yashsingh1/xdaforums huggingface dataset:
[Android Apps and Games] emelie:
another thing, sorry for the massive amount of stuff i just thought i'd get it all out now that i'm at it ;)

right now i am in posession of all the right resources (lumber, wool, grain, brick) and i have a sweet spot where i want to put this town.

the thing is - the button to do it is not there!

those buttons are showing:

1st row: Info - Trade - End turn

2nd row: Buy or use card - Build road

"Build town" is not there!

is there any way to provide you with debug info for cases like this?

maybe it would be possible for you to integrate a debug option that saves the current state of the game in a txt-file i could send you, or something like it.

EDIT: i wasn't able to build towns or cities for the rest of the game.

at some point (couple of turns later) i also lost the ability to build roads, even though i had enough resources.

EDIT2: i was able to build cities, but no more towns and roads.

is there some rule that restricts the amount of towns and/or roads i forgot?

EDIT3: this has to be a rule i don't know about. in another game i am now able to build roads/towns/cities as i like.
[Android Apps and Games] emelie:
i just move the robber because i rolled a 7.

the game offered me to steal from either of two players because they had cities where i placed it.

one player had 0 resources the other had 3.

why bother to show the player with 0 resources?
[Android Apps and Games] emelie:
a confirmation when building roads would be great - i was very sure of my placement but build two roads in the wrong spot because of clumsiness ;)
[Android Apps and Games] emelie:
oh and i'd like to help with the german translation.
[Android Apps and Games] thekingofmean:
Freaking Awesome!!!

Freaking Awesome!!!

I love, love, love, love this game!
[Android Apps and Games] Reno_79:
Going to give this a go, catan is a very addictive game, kudos for bringing it to Android!
[Android Apps and Games] emelie:
yeah i like your detailed answer! going to reply at the end of the week - massive pile of work to take care of.

in the meantime - i'd like to do the german translation, PM/post instructions so i can proceed! sent you an email

love your game :D
[Android Apps and Games] theeil:
Here's the new status screen (attached.) I added the player color after in screenshot 2.

If you select the current player (you) or the game is over, then it shows the actual number of points. Otherwise, it shows the number of victory points not counting victory cards which are supposed to be hidden.

Any comments?
[Android Apps and Games] emelie:
just a quick comment: looks good, would be even better if you could color the tabs according to the players' color.

not the whole screen but just the tab-"button" (i guess it isn't a button) on top of the status information.

then it would be quicker to select which players' stats i want to see - usually i remember a player by their color.

if this is possible then don't mention the color on the respective status page as it isn't necessary any longer.

great stuff!
[Android Apps and Games] theeil:
I was thinking about that, but it didn't seem to be worth the effort. It was really easy to just put the player's small city icon up there though. Serves the purpose quite well.
[Android Apps and Games] emelie:
got caught in a deadlock:

i have no space left to build or buy anything.

it's my turn.

i choose to use my progress card.

what is it?

build a road!

of course that didn't work out too well ;) closed the app via task manager.

see screenshot attached

i guess that has to be handled with some notification popup.

EDIT: "master" is my players' name, red is my color
[Android Apps and Games] emelie:
don't want to pester you with this but for me this is a critical point because i'm going to wonder which player is which player - everytime!

found some stuff that maybe helps you with this:

http://developer.android.com/resources/tutorials/views/hello-tabwidget.html

http://www.androidpeople.com/android-tabhost-tutorial-part-2/

if it's still not possible i rest my case :D
[Android Apps and Games] combatdan:
I have been looking for this for so long!

Excellent start! Really like the progress so far, and just sorry I didn't find this earlier =D

A few suggestions to make the game a bit more realistic (some of which have already been mentioned):

- When moving the robber show how many cards each player has

- Allow player to player trade. I know this would make it considerably more complex of a game and AI, but it would enhance the playing experience considerably.

