Beta Progress

Thanks to the feedback from the beta testing team I have managed to iron out a few more bugs in the NetZilch code, some of which were quite serious showstoppers:

• Games failing to start.  This was because the game didn't have a list of players and this caused some... issues.
• Lobby games not going away.  I have restructured the way the lobby receives instructions from the server so this works better now
  
• Game passwords.  There was a mismatch between the text restrictions on the game creation password field and the game joining password field.  They have now been standardised.
• Opponent scores.  You can now click on an opponent's score sheet to see their tabulated scores.
• Help panels.  Now the help panels should all go away when you click on any of their "ok" buttons.
• Lobby breaking.  When the last player logs out, the lobby scope gets deleted and therefore link to the lobby shared object is lost.  I've now tweaked the server to recreate the lobby if it's not already running and attach a shared object to it properly
• Better server code.  I have made a number of structural and functional improvements to the server side code, namely the ApplicationAdaptor that runs the main lobby has been drastically simplified, proper usage of the roomJoin() and roomLeave() methods makes life easier and the general feeling of understanding has increased.
• Single 5 not being added.  If you rolled 1115 or 5551 or any combination of 3+ of a kind and some 1's or 5's, the extra dice were not being added to your score.  This was a glitch both parts of the engine code, server and client side.
• More legible chat window.  Fixed the font sizes to be the same, moved the text box a little bit and made the text optimised for readability rather than animation.

I'm sure there might be a few things that I've left off this list but that's all that I can think of at the moment.  I've been working quite hard on this for the last few days, I expect this to continue for the next week or so.

To all you beta testers (you know who you are), thank you!  Keep testing, keep playing, keep sending in bug reports.  If I might suggest, give the beta test login details to a few friends and ask them to login at 9pm, local time.  Have a few games, see if you can find a few bugs.  Who knows, you might even see me online... :)

G.

Beta Testers Wanted

Fancy testing out the online 2 player version of Zilch? It's pretty much ready to rock but I do need a body of sensible people with a few friends who are willing to put the network game through it's paces. It's pretty much the same as the single player game but you get to play online with your friends. You can even have a little chat with them using the in-game chat. How sweet :)

So what can you do?  The first dozen or so people who express interest by leaving a comment to this post will get a password for the beta test area.  You should then arrange a time with a friend to both login at the same time and have a few games of NetZilch.  If you find a bug then you should do this:

1. Check it's actually a bug.  See if it's doing something you don't expect it to do or something that it actually shouldn't do.
2. Try and make the bug repeat itself.  If you can't make the bug happen at will, I won't be able to make it happen at will and therefore can't fix it.
3. Get in touch, explaining what the bug is and, in as much details as possible, how I can make this bug happen for me.

I can't emphasise point 3 enough, if you don't tell me how to repeat the bug then I can't fix it.

If you're still interested then drop me a comment and I'll zip you access to the beta test.  First come first served!

G.