[TerminX]

Hello all. I was thinking that since I haven't exactly been actively developing EDuke32 over this past couple months or so, I'd get back into it by starting with whatever annoying little niggles have popped up that could potentially be solved with just a few minutes of investigation and coding.

So, following in the footsteps of Ubuntu's "one hundred paper cuts" initiative, I'd be interested in hearing about whatever minor problems you guys have noticed in EDuke32 which could be smoothed over with a bit of polish. This includes weird but easily reproducible behavior, inconsistencies with the original game, typos in menus and pretty much anything else that stands out as being not quite right.

So... get to posting.

[ReaperMan]

Multiplayer needs to be built in, er but thats not a small problem.

Anyway, the polymer code could be optimized a bit more so it doesn't lag so much.

[TerminX]

That suggestion is a pretty epic failure. I ask for small issues that could be fixed in a few minutes and I get someone suggesting the massive work required to optimize Polymer further? Are you kidding me?

[Micky C]

Whenever I get out of mapster32 or eduke32 by using either the console or alt tab, the program becomes unresponsive after a short period of time, say 10 seconds plus or minus. This is annoying because when I'm playing eduke32 I like to multitask sometimes, and when I'm mapping I often look up guides.

[Danukem]

@Micky C: That one might be hard to track down because it is system specific.



Fear not, TX, for I understand the thread topic and I am acquainted with those annoying little niggles.

Here is one:

Start a game with music on. Then turn the music off. Then save the game. Now load the gave you just saved. The music will start to play again, even though music is still turned off in the options and it was off when you saved the game.

I'll post more as I think of them.

[The Commander]

Make the game run under DirectX and not OpenGL, just something small that can be fixed with a few lines of code...

EDIT: I will place something serious but small if I come across them.

[TerminX]

DeeperThought, on Oct 27 2010, 12:13 AM, said:

Start a game with music on. Then turn the music off. Then save the game. Now load the gave you just saved. The music will start to play again, even though music is still turned off in the options and it was off when you saved the game.

Ooh, that's a good one, and is a perfect example of the point of this thread. It's a silly, annoying problem and it requires exactly one line of changes to fix.

[Lord Misfit]

Well, I think I've already gone over the digitalnumber font bug when you came back a week ago [from beyond r1599], and the strange input problems with SHIFT randomly getting pressed when I press the arrow keys on my keyboard in EDuke32's versions past r1632. Does that kind of stuff count as "paper cuts"?

[Danukem]

A few days ago I found what appears to be a CON compiler bug which prevented me from re-organizing my code in the way I wanted. I have reproduced the problem using a slightly modified version of the original CONs, which are attached.

What I did was I put most of the action, move, and ai definitions in a separate file instead of having them right before each actor.

So the top of GAME.CON looks like:

include DEFS.CON
include USER.CON
include ACTIONS.CON

The game crashes when it tries to compile ACTIONS.CON

Compiling: GAME.CON (139170 bytes)
Including: DEFS.CON (35992 bytes)
Including: USER.CON (45482 bytes)
Including: ACTIONS.CON (12177 bytes)
Fatal Signal caught: SIGSEGV. Bailing out.
g_errorLineNum: 0, g_tw: 0

Uninitializing DirectDraw...

There is absolutely nothing in ACTION.CON that wasn't pasted from GAME.CON

Attached File(s)

•  cons.rar (41.11K)
  Number of downloads: 333

[Stabs]

could you make it so when you die and you turn "god" on and it brings you back to life "give all" wont work, kinda annoying when iam testing maps and i die at the start while loading because i was surrounded by monsters.

[The Commander]

Music does not play in the background when starting a game multiplayer.
When launched with the -server command.

[Lord Misfit]

I think I also noticed something with case in the console input in newer versions [although I don't know what version this started at yet]. I remembered during testing of a newer version of EDuke32 that when I toggle caps lock on and off that it didn't change the case of the console input. I had to hold down SHIFT while typing. This is important to note since setvar and all those var toggling commands in the console rely on case sensitivity in the case of vars.

And yes, I was using plain text displays for the console, so I know it's not just the sprite-based font mode, but that does bring up it's own issue here. Is there a way to make a visible change to differenciate between uppercase and lowercase text in the console when using sprite-font display instead of the basic display? I'd personally perfer the color coded sprite-font mode for the console for debugging, but with no way to tell uppercase from lowercase in that mode, I can't efficently do var testing [I do it constantly, so it's an important thing for me to mention], and this I'm stuck in basic font mode for most things.

I'm not sure if this is a "paper cut" type of thing, but I just remembered about this a few minutes ago and figured I'd pop this question as well.

[Zxcasd]

In Duke3d, if you are already in a game and if you go to Options > Keyboard Setup, the blue letters on the left side (the Actions- like Move Forward) in many occasions are hard to see, due to the game background.
Maybe if they had some kind of border around, like (in the same menu) the fonts used in "UP/DOWN=SELECT ACTION". That stands out much clearly, on any background.

[Zxcasd]

The option to disable "Auto-search for updates" in the GUI Eduke32 front-end.

The reason is that many times, when trying to connect and failing, the whole GUI would freeze and I couldn't play the game.
I know there's the option to disable "Auto-search for updates" in the game's options, but as I said, when the GUI freezes, I can't even *get* in the game, to disable it from there. So that's why I need it in the GUI, too.
Or, maybe it should be *only* in the GUI...