- Show what the progress cards are before you use them

Good work man!
[Android Apps and Games] emelie:
just noticed a slight inconsistency: when buying a card the popup says "Buy card (wool, wheat, ore)" - should be grain instead of wheat like everywhere else
[Android Apps and Games] netrunner7:
like your game.

just one info .... can you add somewhere the cost table for the different building types ?

road: 1 lumber + 1 brick

city:

.....

maybe you can add it to the new page where you show the player informations creting one more tab, or just add it to the end of the info popup ...

well done.
[Android Apps and Games] theeil:
I'll push out an update in the next couple days with some stuff I've been working on.

Quick reference window

- press menu, then quick reference

- first tab shows building costs

- second tab explains building towns/cities/roads

- third tab explains the 3 types of development cards

Status window

- one tab per player, shown in the game's turn order

- selects you by default

- shows a colored icon in the tab corresponding to the player's color (it's actually the same as your city icon.. for now at least)

- shows most of the info you need

- it's effectively an enhanced "info" window (which it replaces)

- shows turn log at the bottom for each player

- can bring this up while placing the robber to see how many resources everyone has

Trading

- people have commented about my trading rules

- 4:1 should be 4 of 1 resource, not mixed

- trading with other players isn't supported yet

- once I support trading with other players, I'll fix the 4:1, but I think it's more fair this way

Other issues mentioned

- for moving robber, you can use the new status window

- I'm still thinking about the "best" solution for this - feel free to post ideas or even mock-ups

- I need to come up with a good way to undo or cancel actions (such as undo last build, or cancel card use)

- I'll also need prompts to tell you when something went wrong (like telling you why you can't build another road)

- these cases are harder to test because they come up later in the game... but I'll work on it
[Android Apps and Games] emelie:
in your most recent post your addressed every issue. so just brief comments.

sounds perfect according to your last message.

no victory points of opponents -> good

number of development cards shown -> good

quick building costs dialogue -> good

undo after building -> i'll think about something until the weekend.

when stealing showing the full list -> sounds reasonable

good ideas in your last message (info available to judge who to steal from)

it would be great to have a summary of the rules available in-game.

"towns: 3 / 5" -> good idea!

another rule i forgot about is that my amount of cards is limited once i dice 7 and am allowed to move the robber.

detailed debugging is only possible for me on the weekend because i can't spare that much time in front of my dev-machine where all this stuff is installed. but i'll try to do that next time!

---

responding to your last post now.

quick reference window -> nice ;)

status window -> nice ;)

trading -> what you said, my thinking exactly.

other issues ->

-> undo/cancel mockup should be ready on the weekend

-> error messages as well (why it's not possible to build another road)

idea for development: implement a save-game rough enough for you to reload a specific state to test some scenarios.

---

one little request: add another mode where it is possible to play until 25 points are reached

one big request: it would be great to optionally slow down the movement of the opponents - i find it a little had to connect between name/color and keep track of who's doing who. if it's possible to follow the moves of each player play-by-play for one or two rounds i could make much better decisions.

but that's such a nice to have i can't even think about how low on your todo list it should be :D
[Android Apps and Games] alovell83:
I definitely feel like the p2p trading needs to be implemented before you make the requirement to trade 4 of one resource for a new one. I'm not sure if you had any problem deciding on the logic, but I think I can help, or at least hope I can, so let me know if you need any help with planning something along the lines of "if" tests.

I'm thinking computer analyzing what cards they have, what their build priorities are, what resources they need versus the likelihood that they'll obtain the resources on any given turn/expected amount of turns before obtaining the resource. Compare that versus how frequently they come up and how many are in play (an astute player can memorize, but let the computer cheat if needed to compensate for their weaknesses.)
[Android Apps and Games] netrunner7:
rule correction.

I have seen that the points for the "longest road" are count always, but waht i remember, a road is count as long as the road istself is NOT interrupted by another players town.

thx net
[Android Apps and Games] theeil:
emelie,

ddms (included with the android sdk) should be useful for debugging, but I haven't got much experience working with it.

