WarLight has just been updated to version 1.16.1! This is a small update just to fix a few bugs.

This was supposed to have a mobile update along with it, however the mobile part wasn’t quite ready yet, and I didn’t want to delay these bug fixes. The mobile half of 1.16.1 should be coming soon.

Changes

– Renamed the Gray color to Dark Gray.
– Saved single-player games now show the date they were saved.
– When a game is closed, the chat windows now automatically close. This fixes the issue where the My Games page shows a game as having unread chat even after you read it.
– The GameFeed API now returns which team each player was on.
– Fixed a bug when creating custom single-player games that could cause it to remove yourself from the game when clicking “Change Players”
– Fixed a bug that allowed hotkeys to activate while typing into the bug-report popup.
– Fixed a bug that caused the clock to do a single tick sound when opening a game that was past the boot time.
– Fixed a bug after deleting a reinforcement card that caused the deployment slider to do weird things.
– Fixed a bug that involved open seats and the “Start Game” button. If a game creator clicked “start game” while open seats were unfilled, the open seats were not removed as they should have been (you would have seen them as little “O”s on the My Games page.) This made the system incorrectly believe the game was still being advertised on the Open Games tab. Unfortunately, this means that the game would be deleted after 10 days, since it thought it was an open game that didn’t start and was abandoned by its creator.

WarLight has just been upgraded to version 1.16.0! This blog post describes what’s changed.

Take back control from AI

In games where you can get turned into an AI by being booted or surrendering, it’s now possible to take back control from the AI for later turns. This effectively allows for a soft-boot, where the AI can control a player while they’re away and then the player can take back control when they come back.

Also, when browsing history, WarLight now shows player’s AI status correctly. Prior to this update, it would show them as an AI even on turns before they turned into an AI. Now, it will only show AI in front of their name when the AI actually played those orders. The only exception is when a player submits orders and then becomes an AI through surrendering before the turn advances. The AI won’t replace their existing orders with new ones for that turn, but the game reports that an AI was controlling the player.

It’s worth noting that this change also means it’s possible for a player to be booted multiple times in a single game. Each one of these boots increments the boot number shown on that player’s profile.

Game creators can control how many times a player can take back control in a game. The default is two. It’s recommended to keep this at a relatively low value so that trolls can’t keep coming back after being booted over and over to slow your game down.

New Tutorial

WarLight now has a completely new tutorial on the single-player tab which helps new players learn how to play. To check it out, click Single Player and then the Tutorial button.

This tutorial is more refined than the old one. For one thing, it has its own level with no opponent so new players can focus on their own movements without being distracted. Whereas the old tutorial only walked you through playing one turn, this one walks you through two in order to present concepts in more detail, such as taking bonuses and splitting stacks.

Obviously, most of you reading this blog already know how to play and won’t need this. However, if you try it out anyway, feel free to post your thoughts. Also, if you can find a way to break the tutorial by getting off-script (getting in a situation where it’s telling you to do something that it prevents you from doing), let me know!

Open Games tab now shows Random Teams

The open games tab now differentiates between FFA games and random-team games. In random-team games, right next to the boot time, it will say how many players each team will receive.

Additionally, game’s settings panels now make the team mode more clear. Now it has a “Teams” line on all games that tell you if the game is an FFA, random teams, or manual teams. This replaces the old “at start divide into teams of” line.

Expiring Card Turn Numbers

Cards that expire, such as the diplomacy card, now show the correct turn they expire. Previously, they showed one turn number too low, which created confusion around knowing when cards would expire.

Left Column UI Changes

The left column of the main game screen received some UI updates. First off, I want to apologize for changing the UI. I do realize that any time you change UI it causes a great deal of pain. Humans are very habitual creatures, and re-learning how to do something that you used to know how to do is never fun. I didn’t make the decision to make these changes lightly; these are things that are a long-time coming and address deep-rooted problems that players have reported many times over the years.

Let’s go over each change and explain the rationale.

• Cards Button: The Cards link that existed at the top when you have cards received a face lift and also gained the ability to close the cards panel by clicking on it. This is now the preffered way of accessing cards, and if you were used to using the cards button in the lower left, I recommend switching to using this new button (or the hot-key B)
• Surrender and Vote-To-End buttons: The Surrender and Vote-To-End buttons were moved up to the main game screen. Previously, they were hidden under the Players panel. Admittedly, they never made much sense on the Players panel, and they were only placed there since they had nowhere better to go. This led to new players not being able to find the surrender button as easily and receiving some boots that could have been avoided.
• Analyze Button: The main game screen now has an Analyze Attack button that brings up the same graphs that the attack dialog’s Analyze button does. This allows players to access the attack graphs even when not in attack mode.
• Menu button: All of the lower-left buttons except Chat are now located in a collapsible menu. This was done for a couple reasons.

