WarLight has just been upgraded to 1.13.0! Most of my time is being spent on the mobile client these days (mobile update coming soon!), however this release does contain a few fixes and improvements to the browser version.

This blog post describes the changes that were made.

Automatic Zooming

In addition to being able to pan the map around when zoomed in, WarLight will now also zoom the map in and out to ensure that the order you’re watching or selected is always appropriately visible on the screen.

This eliminates a couple annoyances that used to exist. For example, if you were zoomed in and an airlift order plays, the map would pan over to the center of the airlift. If you’re zoomed in too far, you would only see the center of the airlift and couldn’t see either the source or the destination. Another example is attacks that wrap around the map – you would just see one side of the attack and wouldn’t be able to see the other.

Now, WarLight will zoom out for that attack or airlift so that you can see the entire order, then automatically zoom back in for the next order.

This is especially useful for the extremely large maps or low-resolution screens. On these maps, often the first thing players do after pulling up a game is zoom in. Now the game takes care of this for you when you click Watch Turn.

If you prefer to control the zoom yourself, you can disable this by clicking Configure Camera on the Settings tab. Change it to “Pan only” to go back to the previous behavior.

Card Visibility Change

A relatively minor change was made to the information that is shown when a card you can’t see gets played. First, some background. There are two settings that control the visibility of opponent’s cards:

• Card Playing: This controls whether or not you can see the cards your opponent plays if it would otherwise be invisible. For example, if they play an abandon card on a territory you can see, they can always see the card being played. However, if they play an abandon card on a territory that you can’t see, this setting determines whether or not it’s shown to you.
• Card Holdings and Receiving: This controls whether or not you can see what cards your opponent receives each turn as well as what cards they hold in their hand.

The change being made only affects games where you can see the cards your opponent is holding and receiving, but cannot see cards they play. In this configuration, it used to be possible for the history to show misleading information. This is best explained with an example.

Let’s say you’re in a game that includes the abandon card and uses normal fog. Say the game is on turn 10, and your opponent received an abandon card on turn 7, and played it on turn 8. They played it on a territory you could not see, and therefore history does not show you that the card was played at all.

Now, since you can see the cards they hold in their hand, if you look at the cards panel the game will correctly show that they do not have an abandon card. This part was always showed correct information.

The problem was that if you looked in history at turn 9, it showed that the opponent did have an abandon card, which was incorrect. This happens because history can see all of cards your opponent received, however it couldn’t see them playing the card. Therefore, it thought the card was still in their hand.

To fix this, the game now injects events into the orders list whenever your opponent plays a card that you can’t see. You still can’t see any information about the card being played (such as what territory was abandoned), the only thing you get to know is when the card was played. The event will simply say “Soandso played an abandon card in the fog.”

With this fix now in place, history will always show what cards the player has correctly.

Misc Changes

– Map lists are now paginated.
– Partially-completed cards now start splitting themselves at the top instead of the right.
– Fixed a few issues with the in-game graphs. The vertical values now always line up, spacing was added around the edges, and fixed tooltips that appear at the bottom of the graph.
– Fixed a bug with the My Games page that caused inconsistencies when sorting by game name when the game names started with numbers or symbols.
– Fixed a bug which allowed players to decline and re-join to get around the 6-person non-member limit.
– Fixed a bug that caused an error in single-player if the player hammered the Z hotkey multiple times in a row.