- Maps that display the "this map does not have black at position 0, please wait" error. These maps end up loading but with ugly white background soil. I found several examples of these. Eg: http://wmdb.org/16374
OK, there's definitely something going wrong there, since when that map is loaded in W:A, it looks fine. Something to do with how HostingBuddy generates the waLV chunk. I've asked Deadcode so we're investigating.
- Maps that have more than 64 colors and destructible terrain. Sometimes HB says "WMDB map requires some processing to fix (Map colour palette is too large (256) but could be reduced to 112.), please wait". Hostingbuddy should check to see if destructible terrain is enabled, and in those cases dither down to a maximum of 64 colors. Eg: http://wmdb.org/6247 In some instances, I noticed that HB does in fact dither the map down from 256 to 64 colors successfully though – eg. http://wmdb.org/23092 (even though I distinctly remember playing this one with white soil before and thus have habitually skipped it since)
I suspect this is closely related to the above issue.
One thing to note, though, HostingBuddy does not dither down the map - it simply removes unused colors. W:A expects the host to send them a map with no more than 113 colors, even if some are never used, so HB simply reshuffles and compacts the palette to accommodate W:A's requirements.
- Maps that are simply uploaded with the wrong (or unconventional) settings for the scheme. For example, roper maps without "water drops", or mole shopper maps with borders or without holes automatically placed. I found many examples of these. Some pre-processing checks could possibly look for some of these things and alert the host. For example: "This roper map does not have water drops. Type !wd to enable them". I can come up with a more comprehensive list if you want. Eg: http://wmdb.org/5068 (no holes), http://wmdb.org/13173 (has a border)
I've pushed out a change that prints such map settings up-front when you load a map, as well as make more settings customizable for both PNG and random maps. We could also enforce map settings in the scheme configuration, e.g. enforce that maps have no borders in mole shopper games (i.e. the default overrides the map setting, but a user setting can override the default). Something like that is already done for Elite (Fruit island maps only, by default).
- Maps which (less importantly) simply don't conform to my personal preferences. For example, I don't much care for ultra-long Rope Race maps that take hours to complete. And some maps are objectively just plain bad, eg: http://wmdb.org/586. But I can live with skipping these maps manually.
http://wmdb.org/586 seems to be rated low, so HostingBuddy should never pick it. Does it?
Would it be possible/feasible to store a personal blacklist locally on each user's PC? That way you don't have to tie nicknames to IPs or anything like that. And with a local blacklist, my personal preferences in maps wouldn’t affect others' ability to play unglitched maps. The only downside seems to be that messing with local files would probably require users to download an update. Perhaps automatic map caching might also then be possible ?.
It would require protocol changes, which are always a complicated and messy affair. This is basically Internet cookies, but for W:A. If we were to go into that direction, the most beneficial course would probably be to get rid of the chat interface and integrate HB into W:A's interface, (which all is ever so non-trivial of course). For now, I think we should approach the problem from other angles.
Forums
Show Posts