Saving state should be possible at some point. I'll try and do it along with the state information that needs to be shared in an online game. I started working on a simple server a couple weeks ago, but it's still in early development. Perhaps I'll share my ideas about this later.

Adding more max point selections is pretty easy. I just don't want to flood the list. How about we try and agree on a few numbers that are good? 5, 8, 10, 12, 15, 18, 20, 25? 5 is *very* short, but it's handy for testing.

Delaying AI player will require a lot more changes, so maybe in the long term. For now, I think the turn log is helpful to see what's going on.

alovell83,

I agree of course ;) That's why I went to such an effort to enable mixed trading. It's an ugly brute-force algorithm that loops over all combinations of cards and tests to see if it's a valid trade. Actually, the trade window was the one really ugly part of my code. I've been pushing it aside for the last while since it works, but I'll try and imporve it soon since it's really important to the gameplay.

The AI already tries to trade for certain resources it needs to build stuff, with a slight preference to certain resources. I've got ideas on how to prioritize things, but it will be some work implementing it all.

The interface for trading is what I'm more concerned about. Here's my current concept:

- player selects resource he wants from the trade

- player makes an initial offer what what he will give for it (optional?)

- ai or other human players respond with a counter offer (or same as player's offer) of what they want for that resource

- after everybody has accepted/counter offered/declined, the player gets to see all the offers and decide if he wants to trade with any of them

- revise request/offer & repeat

netrunner7,

That's right. It may be a common "house rule" to ignore this. I should be able to fix this, but it makes AI road building considerations a lot harder.
[Android Apps and Games] dr2ww62:
AI

Love the game. Everyone has already mentioned all of my thoughts as I played it. The only other thing I would change is the ability to add smarter AI, which I'm sure is the most difficult part to write. Just curious if there are any plans to beef this up a little? Having online multiplayer would be cool enough for me, but sometimes it'd be nice to have a little bit of a challenge to beat the computer if I am somewhere with poor network availability or maybe nobody is on. Or I'm just antisocial. But long story short, the computer seems pretty.... nonstrategic. I've played through several games and usually one person just builds roads the entire time and one person just tries to upgrade cities and the other person who the heck knows what he is doing. Never really had any competition, since it doesn't seem like they are actually going for victory points. I could probably play for hours and the computer would never win.

Just my thoughts. I LOVE the game tho! Really excited that you are working on it.
[Android Apps and Games] dr2ww62:
Trading

I attached a picture with my idea for a trading window. What I see in my head is when it's your turn you open up the trade window, which also opens it on all opponents screens. The top is for the player requesting the trade. On the left he selects what he is offering and the right he selects what he wants. Then there are rows for each opponent with similar options. The left selects what they will offer and the right is what they want. Then next to each opponent is a radial button or something. Once the play finishes his selections he clicks the submit button and his offer is locked in. Then the opponents see his offer and they can each make there own offer or counteroffer. Once they click submit they are locked in and everyone can see their offer. The player can review the offers and if one of them matches exactly with his the radial button next to that player and the "accept" button become active for the player to select. If none of the offers match he cannot select their radial button and "accept" is not available. He can then modify his offer to match one of the existing counteroffers and accept it, or he can make another counter offer of his own and submit it for review to see if someone will accept it. Once you click "modify" your selections disappear for all other users so they know you are modifying. That way when you resubmit if your selections are exactly the same they will know you are not budging and they can consider modifying their offers to match or decline completely. Once someone declines they either drop off the list or are at least grayed out for simplicity. Once the player declines the trade window is closed for everyone.

Maybe this is too complex? I'm not sure, I'm not a developer. I just like designing user interfaces so this is what makes sense in my mind. Curious to know what other people think about it.

Also, will there be some kind of in-game chatting going on? Might make trading simpler that way too.
[Android Apps and Games] theeil:
Thanks! Yes, AI it one of my top priorities now. I've got plenty of ideas to improve it. I've actually done it as an interface, so I'll be able to easily support multiple AI personalities.