  With the addition of the Surrender, Vote to End, and Analyze buttons, this makes the menu much larger than it was before. The biggest problem with the column of buttons in the bottom left is the amount of screen space they take up, which is very limited for players playing on low-resolution screens such as netbooks and laptops. It’s very common for netbooks to have a low vertical resolution (often 720). In these cases, having too many buttons down here ends up making the page too tall, which pushes the entire Flash object below the bottom of the screen. This results in players not being able to the bottom of the map (I often get emails saying “I can’t deploy to Antartica!”).

  By having the buttons be collapsed when not needed, this allows more buttons to fit in the area and also allows them to be spaced out better (previously they were all squished together for low-resolution screens.)

• Phase Name Changes: The three phases now have a 1/2/3 in front of them again like they used to. This was added back after feedback from new players indicated that it was more clear this way. Also, “Deploy new armies” is now just “Deploy” since there wasn’t enough room to fit it all (this was the reason the numbers were originally removed in the first place.) “Confirmation” also became “Confirm” just to keep the tenses the same.

Misc Changes

– Getting booted now correctly increments the boot stat on your profile when booted players are turned into AI.
– The deployment slider setting defaults to 15 instead of 10 for new players.
– The deployment slider now has a title of “Deploy”
– When issuing attacks, the text in the orders list was altered slightly. “X armies from Y will attack/transfer Z” instead of “X armies will attack/transfer Y from Z”
– In the ladder statistics section of profiles, the Best Rank and Best Ranking are no longer shown for seasonal ladders. What’s most important in Seasonal ladders are the final rank. The best ever achieved is often highly skewed since at the beginning of the season, #1 is awarded just to the first person to get a rank no matter how good they are. You can still see this information by clicking on the link, it just isn’t shown on profiles.
– Some cards received new graphics due to potential licensing issues.
– Adjusted the nudge/boot icon to try and make it look more like a boot.
– Fixed a bug that occurred if you invited the same player to a game twice, once by e-mail and again directly.

Congratulations to zibik21 for winning a very close Season VII!

Season VIII is going to do something a little different than previous seasons. In Season VIII, every bonus will have its value randomized. For each bonus on the map, there is a 1/3 chance that it will be worth one army per turn more than normal, a 1/3 chance that it will be worth one fewer, and a 1/3 chance that it won’t be changed.

It’s up to the players to determine how the modified bonus values will affect the game. Because each map will be randomized in this fashion, every game should be very different from the rest. Of course, the bonus boxes on the map will reflect the new values, but players can also check the Settings panel of each game to see a list of how each bonus was modified.

Since this bonus randomization is a special feature to Season VIII, creating a game with the same template won’t have the same bonus randomization. Therefore, it’s not as easy to practice these settings ahead of time. However, if you’re motivated enough, you can still practice by overriding each bonus value on the Armies tab.

It’s worth noting that the zero-bonuses that are located in Japan, Hawaii, Alaska, and Korea will also be modified. They will become either a 0, +1, or a -1. This opens up new strategic possibilities, such as the option of taking a zero-turn bonus. It’s important to remember that the bonuses you start in are the cheapest to take, so while taking a zero-turn +1 bonus will give you strength on the first turn, it can also make you weaker on future turns as your opponent captures their early bigger bonuses.

Settings are similar to Strategic 1v1 except on the Modified Medium Earth map. This map has also been modified from its previous version. In addition to East Russia having one fewer territories, East United States also has one fewer. The goal of this map is to increase the value of bonuses that are often ignored. Even though this map has two fewer territories than Medium Earth, it feels larger since there are more attractive bonuses and therefore more space that gets used.

You can see the template here, but as warned above, using this template won’t get you the randomized bonus values since that feature is specially coded into Season VIII.

The season will begin on Tuesday at Midnight GMT (which is really Monday night for those in negative timezones, such as North America). Good luck!

It was five years ago today that I first started working on WarLight.

