Vindication like what Ohioans would have felt when Charles Dickens visited America and said that St. Louis was a nice enough place, but “not likely ever to vie, in point of elegance or beauty, with Cincinnati”?
The versions and branches and spin-offs almost sound sane until you realise they didn't mention Haage & Partner 'Amiga Forever' lineage, which is what I imagine most users are using today - via the included WinUAE, Amiberry, or various FPGA Minimig (e.g. MiSTer) based devices.
This one claims to be AmigaOS 3.9 which is a best of breed cobbled together AmigaOS and roms.
I have no idea if/when this might venefit from the fixes to 3.2.3, but I'm imaging never.
3.5 and 3.9 felt like “3.1 plus some bundled, licensed shareware”. Which is fine! It’s nice to have a baseline where you know everyone running that version has a particular TCP stack or dock app or whatever. But 3.1.x and 3.2 to me “feel” like newer versions of 3.1 with actual OS updates (and also plenty of bundled shareware).
I wouldn't argue against someone who sees it the the opposite way.
I was living Amiga daily during the OS 3.9 days, and have no reason to think it didn't come from the Commodore source. Back then I got the feeling it was called "3.9" because the various powers assumed it would be the last release of 3.x. I've never used Hyperion's 3.x, but that is official, too, if largely a backport of 4.x, which of course also came from official source. I would say Hyperion jumped into 3.x (against their contract?) in search of cash, as nostalgia for these old systems increased and ARM emulator boards (etc.) made it possible.
OS4 is still the future, but the cost of PPC motherboards greatly limits the market size.
Haage & Partner did "3.5" and "3.9". Those are no longer distributed, as the contracts with both Amiga and the developers/suppliers expired.
Cloanto (Amiga Forever) did "3.X", which is currently at v. 45.066, or 45.66. It is based on 40.068 by the Amiga companies, not work by Haage & Partner: https://www.amigaforever.com/kb/16-125
I enjoyed this read. It mirrored my own experiences closely, growing up in the 80s/90s in the UK. My first home computer being the C64, then A500, and later an A1200 with 6MB RAM, HDD, squirrel SCSI with various optical media and a 1084ST (originally bought second hand, stuffed full of lowres porn...). I too chased the ultimate desktop - MagicWB, newicons, MUI (licensed!), heavily configured DOpus, various file format plugins, alt disk formats
etc.
97 or so was when I had an old 386 handoff, and 98 when I first installed Linux. I triple booted into BeOS for a while. Coming back from Uni in '98-'02 and using the Amiga less and less, until I finally got rid of it after a trace on the keyboard burned out and the HDD gave up.
I have continued to play with emus over the years, CAPS with the IPF for.at was an interesting project for someone who didn't care for 'cracktros' and respected the physical copy protections lf the day. Lately, AmigaVision running on FPGA 'emulation' is my choice. Don't chase the upgrades - the Amiga was a machine of it's eta - when hw tricks got you a long way, and it wasn't pure cpu cycles and blitting.
I'll also highly recommend GBG. My eldest had a good time building very creative things when he was about 9, and my younger son who is 6 has built a 3d platformer. i haven't a clue how to program it, but they pick it up easily! Also, they both love Scratch (not Jr) on a browser. Not 3D, but a great outlet for their ideas.
If it's just level building, then Super Mario Maker 2 (also Switch) and Levelhead (Steam, more accessible on Switch). There's also BQM (Steam,Switch) for isometric dungeon designing.
Hi,
My son has taken a shine to this after I sent him the link (he's up to 100 cards now...). Online, drafting, and the most important bit - user created content (he'd have been as happy with a traditional editor for the cards rules, but has had fun trying to convince the parser to do his bidding).
The Discord link is timing out for me. Hopefully you don't mind a brain dump here.
He had one feature request - the ability to restrict the number of Rare/Uncommon cards to be included in a deck built off of a given set (if that makes any sense).
Also, we hit a few bugs.
One time we had a major state desync - on one player one team was entirely wiped out with a given card play, whereas on the other it had no/limited effect. From that point, the games diverged in their entirety - including the log. It was only because we were sat next to each other we even knew.
Some form of hashing of the engine state and comparisons every play could ensure that at least a desync identified (which would hopefully lead to a fix).
Another time, the 'End Turn' button was unresponsive for one player, and we instead had to force a draw.
He had an issue with a card he created that read "when you draw a card, ...", which was triggering when the opponent drew too.
The final thing is more of an irritation, which is the 'Activation' overlay can make it hard to move/attack to the hex immediately to the right.
Otherwise, great game and it's obviously a labour of love. Jist hope for a bit more interest and player activity.
Thank you so much for the feedback! Unfortunately I screwed up the Discord link in the post – it's http://discord.wordbots.io/ , not https:// – but it was too late to modify the HN post after I noticed that.
Glad that you and your son have had fun playing it! He's definitely made the most cards in Wordbots of any user so far, so that's pretty cool :-)
I'll respond to each issue in turn:
Re: decks and card rarity – I hadn't thought of this when implementing card rarities (which right now take effect only in draft mode), but it's a good idea. I'll make an issue for it.
Re: state desync – I've never noticed this issue in testing, but I will admit that the multiplayer code is pretty sloppy (this part isn't exactly my strong suit). In theory the game should be fully deterministic (and the RNG is seeded identically for both players and the server), but it's possible that either a socket message got lost somewhere or there's some nondeterminism in some card behavior that I neglected to notice. If you encounter this again, please let me know what happened right before the desync – it'll help us narrow down the issue. And hashing the state and checking it periodically seems like a good measure to take for now; I'll make an issue for it.
Re: End Turn button unresponsive – This is a bug we've had in the past, and it was caused by an error occurring during combat, resulting in the game state thinking that an attack animation was still happening (so the turn couldn't end yet). I'm pretty sure that it's fixed now, but if you encounter it again, check the game debug log and JS console to see if anything weird happened right before.
Re: card draw trigger – Oops, this looks like an issue with how `afterCardDraw` is being triggered, should be an easy fix on my end. I'll take a look.
Re: Activate popover – Yeah, this is feedback we've gotten in the past, and we're looking into what a better UX for object activation could look like.
Thanks for this, will pick through it to see if we can pick up any better practices or patterns. My 11yr old son and I playing with Love for a few weeks, learning OO, LUA, and some game engine principles.
China is mostly blocked from MAMEdev.org/MameTesters due to an annoying chap or two that used to hassle developers. Since at least one of the core team is based in China it's an annoyance.
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