Play testing notes (CVS, 2002-03-10 version)

[bobthedancer at yahoo dot com (Bob Carragher)]

Hi everyone,

Jim Kingdon and I just finished a few partial games of xconq
(using the Tcl/Tk interface) and a mostly-full game of xtconq
(from which I resigned once I realized the juggernaut I was
facing B-).  Jim can give you notes on the xtconq session.  It
mainly worked, but there was a bug.

Jim and I connected to each other through DSL connections to
the Internet.  This in itself posed no problem.  However, we
did soon find some problems with xconq itself.  We ran the
latest version checked under CVS (the ChangeLog file shows
Hans' updates for 2002-03-10), and played the standard game, no
frills, with a random world.

Initially, all was fairly smooth.  For example, during setup, I
would see any selections that Jim was making regarding game
options as soon as he made them (e.g. "see-all").  And during
the initial turns, there seemed to be no problem.

At some point, we would receive the following error.  On my
display (I was host), in the message section of the main window,
I would see something along the lines of

        Checksum changed 6835 -> 6832 when numdone == 0
        Error from #2, "checksum 2 6838 6835"

On Jim's display, he would see something like

        Game is out of sync! (received 6835 from 1, computed 6838, before run_game)

Starting then, we would see progressively more checksum error
messages.  These we chose to ignore, although at one point we
each saved the game and compared the saved files just for sanity
sake.  (They were basically the same; just some minor differences.)

Eventually, dialog boxes with the following would start popping
up, I think after the first unit was lost (for whatever reason):

        Warning:  packet A refers to missing unit #34 [...]
        Do you want to continue?

Clicking the "yes" button would bring up a second dialog box,

        Do you want to see future warnings?

If you click the "yes" button in this case, you will soon receive
a couple more.  I think as more units are lost, there are more of
these that appear, until you are more busy eliminating the dialog
boxes than playing the game.  Also, usually by this point, there
would be lots of "checksum error" messages appearing in the main
window's message area, and those continue even if you select "no"
for "future warnings."

So we finally gave up on xconq and switched to xtconq.  That was
mainly successful once we hacked out some code that was causing
problems during drawing.  Jim can take it from here.  Over to
you, Jim!

				Bob