of knowledge.

That's what the FAQ is for.

You can't expect people to go to the FAQ just because some people are spelling poorly and capitalizing letters in the middle of words. This is the Internet! There needs to be some indication that there is a pattern or signal embedded in the text. Otherwise, it just looks like a string of typos.

Maybe my sarcasm meter is off. Wasn't carstimon's post in jest?

90

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Random city question

« on: January 30, 2013, 11:23:38 am »

The tricky thing is that actively engineering language is hard.  Perhaps this is what pinkymadigan was alluding to with his Newspeak reference.

Nah, it was just some mild referential humor.

91

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Random city question

« on: January 30, 2013, 11:19:19 am »

Your pluses idea seems like the only reasonable, serious idea suggested so far -- aside from explicitly referencing piles, which is clunky.

One thing about City/City+/City++ though, is that they don't feel mutually exclusive to me.  That is, the term City could refer to City regardless of the number of piles, and City+ to me suggests that at least one pile is empty, rather than exactly one.  But then, this is a feature as much as it is a bug.  Most of the time if we mention City+, it's really just enough to mean that at least one pile is empty.

Ah you're right, we need more sophisticated terminology.

How about basing it off what letters are capitalized?
city = the card in general.
City = zero piles.  CiTy = one pile.  CiTY = 2 piles.
Then we can use the "i" to mean "at least" e.g.
CIty = zero, one, or two piles.  CITy = one or two piles.
Since this scheme doesn't work so well with the plural "cities" we should just spell it "citys"

For example:
One of the best strategies in the game is to just buy citys.  Start by buying some silvers or other $3/$4s which will give you money like monument.  Once you buy enough of these you will be able to hit $5 pretty consistently. Since CIty is a village you can be extremely liberal in buying $3/$4 terminals.  But make sure you spend your $5 on citys!  If your opponent is silly enough to ignore this strategy in 14 turns or so you should have 10 CiTys.  At this point you should try to empty another pile (it helps to have some +buy beside CiTY) so that you have CiTYs.  Once you have 10 CiTYs you basically just win the game by buying all of the provinces.

This method is obviously the most precise.

You win, obviously.

92

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Random city question

« on: January 30, 2013, 10:48:07 am »

Your pluses idea seems like the only reasonable, serious idea suggested so far -- aside from explicitly referencing piles, which is clunky.

One thing about City/City+/City++ though, is that they don't feel mutually exclusive to me.  That is, the term City could refer to City regardless of the number of piles, and City+ to me suggests that at least one pile is empty, rather than exactly one.  But then, this is a feature as much as it is a bug.  Most of the time if we mention City+, it's really just enough to mean that at least one pile is empty.

Okay, just reviewed the thread again, I remembered more serious suggestions than there actually were.

I thought the roman numerals suggestion was okay as well (City I/City II/City III); though I can still see 'City/City I/City II' being used, it is a step in the right direction.

Also, the explicit suggestion of 0-Pile City/1-Pile City /2-Pile City is about as unambiguous as it gets.

93

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Random city question

« on: January 30, 2013, 10:20:02 am »

I think the amount of debate, the results of the voting, and previous confusion by some surely indicates there is reason to abandon the 'level' terminology altogether. Even if everyone likes the ideas of levels the best, going with terms that are so obviously ambiguously interpreted seems like a bad idea.

Someone with more initiative than me should put together a list of serious alternatives.

@theory: Thanks, I think it is swell too.

94

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Random city question

« on: January 30, 2013, 09:29:19 am »

City
City+
City++

...or 1984 style:
City
Plus Good City
Double Plus Good City

95

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Random city question

« on: January 29, 2013, 10:26:10 am »

And at least 25 people who interact with the real world have voted as well .

Yeah, but we run your real world.

96

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Random city question

« on: January 29, 2013, 08:46:21 am »

So far, at least 23 programmers have voted.

97

Goko Dominion Online / Re: Harem

« on: January 28, 2013, 04:43:34 pm »

No, there's a topic on GS, and Tanya has said it was just a text error, and will be fixed next update. It's fixed in the private beta, just checked.

I'm so confused as to why they would make the decision to hand code the text and not have it driven by a type tied to the card.

98

Goko Dominion Online / Re: Possession in one-player games -- Important?

« on: January 25, 2013, 01:30:48 pm »

I'm not contesting it does nothing, I'm contesting that the word loses any real value, as people have to figure out whether you are using literal in a literal manner or a figurative one to understand what you are saying. Literally.

It's almost always very obvious from context. For example, I could not possibly have actually eaten a million hamburgers. It's too many hamburgers.

Maybe often, I'm not quite sure that it's 'almost always' though. I hear it used when people are only slightly exaggerating as well, or when they mean 'approximately'.

99

Goko Dominion Online / Re: Possession in one-player games -- Important?

« on: January 25, 2013, 01:23:07 pm »

And the word doesn't mean nothing there. Like a second "very," it's not doing a lot of work, but it's doing something. Varying that input changes your output.

I'm not contesting it does nothing, I'm saying that the word loses any real value, as people have to figure out whether you are using literal in a literal manner or a figurative one to understand what you are saying. Literally.

100

Goko Dominion Online / Re: Possession in one-player games -- Important?

« on: January 25, 2013, 01:12:27 pm »

It's amusing that the trend with "literally" is actually the opposite direction everyone thinks it is.  It's been used to mean "figuratively" since the 18th century, but that usage is becoming less and less accepted... not more and more accepted!

I am not sure why this is unclear, but no-one uses "literally" to mean "figuratively." "I figuratively ate a million hamburgers." No, no-one ever says anything like that, not even with the word "figuratively." "Literally" is used to exaggerate; "figuratively" is not. There is no plain word-substitution going on here.

Meanwhile, I suspect there is both a slim chance and a fat chance of all of us in this thread agreeing on these usages.  I personally dislike the use of these words to mean their opposites, not because it's wrong, but because most people don't understand that the ironic usage is ironic.

When someone says, "I literally ate a million hamburgers," no-one is confused. They're not being ironic there either; they're exaggerating.

But the hyperbole makes it a figurative comment. Figurative speech is generally considered the opposite of literal speech. Since they are not being literal, they are being figurative. Since they are saying they are being literal, while being figurative, it makes the word mean nothing.

It ruins the word.