

Ask HN: Review my App - Freeciv.net - roschdal
http://freeciv.net/

======
jeff18
Why require an account? Just let me click a "Play Now" button. If you want to
be fancy, you could make it like EtherPad so if I want to play a game, I could
just go to freeciv.net/jeffsgame

I would not be surprised if by reducing the barrier to entry, you get three
times as many players. Your bounce rate must be staggering right now.

Please implement this and then post another YC article with the stats on your
bounce rate. :) I'd be very curious how big of a barrier requiring an email,
etc. really is on a site like yours.

~~~
eru
I was in the mood for playing when I checked it out. But not enough to bother
with email addresses.

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dannytatom
I only have one real complaint, and that is this:

    
    
        The email or password contains invalid invalid characters.
        Only letters (A-Z) and numbers (0-9) are allowed.
    

What's the point in not allowing special characters in a password (serious
question)?

~~~
eru
Good question. Some banks (and other large companies) also seem to dislike
them in passwords.

~~~
pyre
Some stupid rule thought up by someone that is trying to force users to make
passwords that they can remember. Like some sort of Web/IT version Clippy
saying, "I see you're trying to enter a password with a '+' in it. Are you
sure that isn't a typo?"

Either that or their backend software is incompetent (as well as the people
that made it) and can't handle pattern-matching outside of [:alnum:] or can't
store character values outside of [:alnum:]. It's the same reason that there
are many sites that you can't use the 'md5 a single password against the
site's domain name' trick because they limit password length to 8 or 16
characters (as if they are some sort of 'accepted industry standard').

~~~
durin42
I like that idea of using some sort of standard hash and password pairing
along with the domain to come up with a password that's site-unique. Is that
original, or taken from somewhere?

Have you considered using base64 or some other encoding to shorten the string?

~~~
pyre
Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but the string will already be Base64 if it's
human readable (I'm not trying to use character 254 as part of my password)
and base64 encoding actually _grows_ the data you are encoding (since you are
breaking some bytes down into two bytes to make them both human readable).

The problem being length. Human-readable (ascii-armored/whatever) hashes
(md5/sha-1/sha-256) have standard lengths which are usually longer than the
maximum size of the password fields.

~~~
durin42
I was assuming he was using the hex digest of the hash. You have to use some
kind of ascii armoring, and base64 seemed like one that'd be reasonably safe.

------
revorad
_Internet Explorer not supported_

Awesome!

~~~
gcb
What's an IE?

btw, it would be neat if i could play on opera mini.

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kalendae
I see ads on the side, I may be completely misreading your intentions for
having them of course (as it could just be why not?) but I am not seeing
freeciv on web as being very high in traffic. Main reason is that the barrier
to entry is extremely high. Without tutorials, and the way the ui is setup, it
requires you to be a former civ player, and a former civ player likely has civ
on their computer (or at one point). So with the free advantage gone for a lot
of them (eg i have civ4 installed right now), how is this better than
multiplayer civ4? my hope is that u have some cool plans for it that takes it
beyond the commercial civ titles.

~~~
bd
There is definitely an opportunity for browser-based Civilization game, though
it's going to be tough to compete with Sid himself:

<http://www.facebook.com/civnetwork>

------
Maciek416
Some notes:

1) I typed "G" to have a settler unit wander out into the wilderness and it
founded a city on its own. That was unexpected. I'm almost certain I didn't
have it in any kind of automatic mode.

2) It would be good if we had a stronger indication of which tile will be the
target of an action, and possibly a preview of the path taken there.

3) More animated indicators in general of where we should be looking at any
given moment would be helpful.

4) Try to test the game on a large display (I'm testing on 2560x1600). It
looks fantastic, but some of the UI could be better-delineated and tightened
up. It seems to be a little spread out right now.

Overall, this is awesome. Thank you for creating it! Civ is very high on a lot
of people's top-10-of-all-time lists, so this should become very popular very
quickly. Good luck.

------
alexkearns
Thanks mate, you have just destroyed my marriage.

~~~
milkshakes
and my finals week

~~~
codexon
and my startup

~~~
eru
I hope you guys don't discover Nethack or Dwarf Fortress.

~~~
wlievens
WebDF would be the end of all things productive for me.

~~~
baxter
WebDF could be the end of humanity.

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AdamGibbins
Server appears to be overloaded, just forever loading for me :(

~~~
bshep
Same here :(

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taitems
I signed up but the game never finished loading, so I had a play with the UI
for a few minutes.

<http://i.imgur.com/fzB6i.jpg>

~~~
kyro
Is there a tutorial you could point me to that'll teach me how to make buttons
with a style similar to that 'Play Now' button?

~~~
taitems
It's something that I always saw and one afternoon decided to try and
replicate. You can search for "MetaLab" style buttons, but it's as simple as
fine-tuning the settings for inner shadow (normal mode, white) a darker
stroke, a gradient overlay and a subtle drop shadow.

That's probably not my best ever example of that button style either.

EDIT: A pretty poor substitute [http://blog.creativityden.com/design-a-pixel-
perfect-menu-me...](http://blog.creativityden.com/design-a-pixel-perfect-menu-
metalab-style/)

------
yungchin
Edit: nevermind what I wrote below. I just figured out I didn't understand the
controls. Would it be impossible to create "drag and drop" for units?

I tried a single-player game in Firefox (3.5), but it hardly reacts to my
input (even though top tells me it's barely consuming any cycles). I thought
I'd give it a try with the Chromium Beta (but couldn't login anymore, so I
created a second account) too - same thing there though.

In any case: love the idea!!!

~~~
nuba
Cool! Works for me on a firefox 3.6b4, but I found the interface a bit clumsy
and lacking visual feedback, and also some may not notice the commands area in
the lower-right corner. Otherwise, thanks!

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plaes
You've done a good job.

I've been looking through the sources and found the "patches" directory. It
would be cool if you had comments on top of every patch why it is needed.

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brandon272
Chrome says "Waiting for freeciv.net..." but nothing loads.

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city41
In the chat console, the blue text on black/dark grey background is totally
unreadable.

So far I'm very impressed.

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roschdal
Thanks for the reviews from everyone. I'll use this to improve the game soon.

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woid
That was one of tasks on my list of "Projects to do before I die"!

checked out, love when people are making things real, thanks man

Ah, then next one is tough, "have threesome with japanese twins".

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kunley
It hangs. (2 minutes pass) No! But still slooow

