AFLobby Beta 4.2

And everytime i try to login, a messagebox comes up for like a millionth of a second, dissapears right away, and puts me back onto the login box, no worky.

Actually i complained many times before, especially on spring forums 😛
I use ubuntu and it doesn’t make a folder for each zip file, if you zip up files, it should be in a folder, it’s less hassle for people like me, so stop being lazy and put it in a dam folder!!

I am trying your lobby and after I spoke with you in the chat, i’ll put all my suggestions/comments here.

I will just comment on things I ran into when using this, some things might be unimportant.

– I had to update my java version (which was pretty old), so it didn’t start at first, but it took a while befory i noticed this was the problem. I got the message that the main class could not be found. I had downloaded the installer and installed in a subdirectory in my spring direcory. I thought this might be the problem, so I moved the files to the root of the spring dir. When that didn’t work I downloaded the zipfile, and extracted that one too. The zip file had the file lib/AbsoluteLayout.jar, which was not in the installer it seems. With the zipped version I ran the bat file, and it got me this error:
Exception in thread “main” java.lang.UnsupportedClassVersionError: Bad version number in .class file. This was a hint to upgrade my java 😉

– the first run wizard was not entirely clear for me. It might be a good idea to add the exact filenames (or is this not portable?) to the wizard. alternatively you could give a hint where the file can be found (eg. unitsync.dll in the spring installation directory). Even now I don’t know what the “Single player” path is about, or what file i am supposed to find there.
It was also not clear to me what this glest was (since i have the spring entrance). As discussed in the chat you could put in something like “If yu want to play Glest” and “If yu want to play Spring”

– game hosting:
* the minimap flickers randomly
* I cannot make the username column smaller in order to widen the small columns in the back (too small to read the column header).
* adding bots is slightly confusing. There is no visual hint when adding the second bot (and there is for the first bot). This makes it seem like nothing happend. This might be confusing to me because i was expecting the second bot to be shown below the first.

– really nice to have: a way to fix the players/bots to specific start positions. In fact this was the reason i was trying other lobby’s. I like to play a game against bots with a friend sometimes.
From the spring changelog:
Lobby interface (unitsync, game setup): Added new start positions mode Choose Before Game. Useful for AIs, you can select the starting position of players from the client.

– is there a way to see map start positions? there is a button, but its greyed out.

– what does “the start-> get help” button do?

I’ve played a successfull game (from a lobby perspective that is 😉 ) with the lobby, everything seems to work. It still needs alot of polish, but it seems a sound lobby.

Thanks,
Merijn

Just needs a little GUI Tweaking u know 😛

There might be a problem with the registration of people leaving a hosted battle room. I hosted a battle for testing, and I didn’t look at it for some time. I had forgotten to set a pasword and in the end there were a lot of players listed in the chat, some even multiple times. But those players were not actually there anymore (some even were offline altogether). There were no part messages in the chatlog. The battle list did show the correct amount of players tho (only me).

In the channel windows, the player count, “xx players listed”, becomes incorrect over time. May be related to my previous post.

additionally, it took me a while to find the button to part the channel. I thought those buttons were related to the channel user list at first.

I feel at the moment that an AFLobby release would be unwise. There is a lot of talk about spring lobby and releasing just to compete would be an unwise move as it would simply hurt AFLobbys standing in the face of spring lbobies current popularity wave.

Instead I am working on lots of GUI modifications which should change things quite a bit, however there are kinks that need to be ironed out and more features that need finishing or implementing.