#RestoreCANVAS

I have attached a pic below but my description of what is the problem should be sufficient.

Subject: The red stripes that tell you your province may revolt.

They oscillate. Meaning the stripes 'throb' at you.

A good player will spend most of the game attacking and moving forward and will most likely see the red stripes 90% of the time he plays...

While this had good intentions, can you imagine staring at a screen that throbs red at you all the time????

It is damn annoying.

We have smoke for the ones who may rebel and we also have red throbbing ugly red stripes. I would be interested in another perspective on why we have 2 ways to view potential province revolts instead of just one and why in the world having red throbbing stripes in your view all day is a good thing.

Programmers, would you want to see 2/3 rds of your code be a different color and oscillate on your screen all day?

Isn't the smoke good enough?

While we are working on fixes for objective problems (some of which were reported in this thread), in one of the May updates we will also release an update to the renderer that will adress some of the subjective feedback, such as "game is too bright or colorful". We will tone that down a little bit and even incorporate the suggestion to make it dependent on the zoom level. We also implement the suggestion to make the non-core stripes less prominent.

More on that in the upcoming news.

freezy wrote:

While we are working on fixes for objective problems (some of which were reported in this thread), in one of the May updates we will also release an update to the renderer that will adress some of the subjective feedback, such as "game is too bright or colorful". We will tone that down a little bit and even incorporate the suggestion to make it dependent on the zoom level. We also implement the suggestion to make the non-core stripes less prominent.

More on that in the upcoming news.

I know this is purely a preferential thing, but since there are so many varying opinions on this rather small issue, wouldn't it make sense to just make it so one can enable/disable the stripes, and/or enable/disable the intensity setting (high vs. low) or better yet, give the user a slider popup that lets them set the tone intensity (i.e., scale of 1 - 10, where 1 is dimmest and hard to notice, and 10 is brightest and most obnoxious)?

Since it's an issue of personal taste, and one that goes back and forth, "fixing" it never fixes it. But giving us, the users, the ability to adjust it would "fix" it for everyone.

Stumpy Pete wrote:

Since it's an issue of personal taste, and one that goes back and forth, "fixing" it never fixes it. But giving us, the users, the ability to adjust it would "fix" it for everyone.

Everything can be called personal taste. A case can be made that the stripes add value because it makes it easier to see which provinces may rebel at day change...but so does the smoke that was used in Canvas and is still there now.

The orange glowing/throbbing stripes on recently conquered provinces doesn't add value to the player who conquered them or give additional information to the player as it is just an extension of the smoke.

The tags that now follow each unit around adds value but at a cost that it blocks the players ability to see the battlefield clearly. So is that also a personal taste that someone wants to see the battlefield better and not be blocked by a tag where all that info can be found by just clicking on the unit?

The movement lines of units that now show up continually also add value but at a cost that if you have many units moving around you can't tell where your troops are going because of all the lines. So would that be personal taste that I would like to hover each unit to check on where they are going instead of having to guess or stop and start units to figure out what I did an hour ago?

KISS - Keep it Simple Stupid...was a programming motto from the 80's. Seems to be a good starting point 40 years later.

Stumpy Pete wrote:

Yes, I don't like those always-on lines, either. But I can tolerate them. I don't like the tags always showing either, but I'm "making do" with them. However, rather than complaining about how much you hate them, do like me, and offer the suggestion of making them optional via added game settings in the "Classic View" low-res mode buttons sub-menu

I started playing Call of war since its inception on steam and I always let go of everything bad that bytro did to the game, but this is the last straw. It is not possible that bytro is unable to listen to its users and return the much appreciated canvas graphics, and because of that the game is dying.

I've always used canvas graphics and it's not because I can't use improved graphics, it's just because I always liked canvas graphics better.

Now I can't play call of war because I can't get used to the new graphics and for that reason I'll have to quit the game, it was a pleasure to be part of the community for so many years.

Hopefully in the not too distant future bytro will listen to its users and canvas graphics will return.

(Forgive my bad English, I come from the community in Spanish)

#RestoreCANVAS

Hello all.

I've never actually used Canvas (if I have, I can't remember). But I feel like all this is an overreaction, whatever good Canvas may have been.