Now that I think about it, the true problem is the GUI Auto-update taking place before the user has a chance to do anything (check out the Message Log).

Maybe the best thing would be:
- user starts up GUI (eduke32.exe)
- engine searches for game data
- GUI *ASKS* user: "Do you want to search the net for updates?". (Many applications do it like this).
- the rest remains unchanged...

[blizzart]

Maybe you can fix the problem, that the game menu doesn´t show right on widescreen (it always uses a 4:3 resolution) when you start the game.

I thought this was a bug and didn´t even start playing with the newer builds until I start a game and realized that the screen changes to 1680x1050.

[Forge]

The "\" key (the one between "enter" and "backspace") won't stay bound.

I have to remap it every time I start eduke32.

[Hendricks266]

I'll post if I come up with anything.

DanM, on Oct 27 2010, 01:42 AM, said:

could you make it so when you die and you turn "god" on and it brings you back to life "give all" wont work, kinda annoying when iam testing maps and i die at the start while loading because i was surrounded by monsters.

This.

[Jan Satcitananda]

A few complaints about gametext/gametextz commands: spaces always have width of 5 pixels and all digit widths are fixed to 8 pixels even if the font I am using supposes another width.
I suggest adding an orientation flag for discarding these overridden widths, always using tile widths and drawing spaces as well as other symbols (tile before the '!').

[TerminX]

blizzart, on Oct 27 2010, 03:43 AM, said:

Maybe you can fix the problem, that the game menu doesn´t show right on widescreen (it always uses a 4:3 resolution) when you start the game.

I thought this was a bug and didn´t even start playing with the newer builds until I start a game and realized that the screen changes to 1680x1050.

That one is a design decision. Pillarboxing is preferable to ugly stretching in this case IMO.

Keep the suggestions coming... some of what has been posted here so far is exactly the kind of thing I'm looking for.

[Jimmy]

The red digital font has different tile positions for most of the numbers. They're just slightly off (anywhere from 2 to 4 pixels), some are vertically wrong, some horizontally. Is there any way this could be fixed and unified in the code? I know you can do it through the art route, which I've done myself, but I could see others not wanting to do this.

[Danukem]

Captain Awesome, on Oct 27 2010, 01:23 PM, said:

Is there any way this could be fixed and unified in the code?

If fixes for that specific font are hardcoded in, then it will mess up any replacement fonts.

[Jimmy]

True, but I imagine there are ways around that. Why not only fix them if a flag is set or something like that?
Edit: Not to mention, the original game has some sort of bug fix for this, as this isn't a problem with what's already there. Why they didn't just fix the .ART positions, I have no idea.

[Hendricks266]

Captain Awesome, on Oct 27 2010, 03:23 PM, said:

The red digital font has different tile positions for most of the numbers. They're just slightly off (anywhere from 2 to 4 pixels), some are vertically wrong, some horizontally. Is there any way this could be fixed and unified in the code? I know you can do it through the art route, which I've done myself, but I could see others not wanting to do this.

Captain Awesome, on Oct 27 2010, 05:20 PM, said:

True, but I imagine there are ways around that. Why not only fix them if a flag is set or something like that?
Edit: Not to mention, the original game has some sort of bug fix for this, as this isn't a problem with what's already there. Why they didn't just fix the .ART positions, I have no idea.

This is wading into deep shit frustrating territory. It's impossible to fix this as a "paper cut". Someone would have to code a routine to verify that art being patched is identical to the normal game. I don't know if that would be allowed past quality control, and I'm nearly certain that I'm the only one who would care enough or want to embark. However, if this is done, it could be applied to the HUD errors, etc.

[Omni]

What about people with to many input devices crashing? Such as some with Alienware laptops crashing with out a special older build.

[The Commander]

Probably more of a annoyance, but can we get some sort of control over the main menu background.
I would like to make it opaque as seen in the eduke32 credits section of the game.

[blizzart]

TX, on Oct 27 2010, 09:56 PM, said:

That one is a design decision. Pillarboxing is preferable to ugly stretching in this case IMO.

Yeah it looks ugly when it´s stretched. But IMO some people probably don´t even start playing, because they think they can´t change the resolution (so I did the first time).

[NNC]

Fuckin' Enforcers used to stay away from water. Lately they drop into the nearest water like a rock.

Multiple explosions like with the building in E1L2 sound buggy. No matter how many sounds I use in the options, I hear one big explosion, and no chain of explosions.

[SwissCm]

blizzart, on Oct 28 2010, 04:04 PM, said:

Yeah it looks ugly when it´s stretched. But IMO some people probably don´t even start playing, because they think they can´t change the resolution (so I did the first time).

That's the dumbest reason to change something back I've ever read. Pillarboxing is common as dirt nowadays and changing it back so it doesn't respect the original aspect ratio is a terrible idea.

[Jblade]

Can the music track you've got playing be saved when you save the game instead of having to code a workaround for it? I mean not just for starttrack but also if you change the track with the F5 key. I guess there's a good reason why it doesn't save the track but there might not be.

[Danukem]

James, on Oct 28 2010, 11:25 AM, said:

Can the music track you've got playing be saved when you save the game instead of having to code a workaround for it? I mean not just for starttrack but also if you change the track with the F5 key. I guess there's a good reason why it doesn't save the track but there might not be.

+1

There's currently no way to tell which music track is playing. A pre-defined gamevar that holds the track number would do nicely.