Message delay

[LarsLars]

Hello all,

I have played spmbt from the beginning and development has been promising. Winspmbt was great step towards perfect game!

There is ONE very annoying thing on the game however...

I am sort of player that I like to read messages very carefully when it's something really important battling in question. Therefore I keep message delay at the maximum. However, think about situation that you have many tanks against infantry. And infantry is shooting tanks with some guns that cannot hurt them. You have to watch ALL these unimportant shots and the game lasts forever!

Immediately when winspmbt was out, I contacted customer support and told them that it would be great if messages would wait the amount of time you have selected, OR when you press mouse button or enter/space. This would mean you could really watch carefully all the important shots, but you could "skip" unimportant battling (tanks vs infantry for example).

Now that I see winspmbt going already on version 2.0, and I see even smaller fixes have been applied to this great product, but not this small but important fix, I am VERY disappointed.

I have been coding programs for living for over 7 years now and I strongly suspect that message delay is just one or two lines of code like "Wait(MESSAGE_DELAY_MS);". Is it so hard to make it "Wait(MESSAGE_DELAY_MS) or Keypressed();" ??

Or is this feature already in product? How come I am missing it? How do YOU handle this situation, some of you want to read messages carefully too, I assume?

Yours truly,
Sergeant
Petri Simolin

[Pyros]

Hi Petri,

Several new features could be added to the game engine, but this is something that the developers Don G. and Andy G. should decide.

From what I know, all their development time has been consumed for upgrading the previous WinSPMBT version.

What you mentioned in your post may be an interesting new feature, but you must understand that this feature could be less critical than something else, so maybe there wasn't enough time for it.

One other thing that you must take into consideration is that even the slightest modification of the game's engine may create secondary side-effects to other compartments of the game (the needed time for the QA of every modification is a serious limiting factor).

Also, I would like to suggest you, to post your comments in this forum (rather than contacting the customer support), as this is the most direct way to contact the developers of the game and obtain an answer.

I wish you good gaming,

Pyros

[DRG]

When Andy gets back on line I'll have him explain it to you but as I recall it has to do with the spacebar and other keys that would be handy to clear the messages already assigned other functions but I **may** be confusing that reason with another change. The suggestion WAS forwarded to us on July 21 and DID go on to the to-do list and the change WAS discussed. You are the one and only person to ever request this. Personally, I always play with the message delay to zero and I can still read any of the messages I may be interested in and it does not slow down the overall gameplay.

Don

[LarsLars]

Thanks for the comments/answers.

DRG said:
The suggestion WAS forwarded to us on July 21 and DID go on to the to-do list and the change WAS discussed.

I am glad to hear my message was forwarded to the developers.

You are the one and only person to ever request this. Personally,

I am very surprised! Most of my winspmbt-friends strongly agree with me on this one, but I guess they think issue is not important enough to tell the developers about it. :-)

I always play with the message delay to zero and I can still read any of the messages I may be interested in and it does not slow down the overall gameplay.

I am generally _very_ fast reader, but still, I don't have enough time to really READ and UNDERSTAND all the messages on low message delays.

On small battles with not so many troops, it's not a problem to keep message delay low (or high if you are not in a hurry;-), but when you are playing very large battle with maaaaany troops, if you set message delay high, the battle lasts *forever*, and on the other hand, if you set it to low, when view changes from unit to another (on enemys turn) quickly, you get easily mixed up "what exactly happened and what unit shot what unit now?"

Maybe the highest setting of message delay could be "Until key pressed"?

This really is annoyance on its current form, as you either don't have time to see everything (at least I want to know details!:-) or you need to watch EVERY message (the unimportant ones about men shooting tanks with pistol too!) for very long.

Now that I think of it, message delay should be dynamically adjusted by game engine according to the importance and length of the message. (just kidding:-)

Thanks,
Petri Simolin

[LarsLars]

No news on this issue?

Petri Simolin

[DRG]

We are dealing with other issues ATM. If it can be done it probably will be

Don

[LarsLars]

Thank you for Your effort in advance, even if it is not doable.

Yours truly
Petri "Commander" Simolin