Think of it like that: if your theory of Bytro getting rid of old players is true, it means Bytro has no passion for the game and no respect for the players, so trying to convince them by insulting them is a waste of time.

If they're saying the truth, we're not accomplishing much by insulting them either. It's disrespectful to the devs and staff who may have been working hard to improve the player experience, and now are treated by the community like this. Not only is it extra work for them, but it's also demotivating.

Maybe Bytro wasn't even insulting you or didn't mean it the bad way.

In a society, if you want something to be true, you will convince yourself it's true, no matter if you have proof or not. Even if the original message was respectful and understandable, the people can always find new interpretations and the rumour will have nothing to do with truth in the end, while the original message is forgotten somewhere or is so different that no one believes it was where the rumour came from.

I'm not saying Bytro didn't or did insult you (I don't know) but it's easy to misinterpret anything if you want to. Please rethink if this is the right thing to do.

I don't see the behaviour of staff in this thread being disrespectful or wrong. The frequent updates and improvements come with bugs that can ruin the experience of all players and have to be dealt with urgently. So, it may not be easy to fix every bug and track all the feedback, especially if any changes come with many people pointing out new problems. I'd like to believe that they took all your reports into consideration and are going to improve the customizability of the game in the future.

I hope we can turn off fog of war and the bright, excessive colouring of the borders in WebGL one day. Also hope the red points are over the army icons and change colour when the army is selected so that it's easier to orientate in messy battles.

Fun fact: I've heard there's a strategy of splitting out your army into a ton of little armies so your enemy gets very confused over what armies he's actually seeing. Maybe improving the red dots would kill this strategy and harm the variety of this game... that's the reason they didn't fix it!

I don't mean we shouldn't give feedback. What Ike is doing is of course right, pointing out what exactly is wrong in WebGL. Just please don't get in rage too much, I understand the perspective (used to hate 1.5) but I don't think such feedback will achieve anything (it doesn't seem to have achieved anything anyway, but hope is always there).

I actually belong to the new players who spend a week (or 3 months, same thing) and leave.

Whatever, I feel like I've missed a lot, so I hope I can still find that somewhere.

#ShowMeCANVAS

News from FP. Ded dots are returned and...

Hornetkeeper wrote:

I hope we can turn off fog of war and the bright, excessive colouring of the borders in WebGL one day. Also hope the red points are over the army icons and change colour when the army is selected so that it's easier to orientate in messy battles.

Fun fact: I've heard there's a strategy of splitting out your army into a ton of little armies so your enemy gets very confused over what armies he's actually seeing. Maybe improving the red dots would kill this strategy and harm the variety of this game... that's the reason they didn't fix it!

#ShowMeCANVAS

I will forward the proposal to highlight the hovered/selected red dot for implementation.

ike53 wrote:

I have attached a pic below but my description of what is the problem should be sufficient.

Subject: The red stripes that tell you your province may revolt.

They oscillate. Meaning the stripes 'throb' at you.

A good player will spend most of the game attacking and moving forward and will most likely see the red stripes 90% of the time he plays...

While this had good intentions, can you imagine staring at a screen that throbs red at you all the time????

It is damn annoying.

We have smoke for the ones who may rebel and we also have red throbbing ugly red stripes. I would be interested in another perspective on why we have 2 ways to view potential province revolts instead of just one and why in the world having red throbbing stripes in your view all day is a good thing.

Programmers, would you want to see 2/3 rds of your code be a different color and oscillate on your screen all day?

Isn't the smoke good enough?

Will forward to make the revolting stripes less in your face by lowering their saturation and brightness a bit. In general we wanna keep them though as we also got positive feedback on them, the smoke is easy to miss. So the compromise is to make them stand out a bit less.

In low graphics mode they are not present btw, so if you really can not stand them that might be an alternative.

freezy wrote:

Hornetkeeper wrote:

Espero que algún día podamos apagar la niebla de guerra y el color brillante y excesivo de las fronteras en WebGL. También espere que los puntos rojos estén sobre los íconos del ejército y cambien de color cuando se selecciona el ejército para que sea más fácil orientarse en batallas complicadas.