I've released pretty recently, so I'm still working through a fair list of feature requests. My original plan was to have a sort-of usable "pass the phone" version done by now, so I'm a long way ahead of that schedule. Hopefully I'll be able to improve that soon.
[Android Apps and Games] theeil:
Island Settlers r5 release

This consists mostly of usability and interface improvements:

Status window (replaces “info”) shows all the player stats that you’re allow to know. This can be used to determine how many resources they have so you can place the robber.

Quick reference shows the building costs, as well as some point form notes about buildings and development cards. It’s pretty rough and not so elegant right now, but it works. Hit menu to access it.

Various strings were improved to give you a better idea what to expect. For example, “Use soldier card” now says “Use soldier card: move the robber.”

Notify user when there’s no site to build a town, city or road. Also cancel progress card use if this happens.

Another player’s settlement on your road now cuts your road length.

“Mixed trading” is now an option in the game menu. By this, I mean trading 4:1 or 3:1 of any combination of resources. The default is to disable this which follows the official rules. I’m leaving it as an option since I think it’s fair when trading between players isn’t supported.

Automatically steal a resource if there's only one player to steal from.

Preliminary Spanish translation.

If you suggestion isn't in the list here, I probably haven't forgotten yet. I still have 4 different TODO lists lying around.

Updated on Android Market as well now.

Website: http://omnionic.com/settlers/

Direct download: http://omnionic.com/pub/Settlers-r5.apk
[Android Apps and Games] emelie:
great great great!

looking forward to tomorrows gaming session :D

small thing: the "buy or use card" button should just say "use card" (if i have one) before i start my turn.

EDIT: btw your website seems to be down; i'm getting either http timeout or database connection error
[Android Apps and Games] netrunner7:
i was able to download the apk file.

here is a mirror link for Settlers-r5.apk MIRROR-LINK

once it is in the market or if requested i will remove it.
[Android Apps and Games] theeil:
My hosting provider notified me that they'd be doing hardware upgrades at 2am today. I didn't expect it to be an issue, but I guess it went so well that they decided they wanted to do more, so they decided to do some unscheduled maintenance on my sql server.

This knocked my wordpress site down. The apk link should have worked regardless. Thanks for helping others though.

Anyway, my database seems to be half-alive (slow) now. It should be back to normal soon. You get what you pay for I guess.
[Android Apps and Games] netrunner7:
theeil will remove it tomorrow, i have uploaded it to my Dropbox Public folder for sharing :D
[Android Apps and Games] CYDVicious:
Sounds like it has already been said, but.

You should not be able to build a road past a settlement. The AI was doing that and in addition to the opponents settlement not blocking them from extending their road, it also counted the road as part of their longest.
[Android Apps and Games] theeil:
Ok, I think you have a new point here that I didn't pick up on.

From http://www.universityofcatan.com/faq/faqq48301.html :

I should be able to fix this up.

Update: yes, I did fix it. It'll be in the next release.
[Android Apps and Games] jdb78:
I love it, great work! Looks really professional already.
[Android Apps and Games] combatdan:
Great to see the game is alive in development!

Very nice update! The trading already made the game more realistic, and the new info screen is FANTASTIC!

Thank you for your excellent work!

Have you considered having a simple panel at the bottom/side of the screen showing the last 4 rolls of dice? I know you can find out from the info screen, but it could make game play a little smoother.

Anyway, very nice man!
[Android Apps and Games] theeil:
(copied from my website post)

I posted a small(ish) update, available here as well as on the Android Market. I made a slight improvement to the AI which has a pretty positive impact on what it choses to build and what it trades for. I also added a rule to prevent you from building a road “through” an opponent’s town or city. Language support was bumped quite a bit this release. There is now support for Chinese (with in-game buttons), Spanish, Dutch and German. Note that the player logs and the instructions (from the main menu) aren’t translated. Neither are the in-game buttons in Spanish, dutch and German.

