Improved Army Printing

[lokisgal]

AND IT DOESNT WORK ON A MAC - I HAVE ALL THE FONTS AND NOW I HAVE NO BOB!!!!

Im in foggy games and its important for kills and so on i cant tell how many someone has left - wtf
when is this going to be fixed???!!

I updated on one comp OS 10.4.1 (mac) now bob is just gone
did not update on another - same system and I cant load maps.....

firefox etc...

[lokisgal]

lokisgal
Let's try this. Clear your cache and cookies. Uninstall BOB if it's there. Then check if you have the latest version of your browser. Restart pc. Install BOB again.

ive done all of that - it must be a mac conflict
was the very first thing i did....

[king achilles]

Strange. If it's having BOB installed properly on your browser again, post in the BOB thread about this.

[maasman]

I'm having a lot of performance issues now, especially on the hive, that weren't there before. I'm suspecting it's because you put more of the strain on my end and off of the server, but this slow computer can't take it very well and its causing a lot of headaches for me, but I'm not sure what you could do to fix it

[tdans]

my clkies are not working at all.. kinda hard to do 70 turns with dropdowns..

[Commander62890]

clickies dont work

[Eddy_26]

I've found that unchecking BOB in the greasemonkey menu fixes CM, otherwise I'm having to refresh for every attack and phase end

[jricart]

Since you guys are improving this site a lot recently, how possible it is to include BOB and Clickies in the main site programming so we dont need to use add-ons?

Most of the people use them, and that will eliminate a lot of issues when you guys do upgrades, dont you think?

We are already working to add various Tools & Enhancements as site features. Stay tuned for this.


--Andy

Bananas for you and booo to lack for make us suffer with clickies and BOB right now!

[joriki]

Hi lack -- first of all, thanks as always for all the work you do on this site.

The font is the exact same size and most numbers are exactly identical. The number 2 and 7 are slightly different now.

But of course some people will complain that everything is impossible to read even though nothing has changed

I think you should take back that comment. People are trying to help and point out problems, and you're making fun of them and pretending there aren't any.

I understand the technical advantage aimed at by the improvement, but you may have underestimated the serious technical disadvantages it also brings with it. Text placement and styling is way more complicated than just serving a PNG, and you're seeing some of the effects of that in this thread.

Here's an analysis of the changes I see -- this is all without user scripts, using Safari Version 5.0 (5533.16), Mac OS X, Version 10.5.8, Build 9L31a, with Tahoma TrueType font pre-installed, normal zoom -- I'm embedding old and new pictures below.

-- The glyphs are bolder than before. This seems to be mainly because the DOM contains five versions of each glyph, one in the center and four shifted in each of the four axis directions. If I remove the shifted versions, the result looks closer to what it used to.
-- It seems the glyphs are now being anti-aliased, and weren't before. That may be what a lot of people are referring to as "blurry".
-- The glyph shapes are quite noticeably different, and it's not just the 2s and 7s. For instance, the 1 now has a curved hook; that used to be straight.

I also looked in Windows (also with Tahoma installed) -- it looks much more similar to the old version there, so part of the problem may be that you didn't test on the Mac; still, the Windows version is also noticeably different, e.g. also with curved hooks on the 1s.

So it seems that even if you solve all the problems with shifts and shifted black borders and user scripts that have been reported, some differences will probably remain. I think there are basically three options: a) retract the claim that nothing has changed, and announce that it looks slightly different now, and different on different computers, and you think the advantages outweigh that, b) reverse the changes, or c) create a font with the pixel shapes as they looked before, and either embed it in the page or offer it for download and make it the first in the font list, with Tahoma as the first fallback. I don't know if any of the major font formats allow direct pixel raster glyphs -- I know SVG does, but I'm not sure what the state of SVG support in major browsers is, and if you're going to embed SVG, you might as well embed the PNG as it was inline in the SVG; that would also solve the problem of the separate PNG sometimes going missing, without any of the positioning problems. (If you want to go the SVG way, I might be able to help.)

Here are the images -- it's not exactly the same game position, but similar enough to make some comparisons:

old:

Click image to enlarge.

new:

Click image to enlarge.

[maasman]

for me the same pixel font is there, but my computer is getting bogged down loading everything on a larger map.

[TheSaxlad]

Attention of Lack.

Love the new upgrade but when you install clickies 4.0 the bottom box flashes asking you to install 4.1. Now i know 4.1 doesnt work but could you ask whoever the developer is to get rid olf that box as it is really hurting my eyes.

Thanks.

[grifftron]

Thanks lack, BOB is working fine for me, i just clicked on the upgrade link you posted and it worked fine. A lot quicker too, nice job

-griff

[braveboy]

I really don't like this "improvement" - the font is weird and glares - its not as nice to use as previously. Why change something that isn't broken??

