Combat Assists And Other Tweaks

It's been a very busy real-life period with a good few things taking place here that have kept me from spending much time on the game, but one of those wrapped up over the weekend, and I now have some time again to spend.

So, one of the last things (there are a few more) things that was on the to-do list before I can do the open testing launch was finally fixing up the Combat-Assist function that's been sitting there for goodness knows how long, and not actually doing anything properly.

It's not perfect, but it's there and working. 

Characters can choose to (instead of an attack or ability) help protect one of their colleagues by offering them protection. To do this, they must be beside the other character and it will use up a standard activation. But, the character they are protecting will gain a good bit of defense and some armor due to the aid provided. Additionally, multiple characters can do this and the effects stack. So, if you're in a situation with a very difficult encounter, protecting your tank may be really important at the right times.

And... so far.... it seems (I almost don't want to say it aloud) that the concurrency crashes are at bay. Fingers crossed that doesn't change. 

Potential Solve for Thread Crashing Bug

So, I've had this bug, that very rarely shows up, but it's always happening on one particular line of code. And it's a concurrency issue, where two things to try do something at the same time - and basically bad thing happen.

The interesting thing, is that, I swear, according to just about all the documentation that I can find, this should not be happening. I've protected the property in the required special locks and synchronizations that it shouldn't be possible for two things to hit it at the same time, yet... here we are, saying that they do. Anyhow, I've changed that bit of code, hopefully enough so that it won't happen. Annoyingly, it is almost entirely invisible on the emulator (guessing it's running too quickly to really hit these concurrency snags) so I'll run about on the phone later tonight and see if I can randomly get it to crash for no apparent reason.

Other than that, I've been noticing that my traffic here is growing and growing. I did notice though, that traffic through to the new base domain tornrealms.com has not materially changed. Which leads me to question, whether the traffic here is real, or whether it's all just AI bots training their LLMs. I'm hoping that at least some of it is real - but to test this out, I've switched a few things over in cloudflare to see if blocking bots causes my traffic to nosedive.

So, lets see in a few days if we're all real, or if we're just helping to slosh that AI slop about. 

UX Interface Updates, Tweaks and Improvements

Today I've spent the majority of the day working with the android native navigation bars, working out when it's right to show, when it is better that it's hidden - and how, and all manner of really boring stuff like that. But important boring stuff. Oh, and I got a good bunch more work done on the settings popups.

So, to summarize, the app now has settings for left and right handed users and shifts the interface to suit nicely. Yay.

The main game screen now slides the interface in and out as needed and otherwise hides the android UI as it's not needed (more than it used to already).

I've started working on sub-game screens to hide and improve the UI. So for example, there's no more android UI in the character creation screens, so (even in some rare instances) the UI cannot now overlay the game buttons making life difficult.

There's a bunch of other small tweaks, like making an "Are you sure?" type setup on when back buttons are pressed when shown, so overall, it's starting to feel a lot cleaner and more polished.

The bad news is, out little concurrency crash hasn't had any love. It's still there, lurking in the depths of the app. 

 

Bugs a Smashin!

So, it's been a pretty productive couple of days indeed. I've corrected the dialogue for Joe, and that's working as it should. The fix for the app to remember text size changes between orientations was relatively quick and painless.

I thought I fixed the concurrency crashes, but alas, I have not yet fixed that little gem.

And finally, the biggest section I've been working on is bringing the interface up to where it should be. I've had the android navigation buttons sitting on the bottom of the screen, and never really thought about them. And the "back" button was quite useful in a good number of places. And then of course, it turns out that sometimes, those buttons on a real device will overlap the game interface.

So, when I started really looking and thinking about it, I had to remove that navigation bar, and then.... and then.... what exactly? Well, a few things it turns out. So I have implemented a gesture thingy that will catch when you swipe on the main game screen, and depending on how you do it, it will slide certain menus onto the screen. That's also a great way to have even more of the screen for the game. But I've also implemented some interface buttons and actions that will replace the back-navigation-function. I should have done it from the start, but I'm catching up now.

The gesture recognition allows quite a few more interface things later on too, which will be great. Hopefully tomorrow I'll be through a bunch more of this UI/UX stuff.

Handful of New Bugs

I made a call this evening to a mate of mine who is great at sniffing out things that I notice, then forget about. And He's really good at reminding me that when I just forget about them, they don't actually go away. So. We discussed a few things.

I need to retain text size settings when I change the rotation of the device. That should be nice and easy.

There's a damned crash linked to a concurrency issue. I know it's there. I don't really know how to fix it. It seems to have been fixed for all the OTHER things. Just not this one. Give me patience!!!

Joe, one of the NPCs was offering a quest too early, in that I know he shouldn't offer that quest until later, and he was... I wasn't sure if there was a bug in the app, or if the conversation dialogue had an issue. Turns out it was the conversation dialogue. So that's fixed!

And lastly, on his device, the android buttons are overlaying interface buttons. I need to have a proper look at that and fix it.

And so here we are. I've some work to do!
 

Game Site Coming Along Slowly

I've been pretty busy trying to upgrade the actual site for the game last night and this morning. While this blog is great for either technical updates, or me just posting whatever is in my head at the time, there needs to be a proper landing page type of site that has all the important links and information nice and tidy. So that's what that is.

Again, as always there were some DNS teething issues, but it seems to be working currently and as it should - so hopefully that stays the way it is. 

You can check it out either via the link at the top or by clicking here.

Swing and Miss

So.... there were bugs in my newly tweaked party creation. I mean.. little tiny bugs... but... that little tiny bug stopped the game loading screen let folks create a functioning party and basically hung. Turns out making changes to code and deploying without a proper start-to-finish test is poor.

I mean, I had tested the initial bits with a fresh account, then I'd made more changes, then tested, then made more changes and that sort of thing, but before deploying I really should have start-to-finish tested it all over. And now here we are. With that done and the bugs fixed.

I also did get some feedback from a chap, once again telling me something I knew, but had put to a back-burner. Turns out the text was difficult to read on the image backgrounds, so I needed to put in some shading behind certain things - which is now done, so it again looks less amateur-hour.

So little, but needed progress. I'll check in tomorrow again after hopefully a few more folks test the setup again and we can see about that open test finally...