I’m hoping to add basic trading with the AI this week, as well as “monopoly” and “year of plenty” progress cards.

Enjoy!
[Android Apps and Games] emelie:
couple of things about the most current release.

- gameplay feels very smooth, the new AI already managed to beat me once! ;)

- tried to use a progress card but already had built 15 roads; the resulting message was kinda misleading stating that there is no room for roads (while the toast is even more misleading - stating that i used a progress card) -> see attached screenshot

- because of the localization limitations (no translated buttons, etc.) i'd prefer to have the whole game in english; is it possible to switch language as an option?
[Android Apps and Games] theeil:
I think I need to add an alternative sentence saying "you reached the maximum number of roads" instead of "there's nowhere to build a road."

Is the translation accurate otherwise?

<string name="game_build_road_fail">Kein Platz um eine Straße zu bauen.</string>

<string name="game_build_prog1_fail">Karte nicht verwenden.</string>

<string name="game_build_prog2_fail">Du kannst Die zweite Straße nicht bauen.</string>

<string name="game_build_road_fail">There\'s nowhere to build a road.</string>

<string name="game_build_prog1_fail">Cancelling card use.</string>

<string name="game_build_prog2_fail">You can\'t build the second road.</string>
[Android Apps and Games] emelie:
<string name="game_build_road_fail">Kein Platz um Straßen zu bauen.</string>

<string name="game_build_prog1_fail">Karte nicht verwendet.</string>

<string name="game_build_prog2_fail">Zweite Straße kann nicht gebaut werden.</string>

I would go with that.
[Android Apps and Games] CrazyBeaver:
Great job so far!

Hi,

I really like where you're going with this.. I always loved this game!

It would be really cool if you included the option to change the number of players and maybe the mapsize.
[Android Apps and Games] combatdan:
Excellent

This new update is fantastic! The AI has dramatically improved, and gives a real challenge!

Now to figure out how to STOP playing =D
[Android Apps and Games] belyle:
Great job! I can't wait to see how this progresses over the next few weeks/months.

A few things:

How long does an app typically take to update in the app market? For me it's still showing 1.0.0.5, or is that the most recent?

Are all of the cards in the deck? I only got soldier cards, and I bought A LOT of cards.

I would like to see a feature that logs the dice rolls so I can see the breakdown at the end of the game.

An optional "quick game" mode where victory is 7 points, start with one city and one settlement.

Other than that, I really like how quickly the game moves, the simple interface, and the fact that it's Catan on Android! FINALLY!
[Android Apps and Games] Aelthir:
Excellent work with the game! My friends and I really enjoy playing it at restaurants etc.

Are there plans to add a wireless multiplayer function through wifi/push/bluetooth? I'd love to be able to play Catan through push notifications like the iPhone does with Scrabble.
[Android Apps and Games] theeil:
Release r7 (or 1.0.6 on the market)

I added basic trading support. You can now propose a deal, then the AI accepts or rejects it. Other human players can also consider it. You’ll have to try various offers to see what the AI wants (for now.) I’ll work on counter-offers later.

You can now also override the language setting. Some users like the localizations, but others prefer to stick with the English version because it’s more complete for now. It doesn’t load right away if you set it form the main menu though. Some improvements are in order.

Fixes include:

longest road bug

improved “can’t build” error messages

fixed victory point count in status window

fixed scrolling bug in status window

belyle,

Interesting comments! I'll consider these suggestions. It would be cool to have a dice histogram in the stats somewhere. Quick game could be cool too, though you can already set the number of points. Soldier cards are supposed to be the most common (14/25.) Play a little more and you should see others. They're there (except all progress cards are road building... need to add monopoly and year of plenty soon.)

Aelthir,

I actually started working on an online multiplayer server a few weeks ago. It's a really simple concept, but I think it should work. It will take some effort to get up and running, but it's one of my long-term plans.

Enjoy!