WarLight has come a long ways in five years! Over 2.5 million multi-player games have been played and it’s showing no signs of slowing down.

Here you can see a graph of relative traffic to WarLight.net from the last few years:

In the early days, traffic was pretty flat. March of 2010 is when WarLight swapped from Silverlight to Flash and the traffic started steadily growing. The first spike you see in June 2010 is the big Poland spike, when lots of Polish people found the game (mostly through Polish site joemonster.org). The big increase in traffic in October 2011 was due to the release of the stand-alone client that was distributed to Flash gaming sites such as Kongregate and Armor Games. You can also see big dips in traffic every December as people are away for the holidays.

2013 is going to be an important year for WarLight. Stay tuned to the blog for announcements!

WarLight has just been updated to version 1.15.9! This is primarily an update to the mobile client, but it also includes some small bug fixes and improvements to the website. This blog post contains a summary of what’s changed.

The Help Forum

There’s a new forum called the Help Forum. This is a place for players of all experience levels to ask questions about how WarLight works. If you’ve ever wondered how something works, feel free to drop by and ask! If you’re an expert on WarLight, feel free to drop in and impart your wisdom on others.

Other Website Changes

– Real-time games no longer send e-mails when you surrender, win, are eliminated, or vote to end. They were unnecessary since, unlike in multi-day games, the player was likely already present in the game when these actions took place.
– When chatting, you can sometimes see messages that came in from a turn greater than the one you’re looking at. The client now notices this and automatically refreshes to get the latest turn.
– When creating a multi-day tournament with the word “lobby” in the title, the game now suggests that you should probably use real-time for real-time tournament lobbies.
– Tweaked the refresh times a bit. It’s now faster in real-time games. It’s slower in multi-day games unless they advanced in the last 10-20 minutes so that they can still be played real-time.
– The clock shown for real-time games no longer shows 0 hours since it’s always 0.

Mobile Client Changes

This update to the mobile client adds a lot, so be sure to update to it if you’re one of the beta testers! Android beta-testers can install this via the usual method. Please try out these features and let me know how well they work for you.

– In the settings menu, you can now enable push notifications. When enabled, WarLight will notify you whenever it’s your turn or invited to a multi-day game.
– Added the Open Games page.
– Added the clock for real-time games.
– Added the analyze button for checking kill percentages.
– Added the ability to preview maps. This can be done from a game’s settings, a game’s lobby, or when creating a game.
– Added the ability to view custom scenarios when looking at a game’s settings.
– Added auto-refresh. Pressing the refresh button isn’t as necessary anymore. If you’re concerned about data usage, you can turn it off in the settings.
– Overhauled the look of the settings screen
– When long tapping the map, there’s now a circle that collapses around your finger to help you realize that it’s working. Information was also added to explain what this is, and the tip from the main menu was removed.
– iOS: Added retina iPad icon.

WarLight has just been updated to version 1.15.8! This update brings the mobile client closer to party with the Flash version. As is often the case, some improvements to the website snuck into this update too. This blog post contains a summary of what’s changed.

Change Player’s Color

It is now possible to change the color that you or an opponent appears as on your own screen. To try it out, open a game, click on someone’s name in the lower-right, and select the new “Change Color” button.

Changing a player’s color only affects your own computer; everyone else will still see them as their true color. This is useful for a few situations:

1. If you’re looking at a game where multiple players have very similar colors, you may wish to change one of them to make it easier to tell them apart.
2. If you’re colorblind and the colors chosen aren’t ideal, you can change players to colors that you can see more clearly.
3. If you aren’t playing as the color you wanted to play as due to someone else taking it, and are too stubborn to adapt, you can change yourself back to your desired color.
4. If you’re playing a complex team game, you can change colors on a team to similar shades to help in visualizing what each team owns. If you want, you can even change entire teams to the same color, as WarLight does not prevent you from setting multiple players to the same color.

Changes in color are temporary. If you refresh your browser, all players will revert back to their standard colors.

Other Website Changes

– Re-arranged the player popup a bit when making room for the Change Color button. It’s now easier to read the info box when it has long lines.
– The seasonal ladder now requires 7 games to be completed before getting a rank instead of 5. This will cause the ratings to be less chaotic in the early days of a season.
– Fixed a bug that caused an error if you typed a non-number into the reinforcement card’s progressive multiplier box.