Dato curioso: he oído que existe una estrategia para dividir tu ejército en una tonelada de pequeños ejércitos para que tu enemigo se confunda mucho sobre qué ejércitos está viendo en realidad. Tal vez mejorar los puntos rojos mataría esta estrategia y dañaría la variedad de este juego ... ¡esa es la razón por la que no lo arreglaron!

#ShowMeCANVAS

¡Gracias! Tenemos la opción de desactivar Fog of War (junto a otras opciones) ya en el cliente beta, que lanzamos como versión opt-in en la última actualización. Puede cambiar a él a través de la configuración de la cuenta. Pero prepárate para que gran parte de la interfaz de usuario cambie

Enviaré la propuesta para resaltar el punto rojo seleccionado / suspendido para su implementación.

ike53 wrote:

He adjuntado una foto a continuación, pero mi descripción de cuál es el problema debería ser suficiente.

Asunto: Las franjas rojas que le indican que su provincia puede rebelarse.

Oscilan. Es decir, las rayas te "palpitan".

Un buen jugador pasará la mayor parte del juego atacando y avanzando y lo más probable es que vea las franjas rojas el 90% del tiempo que juega ...

Si bien esto tuvo buenas intenciones, ¿te imaginas mirando una pantalla que te palpita en rojo todo el tiempo ????

Es muy molesto.

Tenemos humo para los que pueden rebelarse y también tenemos rayas rojas, rojas, feas y palpitantes. Me interesaría otra perspectiva sobre por qué tenemos 2 formas de ver las posibles revueltas provinciales en lugar de solo una y por qué en el mundo tener rayas rojas y palpitantes en su vista todo el día es algo bueno.

Programadores, ¿les gustaría ver 2/3 rds de su código con un color diferente y oscilar en su pantalla todo el día?

¿No es lo suficientemente bueno el humo?

Avanzará para hacer las rayas repugnantes menos en su cara al reducir un poco su saturación y brillo. En general, queremos conservarlos, ya que también obtuvimos comentarios positivos sobre ellos, el humo es fácil de pasar por alto. Entonces, el compromiso es hacer que se destaquen un poco menos.

En el modo de gráficos bajos no están presentes por cierto, por lo que si realmente no puedes soportarlos, esa podría ser una alternativa.

I repeat it again, this is my humble opinion as a call of war veteran.

(Forgive my bad english)

That would shut a lot of us up! LOL

Hornetkeeper wrote:

If they're saying the truth, we're not accomplishing much by insulting them either. It's disrespectful to the devs and staff who may have been working hard to improve the player experience, and now are treated by the community like this. Not only is it extra work for them, but it's also demotivating.

Hornetkeeper wrote:

I don't see the behaviour of staff in this thread being disrespectful or wrong. The frequent updates and improvements come with bugs that can ruin the experience of all players and have to be dealt with urgently. So, it may not be easy to fix every bug and track all the feedback, especially if any changes come with many people pointing out new problems. I'd like to believe that they took all your reports into consideration and are going to improve the customizability of the game in the future.

As to the idea of "customizability", there really isn't any customizations, other than the political view changes and a couple other minor user settings. I've offered major settings customizations that falls within this definition (i.e., my proposal for the "Canvas View" set of toggles for the low-res WebGL version of the interface), but real customization doesn't seem to be on the books with them. And I don't think they are ever going to allow it.

What I'd like to see — and what I've proposed several times in the past, and for many years — is that they allow modding of the game (i.e., users creating game modifications of game-play rules, map geography, buildings and units) by dedicated players for individual matches. Such modded games could be joined by anyone who has downloaded a modified game pack for an individual gaming server.

I've also proposed that there could be portable servers for both offline LAN play or for single-player play (THIS would greatly reduce the demands on the company's servers). I've even proposed charging money or Gold premium points to acquire these features…which would be a far more popular way for the company to make money without pissing off all the gold-haters out there (I won't name names!)

You see, I'm a software engineer and have experience in code design, algorithm modifications, game design, and various other aspects related to this. And I'm also a fan of the modded maps of the Civilization series of games. And I can tell you, that there are many very talented programmers like myself who would be eager to volunteer their skills and time to create rich and vivid content to bring this game to new and far-reaching levels.

