strangeness when upgrading racetracks and swimming pools (was: [glob2-devel] feedback on Globulation 2 (long, with many topics))

[Joe Wells]

Joe Wells <address@hidden> writes:

> BUG?:  Upgrading racetracks and swimming pools has a strange quirk.
> While waiting for the globules inside to exit, it seems to work
> normally (like other buildings) but once they have exited (or if the
> building is already empty), it goes into a strange state for a while
> (up to a minute perhaps?).  There is no bar to set the number of
> workers (and the dots do not appear above the building site).  There
> are still dots below the image indicating its hit points, but no dots
> to the right, above, or to the left.  The image of the building
> remains the same.  When the building is selected, in the details
> display on the right it shows this (if your font is not fixed width my
> diagram will look funny):
>
>   +----------------------+
>   | Racetrack (player 0) |
>   |       Level 1        |
>   |                      |
>   | +------+  Hitpoint   |
>   | | pic  |   270/270   |
>   | | here |  Inside     |
>   | +------+             |
>   |                      |
>   | Armour: 5            |
>   |                      |
>   | ===BROWN BAR HERE=== |
>   |                      |
>   |                      |
>   |                      |
>   |  Cancel Upgrade      |
>   +----------------------+
>
> Eventually it seems to get unstuck and proceed, but this is strange.
> For a while I was convinced it wasn't working and I kept cancelling my
> upgrade and trying it again to see if it would work on a second try.
> Eventually I learned that I have to be patient.  It would be better if
> this quirk simply didn't happen.

I think I now know what is happening here.  The racetrack gets bigger
when it is upgraded.  You can't even ask to upgrade it until the land
around it is empty of resources.  However, once requested, the upgrade
doesn't actually start until two additional conditions are met: (1)
all globules inside must leave the building and (2) the additional
land needed for the upgraded building needs to be free of globules.
In this case, I think condition 1 has been met but it is waiting for
condition 2.  Unlike when creating a building from scratch, which
places a forbidden area to get globules to leave, upgrading a building
doesn't do this, so if you have a lot of globules hanging around this
can block the upgrade.

The bug is that the user interface doesn't explain _why_ the upgrade
is stuck.  I spent an entire game thinking there was some bug in glob2
which prevented me from being able to upgrade racetracks and swimming
pools at all, so I just gave up on upgrading them.  To avoid this,
there should be a message in the building's status display indicating
that it is waiting for globules to leave the building site.

Anyway, it would also be good to automatically place a forbidden area
to get the globules to leave and remove the area automatically once
the building site is free and the upgrade actually starts.  (At the
same time as the forbidden area is created/removed would be a good
time to also do a clearing area.  (And it would be good to remove also
any guard areas that happen to be there at the same time as the
forbidden/clearing areas are removed.))

-- 
Joe