Mobile Client Changes

This update finishes out the ability to create multi-player games from the mobile client! All customization options are now available when creating games. Since this added a lot of UI to the app, it would be great if beta testers can try it out and e-mail if they find any problems.

Android beta-testers can install this via the usual method. If you’re a WarLight member and want to beta-test the iOS version of the game, there’s now a sign-up page located here.

Here’s the full change log for this update:

– Added the ability to customize game settings when creating games.
– Added checkboxes on multi-select screens.
– Template owners are no longer shown when you’re only looking at your own templates since they were redundant.
– Cleaned up the some of the card UI.
– Fixed a bug that occurred if you rotated your device while a game was loading.
– Fixed a bug when creating a game with custom scenarios that caused new players added to a game to not get assigned a slot by default.
– Android: Added space to the bottom of the menu so it looks a bit nicer.
– Android: The software keyboard no longer pops up by default on the game creation screen.
– Android: Fixed a bug that caused the fog texture to not appear after locking and unlocking your device.
– IOS: Retina devices now render the map in full resolution
– IOS: Fixed a bug that made some main menu buttons unclickable on some devices
– IOS: The app works under iOS 5 now. 6 is no longer required.

WarLight has just been updated to version 1.15.7! The mobile client creeps ever closer towards completion, and as usual, the website gained a few minor updates too. This blog post contains a summary of what’s changed.

Real-time tournament invite e-mails

You can now control whether or not you receive tournament e-mail invite emails separately for multi-day tournaments and real-time tournaments. Under Settings -> E-mail notifications, you’ll find two check-boxes: one for multi-day tournaments, and another for real-time tournaments.

Multi-day tournament e-mails default on, but real-time tournament e-mails default off. This means that if you want to receive e-mails when you’re invited to a real-time tournament, you must turn it on in the settings.

This reflects how most people use e-mail. Most people don’t get instant notifications when they receive an e-mail, so they typically won’t see the invite to a real-time tournament in time to join it. This leads to lots of disappointment when they check their e-mail only to find invites to tournaments that it’s too late to join.

If you’re going to create a “lobby tournament” for a real-time tournament, please make sure your lobby is set to real-time as well. This prevents people from getting e-mails that don’t want them.

CLOT can override bonus values

The CreateGame API can now be used to specify overridden bonus values. This allows custom ladders/tournaments to control the bonus values for each game independently, which opens up some new options. For example, you can make a ladder or tournament where the bonus values are randomized in each game.

See CreateGame on the wiki for information on how to use this.

Bug fixes

Two bugs were also fixed in this update:

– Fixed a bug in the game creator that made custom scenarios not appear if you closed and re-opened the scenario builder right away.
– Fixed a bug that caused an error if you clicked “map page” on an under-development map

Mobile Client

If you’re playing WarLight on Android, you can install it via the usual method. I highly recommend upgrading to this version since it has a few key bug fixes.

The biggest feature added in this release is the ability to create multi-player games from templates! You can’t customize template settings yet, but if you have a template you want to use as-is you can use it.

This also adds the ability for game creators to add or remove players to a game from the lobby.

Further changes:

– Overhauled the look and feel of the player details screen.
– Fixed a bug that made territory picks unviewable during the first turn.
– Android: Fixed a bug that caused deployment issues on some phones.
– Android: Fixed a bug that made screen title’s become off-center when rotating your device.
– Android: Fixed a bug that caused order re-arranging to not work.
– Android: Fixed a bug that made the map not appear after sleeping and waking your device.

WarLight has just been updated to version 1.15.6! This is primarily an update to the mobile client, but a few features snuck into the website as well.

Website Changes

– Added a link on the Forum page to view posts from all forums together.
– Added a tournament filter “Active tournaments I didn’t decline”
– Optimized up the “My Tournaments” page.
– [code] blocks on the forum no longer become double-spaced
– Added DeleteLobbyGame API that allows CLOT to delete games if they don’t start.
– The GameFeed API can now be used by CLOT to retrieve limited player data about games that haven’t finished yet.
– Improved the error dialog with options to report the bug.
– Fixed a bug that was causing some maps to use more data points than they needed to, slowing down the map rendering.
– Fixed a bug in the analyze graphs that could occur when the offensive kill rate was significantly modified from its standard 60%.
– Fixed a bug that could cause an error in some cases when loading a saved game.