And it'd be easy to do all this without breaking the core code of the game. Each modified game pack could be only usable once it's been: pre-approved by the volunteer staff for following the basic rules of decency in dialogue, map names, unit avatars, etc.; pre-approved by the developers for code compatibility; and pre-approved by their in-house testers and/or the beta testers for playability and pizazz (that "wow" factor).

I'm talking about submitting ***FREE*** content to a company that has to meet deadlines and stay within a budget. And the only compensation that most of these great contributors would ever need is recognition for their contributions (i.e., their name on the game mod, their chat color and font is unique as content-contributors), and maybe a gold-stipend and/or high-command membership, like the volunteer staff gets.

That cost-free compensation would give the company a more-than-fair justification for making modded content only downloadable by regular users by using Gold or purchasing High Command, for example. Or, the company could even group several mods together into specially-purchased "bonus" materials for the game (thus keeping the basic game free).

Now, I've also pointed out in the past, that even if the source code isn't opened to modification (to protect their proprietary codebase and keep it from being "broken" by lower-skilled programmers), they could still separate the code-base's GUI and user-ended operability into a special modded core that can be fully edited and updated while making the [already-editable] rules-set into a part of a pre-packaged modification codebase (thus keeping only the game engine and back-end server-side core code safe and "proprietary").

They could even make the modification codebase downloadable only by pre-approved modders that have proven their skills and their dedication to the game (and not having a past proving a deliberately malicious intent to try to break the game). And, by combining that pre-approval process for modders with the need to have all modded game files judged by the testers and volunteers before release to the main gaming community, there would thus be a two-layered level of protection from bad content or poor content that otherwise would waste the time of the staff.

Alas, I don't think the developers or the owners at Bytro were ever interested in letting this game get user mods, even if some of those wonderful game ideas did contribute to their bottom line (indirectly) through the purchase of more Gold or purchase of mod packs.

Sometimes, I think my ideas are wasted on the wrong people. But I truly wished they'd see the merits of my ideas, especially when I offer them ways to make more money. Tell me this: could I not be a more loyal member of the Call of War gaming community, both to the game and the company that makes it???

Who knows? Maybe…someday…they will see the wisdom of opening up at-least part of the codebase to user modification. I mean, if the much larger company and development team behind the Civilization series can make real money off of opening up their code for modification, then surely the folks at Bytro can do it.

ike53 wrote:

Stumpy Pete wrote:

Yes, I don't like those always-on lines, either. But I can tolerate them. I don't like the tags always showing either, but I'm "making do" with them. However, rather than complaining about how much you hate them, do like me, and offer the suggestion of making them optional via added game settings in the "Classic View" low-res mode buttons sub-menu

Apparently you haven't read many of my posts in this thread...I have given visual examples of many things that make GL less palatable to Canvas users. And instead of doing their job (writing code) I have shown where items could be improved to make it more like Canvas and let Bytro programmers do what they do...I am also attempting in my posts - for this thread - NOT to become redundant as I have attempted to point out differences and why it isn't as good. So I do take offense that all I am doing is 'complaining'.

Still, if I have missed something of yours, please forgive, because I don't always read every last thing from all players....but I do try, within the thread I'm participating in.

That said, many of the ideas you have proposed seem to be more of a fine-tuning which could be done regardless of my canvas simulation. And in the case of those ideas which are more complex, some of them could be added to my proposed list of toggles for the low-res WebGl "Classic View" settings. The point is to make the idea of the implementation realistic, doable, and have an already-established feel to them, i.e,, a specific place within the settings column, which I gave the code for, to ease the implementation of the GUI side of things.

....anything to help!

Hornetkeeper wrote:

I hope we can turn off fog of war and the bright, excessive colouring of the borders in WebGL one day. Also hope the red points are over the army icons and change colour when the army is selected so that it's easier to orientate in messy battles.

Fun fact: I've heard there's a strategy of splitting out your army into a ton of little armies so your enemy gets very confused over what armies he's actually seeing. Maybe improving the red dots would kill this strategy and harm the variety of this game... that's the reason they didn't fix it!

