I am having problems with Global Options on 2 player, online games (haven’t tried PBEM but I expect it would be the same).
I think it might due to my mis-understanding how Global Options work.
My initial observations led me to think that the value of a Global Option would be specific to the user’s session. Only affecting the other player once the Global Option affected some shared entity - eg. a Global Property, a piece or output to the Chat Window.
As I start to do more online testing, I am observing that a user’s initial setting (the default) of a Global Option does not always take effect. In this situation, the option can be set by toggling it off and back on (exiting Preferences between each change).
Can anyone help me understand what is going on or point me to documentation where the difference between a Global Option and a Global Property is explained, or are they in fact identical except for the Preferences interface ? Moreover, despite what I first thought, is a change to a Global Option synch’d with other sessions in a multiplayer game?
Mark
Which Global Options are you having a problem with?
Think of a Global Option as a game rules setting that a module designer makes, and it lasts for the whole game. If the decision happens to be “use the players’ preference”, then the preference will be consulted. But for example changing the “people can unmask each other’s cards” setting in the middle of the game will not let you suddenly start unmasking cards left and right. The already-masked cards will remember what the initial rules setting was.
Think of a Global Property as a “variable” - it contains a value, but the value can be changed. The value of the Global Property will be the same for all players in the game – i.e. if we’re playing online and I do something that sets the “Victory Points” value to 11, it will now be 11 in your copy of the game too. In PBEM the changes to these things happen when you load or play-forward-through the VLOG file that your opponent sends – a series of “commands” are contained in the log file, which happen to be the same commands that would have “gone out over the wire” in live play.
Brian