Mobile Client Changes

EDIT: For members who are upgrading from the previous Android client, please un-install the existing client before installing this new version. This is necessary since the package name changed to support Facebook authentication, so Android views it as a different app. If you don’t un-install first, you’ll end up with two copies of the WarLight app. If you’re already in this state, just un-install both and then install the correct one again.

– You can now sign in with Facebook, just as you can on the website.
– The look and feel of the lobby has been overhauled.
– When you receive a private message, it now appears as an item on the game’s menu.
– Added space below the map for the deployment slider so that the slider will never overlap a territory you’re trying to deploy to.
– Fixed a bug that made scrolling choppy on large-screen devices or in landscape orientation on small screen devices.
– Fixed a bug that caused an error if you changed your password on the website while you had the mobile version open.
– Fixed a bug that caused skinny horizontal rectangles to appear on the map (this fix may not appear right away since the affected maps need to be re-processed)
– When playing an Airlift card, the back button now works properly.
– The history menu option is no longer visible on games still distributing territories or on the first turn.
– Upgraded the app from OpenGL 1.1 to OpenGL 2.0
– Improved the error handler so it won’t trap you in an infinite loop of errors.
– Fixed memory leaks.
– Fixed a bug that could cause an error if the back button was pressed too rapidly.
– The deployment slider is now centered.

Congratulations to unknownsoldier for winning Season VI! Season VI came right down to the wire — unknownsolider snatched victory at the last minute!

Season VII will take place on the Heavy Earth map. This is a bigger map than Medium Earth. Combined with smaller neutrals, this allows for a lot more expanding than what we’ve seen before.

The three territories that you start with all begin with just 1 army instead of the normal 4. This makes cluster-picking less effective, so spread out those picks!

The luck percentage is still 16%, but this time on straight round. This makes it so the attacks against neutrals are guaranteed, but when you’re fighting opponents you’ll have a small amount of variation. Also, the order priority and order delay cards are missing this time to change it up a bit.

Check out the exact settings with this template: multi-player, single-player.

We’ll kick things off on January 2nd and it will end on March 3rd. Good luck!

The WarLight.net website is experiencing an outage (EDIT: It’s back up!). I’m working on getting it back up as fast as possible. More details will be posted soon. Sorry for the inconvenience.

UPDATE 10pm GMT-8: The main WarLight database has suffered a hardware failure. Rackspace engineers are currently working to recover the data onto a new server. As a backup plan, I am also restoring the latest database backup onto a fresh server, just in case Rackspace is unable to restore the old server. The latest backup I have was taken about 4 hours before the outage, so I’m hoping it does not need to be used.

UPDATE 5am GMT-8: I’m really mad at Rackspace. For the last ten hours all they’ve given me is “We can’t give you an ETA” over and over. Finally, they tell me it’s 95% done being restored and will be up within 2 hours.

UPDATE 6:49am GMT-8: The website is now functional again. Unfortunately, there was a few hours rollback in the database. Hopefully players who happened to commit turns within that period will be respectful and try to commit the same orders they played the first time. I’m going to be taking steps to ensure this can’t happen again.

Additionally, for the next several hours, booting in all games will be disabled (you’ll get an error message if you try to boot.) This will allow players who couldn’t take their turn before the boot timer to get it in before getting booted.

WarLight’s database has had hardware failures before, however Rackspace typically will automatically move your server to a fresh machine with only a few minutes of downtime. This has happened several times, actually, and it’s never been a problem before now. This time it didn’t work for some reason, and to make matters worse, their support personnel were very unhelpful. I had gotten complacent on relying on Rackspace’s automated failover. Unfortunately, when the failover finally did happen after several hours, the database was corrupt beyond repair and I had to go with my own backup anyway.

To ensure this can’t happen again, I am going to set up a continuously streaming backup system that will backup the database several times per minute. This way, if there’s another failure, I don’t have to rely on waiting for Rackspace’s failover and I can restore from my own backup without significant data loss. Previously, the backup was only made every few hours, so this is a significant jump in reliability.

I realize the problems that outages cause, and I’m probably more disappointed by this than any of you. I take this very seriously as it’s my full-time job and I am going to take several steps to ensure this can’t happen again.

UPDATE: As mentioned above, booting is temporarily not allowed in any games. This gives a chance for players who are over the boot time in their games and couldn’t play due to the outage to take their turns. I realize this makes it difficult to play new real-time games, but please bear with me as we get everything back to working normally.

UPDATE: Booting is now re-enabled.