As to that so-called "strategy" of splitting up into a bunch of smaller groups to confuse the enemy....it really only works against very new players....and I mean "new", when they are actively watching. If you split up your forces too late, i.e., just before an artillery takes it's shot, then all those split-up forces will still be hit because they are within "melee" range of the actual [current] target.

The same is true for all ranged and air attacks on ground or sea units. The same is similarly true for melee combat. If you pull part of a force beyond the range of the enemy, leaving some of your own force in-between, the retreating part of your force can still be caught-up in the battle if it's within melee range of the force that's left-behind, even though it's not within range of the enemy force, but that's just because that enemy force is within melee range of that left-behind force

Now, this strategy of splitting up does work when your opponent isn't paying attention. More to the point, rather than splitting up into multiple targets, just split up into two. By splitting off ALL but one single member of the former group (preferably the weakest, slowest, and/or most injured unit), the enemy ranged strike or air strike will continue to target the abandoned unit. This is particularly handy when the enemy is very powerful, and by abandoning a weaker lone unit, the enemy (e.g., a stack of 50 bombers) wastes its shot on a target that could be destroyed by one bomber, per se.

If needed, to hasten the distance between the abandoned and split-off forces, use Forced March on both stacks…in opposite directions. Just remember to turn off Forced March soon after the attack, or else you'll be fleeing too fast and far, getting needless damage just for running. Another thing…if you do this tactic too soon, you're more likely for it to get noticed.

But waiting until it's almost too late (and you have to judge the time needed), means that even if your opponent is paying attention, they might not be paying attention perfectly (i.e., glancing at another battle, watching TV, checking email, while only looking at the battle every few minutes).

Hopefully you can make the most of this strategy, when needed. Please note, this REALLY doesn't work when dealing with nukes. In fact, this strategy works against you most-especially when dealing with nuclear bombers. That's because a nuke bomber can only hit if it makes it past your AA. And if you've left it a very weak target to hit — and that target is outside the melee range of the main stack — then your main stack is going to suffer terribly when that nuclear bomber easily destroys the target (without interference from your AA), and every other target within the much-wider nuclear blast range (it act's like the melee range affect, but is devastatingly-wide and far-reaching on the battlefield).

Stumpy Pete wrote:

As to the idea of "customizability", there really isn't any customizations, other than the political view changes and a couple other minor user settings. I've offered major settings customizations that falls within this definition (i.e., my proposal for the "Canvas View" set of toggles for the low-res WebGL version of the interface), but real customization doesn't seem to be on the books with them. And I don't think they are ever going to allow it.

What I'd like to see — and what I've proposed several times in the past, and for many years — is that they allow modding of the game (i.e., users creating game modifications of game-play rules, map geography, buildings and units) by dedicated players for individual matches. Such modded games could be joined by anyone who has downloaded a modified game pack for an individual gaming server.

Saying that as only a gamer, been a long time ago since I even tried coding anything. I like simple terms on this matter

Stumpy Pete wrote:

As to that so-called "strategy" of splitting up into a bunch of smaller groups to confuse the enemy....it really only works against very new players....and I mean "new", when they are actively watching. If you split up your forces too late, i.e., just before an artillery takes it's shot, then all those split-up forces will still be hit because they are within "melee" range of the actual [current] target.

If you have 10 medium tanks against a RRG stack but it has heavy tanks ahead of it, so you can't use the meds, you spread them all over, a tank every 2km, so that your enemy can't even tell where to click to attack your 30 SP Artillery, which is about to come in and destroy everything he has. That's an example of how you use it. Of course it doesn't really work, it's a joke. But you need to adapt and overcome... instead of being in disadvantage because the game is confusing, take advantage of that and make it confusing for your enemy!

Hornetkeeper wrote:

It's a joke strategy mate... one chat friend tried it out. I know the flaws of the strat

If you have 10 medium tanks against a RRG stack but it has heavy tanks ahead of it, so you can't use the meds, you spread them all over, a tank every 2km, so that your enemy can't even tell where to click to attack your 30 SP Artillery, which is about to come in and destroy everything he has. That's an example of how you use it. Of course it doesn't really work, it's a joke. But you need to adapt and overcome... instead of being in disadvantage because the game is confusing, take advantage of that and make it confusing for your enemy!

