WarLight was just updated to version 1.12.1. This release contains a bunch of small improvements and minor bug fixes.
Arrow clicking
When issuing attacks, WarLight now registers clicks on the arrow itself instead of just the destination territory.
This makes it easier to issue attacks that wrap around the map when zoomed in. Note that this only works when the arrow is over water — clicking a territory always has precedence over clicking an arrow.
Attack Dialog Position
The way that the attack/transfer dialog positions itself has been changed so that it never appears in a location that will be off the screen.
The reason it appeared off-screen is because it made sure it always positioned itself so that your mouse cursor was over the “Okay” button. This allows for simply double-clicking when you want to attack with all available armies, which is what you want to do most of the time. This is my favorite kind of UI paradigm since it requires no training. There’s no text in WarLight telling players that they can double-click to attack with all armies, it’s just something players intuitively pick up once they realize their cursor always starts over the “Okay” button.
This release contains an experimental system to both keep the dialog on the screen and also make sure that the double-click feature continues to work. The dialog now contains three invisible hot-spots in the corners. Clicking any of these spots is the equivalent to clicking the “Okay” button. They’re show as blue circles in this image:
WarLight tries to open this dialog with your cursor over the Okay button, but if it isn’t possible it will open it so your cursor is directly centered in one of these hot spots. This ensures that double-clicking still attacks as normal, but it also allows the dialog to always appear on the screen.
Let me know what you think of this!
Nudge Timer
Players can now only be nudged if they haven’t taken their turn in a game for 24 hours, instead of the old value of 30 minutes. This means players that play their turns once every 24 hours won’t be able to be nudged at all.
When nudging was introduced way back in 2008, WarLight didn’t differentiate between multi-day and real-time games. Therefore, a nudge duration of 30 minutes was chosen as a compromise between fast games and slow games. This decision ended up not working for either format, since 30 minutes is way too long for a real-time game and far too short for a multi-day game.
Nudge, in its current implementation, doesn’t really work in real-time games at all since players aren’t checking their e-mail. At some point, I’d like to make nudge work differently, such as putting a message on the My Games page or playing a unique sound.
Misc Changes
– Map pages now place the map’s name in the page’s title.
– Added an explanation to the history dialog to help new players understand it.
– Clicking on the seasonal ladder from the Dashboard now takes you to that season instead of the list of seasons.
– Minor text changes were made on the map page. Removed the text “so far” after “x players found this review helpful” and changed “First went public on” to “Went public on”
– Fixed a bug that was preventing the Flash file from being resized down too small vertically.
– Fixed a bug that broke the question-mark link next to a game creator’s Personal Message.
– Fixed a bug in the map designer that caused bonuses to sometimes become unclickable.
– Fixed a bug that in rare cases caused the deployment slider to not close when a game ended.
