Hey everyone,
I have only recently joined the BGA community, mainly with the purpose of playing Tichu. But I soon realized that playing Tichu on BGA has some quirks, and as a web developer I had an interest in fixing them. Apparently the original Tichu developers are not active anymore, so I am in the process of "taking over" and already have an updated Tichu version that will hopefully be rolled out in 1-2 weeks. While preparing for that I would love to get some feedback on the changes I made and ideally find some volunteers for testing.
What has changed? (a detailed developer oriented list can be found here: https://github.com/bro314/tichu/commits)
Delays were removed or decreased: Virtually everything that happened came along with an artificial 1 second delay for not good reason. For example each "no bet" event had such a delay without any benefit. Such delays were removed. The delay after a "pass" was reduced to 300 ms, which makes the game much quicker and behave more like other card games on BGA. Details: https://github.com/bro314/tichu/commit/ ... 0d5f4e1c11
All action buttons get locked or removed immediately when clicking an action button. A lot of players had reported that there is high chance for misclicks, because you don't know whether a button click has registered or not. Tichu is now using the standard "lock" mechanism that also most other BGA games are using: You can only click another action button once the action has been processed by the server and the updates have been applied in the browser.
Nicer colors: The yellow panel and the red border were change to be slightly transparent. The box shadow of cards is smaller. The pass card looks a little nicer. The selection in "My Hand" is done by pushing cards up instead of giving them a yellow border.
Nicer player info at the table: Added points next to hand card count. Bigger font for name and counts. Better text overflow for long names.
Improved table layout: The overall table layout is now based on a css grid layout and should behave nicer for all screen sizes, both for list and square table. The "current trick" link and the Mahjong indicator also have a clearer positioning in that new layout grid.
Responsive card overlap: The overlap of the cards is now based on how many cards are displayed and how large the container is, and changes reactively. That allows nice resize behavior, but especially helps to establish smaller areas for played cards in the square table layout: You only need much space, if a lot of cards are played together, which happens rarely. So small overlap most of the time, large overlap rarely, and overall not such a large container is needed.
Fixed buttons above "My Hand": A lot of players have asked for fixed buttons close to "My Hand". Done! The most important buttons were moved into a button row above "My Hand". The "Tichu" button is always "out of the way" to the far right.
The blue user preference links has been moved from above the hand to below the hand.
Often a "play bomb" button would should even if the player did not have a bomb. This has been fixed.
Here are some screenshots of the same game situation from the perspective of four different players with different layouts and screen sizes: https://imgur.com/a/xQvBVrl
Please let me know in this thread, if you have concerns about any of the changes. That would allow me to fix these issues before rolling out the new version.
Please use the BGA bug tracker for voting on or discussing existing bugs and creating new ones: https://boardgamearena.com/bugs?game=1237. I hope to get around to also fixing some other stuff, for example allowing "auto-collect" in real-time games.
* section removed by Admin *
I have only recently joined the BGA community, mainly with the purpose of playing Tichu. But I soon realized that playing Tichu on BGA has some quirks, and as a web developer I had an interest in fixing them. Apparently the original Tichu developers are not active anymore, so I am in the process of "taking over" and already have an updated Tichu version that will hopefully be rolled out in 1-2 weeks. While preparing for that I would love to get some feedback on the changes I made and ideally find some volunteers for testing.
What has changed? (a detailed developer oriented list can be found here: https://github.com/bro314/tichu/commits)
Delays were removed or decreased: Virtually everything that happened came along with an artificial 1 second delay for not good reason. For example each "no bet" event had such a delay without any benefit. Such delays were removed. The delay after a "pass" was reduced to 300 ms, which makes the game much quicker and behave more like other card games on BGA. Details: https://github.com/bro314/tichu/commit/ ... 0d5f4e1c11
All action buttons get locked or removed immediately when clicking an action button. A lot of players had reported that there is high chance for misclicks, because you don't know whether a button click has registered or not. Tichu is now using the standard "lock" mechanism that also most other BGA games are using: You can only click another action button once the action has been processed by the server and the updates have been applied in the browser.
Nicer colors: The yellow panel and the red border were change to be slightly transparent. The box shadow of cards is smaller. The pass card looks a little nicer. The selection in "My Hand" is done by pushing cards up instead of giving them a yellow border.
Nicer player info at the table: Added points next to hand card count. Bigger font for name and counts. Better text overflow for long names.
Improved table layout: The overall table layout is now based on a css grid layout and should behave nicer for all screen sizes, both for list and square table. The "current trick" link and the Mahjong indicator also have a clearer positioning in that new layout grid.
Responsive card overlap: The overlap of the cards is now based on how many cards are displayed and how large the container is, and changes reactively. That allows nice resize behavior, but especially helps to establish smaller areas for played cards in the square table layout: You only need much space, if a lot of cards are played together, which happens rarely. So small overlap most of the time, large overlap rarely, and overall not such a large container is needed.
Fixed buttons above "My Hand": A lot of players have asked for fixed buttons close to "My Hand". Done! The most important buttons were moved into a button row above "My Hand". The "Tichu" button is always "out of the way" to the far right.
The blue user preference links has been moved from above the hand to below the hand.Often a "play bomb" button would should even if the player did not have a bomb. This has been fixed.
Here are some screenshots of the same game situation from the perspective of four different players with different layouts and screen sizes: https://imgur.com/a/xQvBVrl
Please let me know in this thread, if you have concerns about any of the changes. That would allow me to fix these issues before rolling out the new version.
Please use the BGA bug tracker for voting on or discussing existing bugs and creating new ones: https://boardgamearena.com/bugs?game=1237. I hope to get around to also fixing some other stuff, for example allowing "auto-collect" in real-time games.
* section removed by Admin *