Stumpy Pete says "Let's have some fun with pirate math!"

Of course, you can't shoot down a nuclear rocket, but at least by pulling together, you have a 50/50 odds of minimizing the damage by more than half. That's because of the 'X' factor (a chance multiplier with a range of 0.0 to 1.0) with which you can get lucky once in awhile, where that 'X' factor will be closer to 0.0 than to 1.0, in which case the total damage will be significantly less, overall, than the maximum possible expected.

If you stay spread out into multiple stacks, that 'X' factor gets recalculated for each stack that is within range. And, with the greater amount of stacks, statistically-speaking, the more likely the overall average value of the various 'X' factors of each stack will trend toward 0.5, thus guaranteeing approximately 50% damage from the nuke overall.

But if everything is stacked together, and that 'X' factor is only calculated once — and by chance it rates closer to 0.0 (you have a 50% chance of your range falling within [0.0 – 0.5]) — then your overall damage is going to be very light. And in extremely rare cases, if that 'X' factor can reach 0.0, then your units will not be hurt at all. HOWEVER, I'm not sure if there's a "minimum" 'X' factor for nukes, which would thus be greater than 0.0....though there probably should be.

Now, grouping together is a risk in itself because, just as you have a chance of very light damage, you also have a chance of very great damage (i.e., you have a 50% chance of your range falling within [0.5 – 1.0]). So, if you want to play it safe, and guarantee a greater likelihood of getting hit by roughly half the power of the nuke, then spread out. But if you want to chance getting a lower damage overall, then group it up, and roll the dice. Spreading out thus trends the 'X' factor to a known value (0.5), but grouping together gives much more random chance to that 'X' factor....an unknown value with range 0 – 1.

BTW, That 'X' factor is likely a floating point or decimal number with higher accuracy (i.e., [0.00000 – 1.00000]) which determines the "luck" of every volley. And, given the huge damage potential of every nuke, that higher precision to the decimal value is quite important.

I don't know if the currently-listed percentage of possible hit power is the limiting factor of that (i.e., [0.0 – 0.79] for a 79% strength maximum), or if it's a separate value (i.e., that 79% is multiplied times the 'X' factor, such as 0.79 * [0.0 – 1.0] => [0.0 – 7.9]) but with that last example, you can see that the resulting multiplier of the two values combined would have the same result anyway.

uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh WHAT

Modding would indeed be nice and it was discussed in our company already. Sadly there are too many hurdles to this and it would be a big project, so we won't do it for the foreseeable future.

I am also not aware of any free2play non-client always-online games of reasonable size that allow modding tbh.

Also fully customizable graphics options where players can tweak every detail and every color won't be done. We try to minimize the amount of different view mode combinations because each additional option multiplies the testing and developing workload, because for each change it has to be made sure that it works with all possible settings combinations. We are currently doing some shader changes and testing and tweaking them through all existing view modes was already a pain tbh. For example fixing something in one view mode sometimes resulted in an undesired change in another view mode so after each change you have to test everything over again I appreciate all your suggestions in that direction though.

Hopefully the next bunch of changes will already be a better compromise.

Stumpy Pete wrote:

Of course, you can't shoot down a nuclear rocket, but at least by pulling together, you have a 50/50 odds of minimizing the damage by more than half. That's because of the 'X' factor (a chance multiplier with a range of 0.0 to 1.0) with which you can get lucky once in awhile, where that 'X' factor will be closer to 0.0 than to 1.0, in which case the total damage will be significantly less, overall, than the maximum possible expected.

A lot of you should really check out the visuals on the beta client or frontier + beta client mode.

It looks a lot cleaner and adds more of the military commander feel. I think most of you in the #RestoreCanvas camp would really like it.

Do keep in mind that it's in beta mode so expect a lot of bugs and errors but it looks and feels a lot cleaner!

hEY Tribute look at my "Moving On" thread u would like it

freezy wrote:

Correction: Since CoW1.5 the x-factor range is between 80% and 120%.

Was this ever listed in the release notes?