[Dev] 0.0 "Aztec" Progress Thread

[Puppeteer]

Edit 3: Updating the web page now, which is just modifying index.md on the https://github.com/C7-Game/c7-game.github.io repo.

Edit: Oops that wasn't an edit, that was the reply box.

 

[Quintillus]

I think that looks good for the release page. Downloaded the Windows one, confirmed it works as expected. Windows 8.1 believes C7 is a force for good and does not try to stop me from running it.

 

[Puppeteer]

https://c7-game.github.io/ now has...lots of text. Please take a look.

The download links may change once we publish the release, but I'm not sure about that. I presume they don't currently work unless you're logged in and can see the release draft.

 

[Quintillus]

All right, I put my copy editor hat on. Some thoughts on polishing the text, organized by section:

v0.0 Aztec has been released!
- The description says that "nothing moves", but units do move, and the user can move the map around.

Known Issues
- Should this be slightly bigger font to separate it from the Windows/Linux/Mac installation sections?
- Should probably be "progress demonstration" rather than "demonstrator".
- "There are many UI buttons displayed but don't do anything (but some do!)" - I think most of them (50.1% or more) do perform functions. We could probably safely say "Not all UI buttons perform an action" and sell ourselves less short.
- "Audio may cut off very quickly" - When does this occur? I wasn't aware of that in C7 (though I've heard it in Civ). Granted I don't always have my speakers on.

Actually that reminds me, our main menu music is disabled currently. Probably not important enough to rebuild it all though, it's well past an Aztec goal. And we'll still have popup sounds and button sounds to show we can play sounds.

Tested the links and they all work when signed in, and all give a 404 when not signed in. For some reason the Linux one gives a fancier 404 page on GitHub, not sure why, but I don't think it should matter.

 

[Puppeteer]

Ok, updated with your recommendations. I am *not* a copy writer...I'm more of a "barf words out of my brain" writer.

I sometimes got a blip of audio when starting a game, but usually nothing. Then I realized hitting ESC in-game played the whole noise, as did the credits screen. Until then I thought the sound just didn't work on the Mac, but now I think what's happening is that you click a button on the main screen to start the game, and it tires to play the sound, but then it switches scenes and probably destroys the sound player in the process.

I had to add GlobalSingleton.cs in autoloads to pass the load file dialog path selection to the game scene. Not fond of that pattern, but I'm not sure how else to do it. And I hate to put even more stuff there, but it occurred to me that playing a sound from GlobalSingleton would probably finish playing while the scene changes. Just an idea, though...I haven't even looked at the code that plays sound yet.

But anyway, I mentioned it because sometimes the sound just barely starts playing then stops, and it sounds...not right because it's so quick. But a lot of the time I don't hear anything, I think because it's changing scenes before I can hear the start of the sound.

 

[Puppeteer]

Oh, I hit "save" on the release instead of "save draft" after copying much of the text from the web page to the release. Since the pre-release box is checked, this release is not listed in the front page of the repo. Interesting; TIL.

The download links did change, and I updated them on the web page.

So I semi-accidentally released I guess, but it's not irreversible. Let me know what y'all think. About the release and whether or not the milestone releases should be on the repo front page under Releases.

I'm starting to think maybe we should uncheck the pre-release box for milestone builds, and that opens the door for periodic pre-release builds (nightlies, but probably not nightly), something I have been wondering about for a while.

 

[WildWeazel]

I'm on mobile so I can't verify files but those pages look great

 

[Quintillus]

Oh, I hit "save" on the release instead of "save draft" after copying much of the text from the web page to the release. Since the pre-release box is checked, this release is not listed in the front page of the repo. Interesting; TIL.

The download links did change, and I updated them on the web page.

So I semi-accidentally released I guess, but it's not irreversible. Let me know what y'all think. About the release and whether or not the milestone releases should be on the repo front page under Releases.

I'm starting to think maybe we should uncheck the pre-release box for milestone builds, and that opens the door for periodic pre-release builds (nightlies, but probably not nightly), something I have been wondering about for a while.

After playing around with it a bit, I also think we just uncheck the pre-release box for milestone builds, and any other intermediate builds that we intend to be consumed more widely (e.g. we talked about having monthly dev diaries; we may want to include a new release to correspond with that even if we aren't at the next milestone yet).

Like you said, the release isn't really listed on the front page as a pre-release; instead it shows "2 tags" under releases, one for the release, and one for jim-cruft. When I temporarily unchecked the pre-release tag, the Aztec milestone showed up under releases as I would have expected.

Comparing to another repo, I can conclude that NattyNarwhal must also be unchecking pre-release for that repo's 0.0/0.1 releases. So I guess "pre-release" doesn't necessarily mean "pre-1.0". Although I can see the pre-release release when viewing from SeaMonkey (where I'm not signed in), and the only differences is there's an easy-to-miss pre-release tag:

We'll see how it works if we try automated releases in addition to milestone ones. Will the non-pre-release milestone ones still raise to the top as we probably want them to?

 

[B-29_Bomber]

Personally, when it comes to web presence, I'd hold off on announcing anything outside CFC until you have a properly playable game.


On CFC were all fanatics for all things Civ (it's in the forum's title after all) and we're going to obviously find it much more interesting to see how the sausage is made so to speak, whereas people outside the forums might not be so interested in that sort of thing and might be put off by something that's merely a tech demo.

 

[Puppeteer]

I think there is a sizable non-CFC-based community around Civ3, too. I'm not sure how much overlap there is, but I sense they are two or more (including CFC) distinct communities. I believe the recognition of the "Civilization" brand and Civ3's availability cheap on Steam has spawned this in the past decade or so. There is a Discord channel or two, the Steam forum, a reddit, and @SuedecivIII has 5.5k subscribers on YouTube for a channel that only has Civ3 content!

Now that whole community probably isn't interested in C7 in its current state other than saying "neat", but a few of them that haven't found their way here may have something to contribute.