[Qyu]

Hi lack -- first of all, thanks as always for all the work you do on this site.

The font is the exact same size and most numbers are exactly identical. The number 2 and 7 are slightly different now.

But of course some people will complain that everything is impossible to read even though nothing has changed

I think you should take back that comment. People are trying to help and point out problems, and you're making fun of them and pretending there aren't any.

I understand the technical advantage aimed at by the improvement, but you may have underestimated the serious technical disadvantages it also brings with it. Text placement and styling is way more complicated than just serving a PNG, and you're seeing some of the effects of that in this thread.
[...]

I'm agree with Joriki

Here is another exemple with Ubuntu 9.10 + FF 3.5.9 (i didn't test with Ubuntu 10.4) :
you can see the black border with dark color (especially green and blue) make them blurry

Click image to enlarge.

the same with XP3 + FF 3.6.3

Click image to enlarge.

and with XP3 + IE8

Click image to enlarge.

[Nzen]

Thanks lackattack, et. al, for improving the site.

It is only a slightly inconvenient for me because I used the pngs as frames in time-lapse movies of my games to study afterward. I suspect I am in a minority of one in that regard. Oh well, back to screen capture & ms paint.

[qwertylpc]

now the map wont even load and i dont have clickies or any addons on this computer

[amazzony]

now the map wont even load and i dont have clickies or any addons on this computer

If you are speaking of the limited edition World Cup map then it was an issue for a couple of hours but Lack has fixed it by now and everything is back normal. If I understand correctly then the disappearance of World Cup map had nothing to do with this update.

[barterer2002]

Actually ZZ, I think he needs to get the new BOB. These improvements did several things that I've noticed.
1. Bob broke causing it to never ever load on some of the maps (maybe all-I admit to not trying it 140 times). This was fixed and lack has a direct link in the first post and Chip has one here viewtopic.php?f=526&t=119857

2. Clickable Maps broke as well and was also fixed in the same slots.

3. There was a blurriness to some of the army counts, particularly those with 2s and 7s from what I noted. The solution for me in this was to click on Control 0 (that's zero not the letter before P) which brought me back to the smaller sized screens but which worked.

[lackattack]

I think you should take back that comment. People are trying to help and point out problems, and you're making fun of them and pretending there aren't any.

I take back my comment and apologize. I underestimated the difference that some people are seeing.

Here's an analysis of the changes I see [...]

Thanks for your helpful feedback. I find that the advantages still outweigh the downside, and I updated the first post to acknowledge font issues and give tips. I'm not sure there is much that can be done about anti-aliasing but I'm looking into embedding Tahoma for users who don't have it.

I initially looked into SVG as a solution to phase out server-generated pngs... it seems that to make it work across browsers you need to use a JavaScript toolkit and we figured the CSS approach would be simpler. If you or anyone else can help us develop a fixed pixel font or SVG solution that would be awesome.

[Kabanellas]

Not fond of this new font to be honest.....

[ram1961]

I agree that the troop count font is harder to read, partially due to the font colors not contrasting enough against the background territory colors and partially because color letter prefix font lines are too fat making it hard to see the parts of the letter character.

I don't seem to have any problem with the BOB upgrade, but am wondering why I can't see the whole map in many cases when trying to play my turn. Has the Action bar moved further away from the map itself?

[lackattack]

UPDATE: I just embedded the font into the page... hopefully this will make things more similar across various compter setups. Please let us know if you see an improvement or not.

[pjromano]

As someone who is partially colorblind, I don't like this change. i'm not suggesting that it's a bad idea, and I'm probably in the minority, but it makes it a bit more difficult for me. Even though I use color codes all of the time, on some maps it's difficult for me to quickly distinguish where my territories are on the map, especially if i'm not a bright color like blue or yellow, or if the map is exceptionally colorful... What I was able to do (similar to what you can do with BOB with white fading) was highlight the whole map, which made it, in my case, all black, and I could quickly see where I was! I just thought I'd voice my opion, even though I'm sure I'm one of the few...

[soundman]

Keep up the good work lack!

[Qyu]

UPDATE: I just embedded the font into the page... hopefully this will make things more similar across various compter setups. Please let us know if you see an improvement or not.

no change on Ubuntu 10.4 + FF 3.6.3 (not the same version as above (9.10 + 3.5.9) but in fact, there was the same result before your last change)



and another snap :
XP1 + IE6 ...... ok, forget it, i think with this config, the only think i can get is trouble

Click image to enlarge.

but it doesn't work so bad with this poor config !



edit
another
Ubuntu 10.4 + Chromium 5.0.375.38

Click image to enlarge.

for me, except the difficult with the blue font who's still blur, it's ok