[Rails-devel] Bug reports

[Erik V. <eri...@xs...>]

This month quite a number of bug reports have been entered 
into the project's Bug Tracker. I have now gone through
all of these reports, and will here give a summary.

#2898839 - 1830:  dropouts remain, in privates-auction.
- "When a private has 3-or-more bidders, the auction will continue,
even after one bidder passes and drops out.
However, rails also continues to allow that player(s) to bid again."
- Confirmed and fixed.

#2898830 - priority incorrectly affected by privates auctions.
- "Rails doesn't handle priority correctly across a typical 1830-style
privates auction. Note that the auction itself, does not count as a 
player action- for the bidders, winner, etc. In rails, it appears to."
- Confirmed and fixed. The fix is generic: auctioning will now never 
change the PD after bidding in any game. Not sure of this rule holds
for all games, but I'm currently not aware of any exceptions.

#2898824 - 1.0.7 hangs when 2p 1856 or 18al requested- 1830, 1870 ok
- Rails allows 2-player games to be started with 1856 and 18AL, which
officially don't support that number of players, but then hangs.
- In fact the program got into a loop: players have 0 cash (because
no amount of cash is configured) and so the program cannot find
any valid "first move", but keeps looking.
This condition is now checked for, and a not-configured number
of players is no longer possible. To allow games being played with
an "unofficial" number of players, the Game.xml file of the game 
in question must be updated first to specify a start cash amount 
and a certificate limit for that number of players.
(Read this file, it'll be obvious what to do).

#2898821 - 18al game, 1.0.7: AB&C move not processed
- "AB&C's OR 5.1 move in the attached rails file saves and reloads 
fine with 1.0.6, but 1.0.7 ignores AB&C's move completely."
- A bug in version 1.0.6 incorrectly caused AB&C to get the first turn
in OR5.1. It should have been M&O. The bug had already been fixed a
while ago, and so 1.0.7, om loading a 1.0.6 saved file, correctly did 
not accept AB&C moves when it was not that company's turn. 
Advised players to undo until before the root cause error (in SR5)
and play from there with version 1.0.7.

#2898819 - 1.0.7 won't display tiles-window 
- "When selecting "Info / See Remaining Tiles...", nothing happens."
- Confirmed. A recent change, just before 1.0.7-rc1 came out,
caused a program exception. Fixed.

#2898315 - 18EU hover text
- "The hover text for non-lettered cities is incorrect. 
It shows they can be upgraded to tiles 201 and 202, when in fact 
they can only be upgraded to tile 57."
- Confirmed and fixed.

#2897934 - rails.sh containing DOS end of line characters.
- "The rails.sh (in both archives (zip and tar.gz), contains ^M 
characters at the end of each line. This prevents the game from 
starting from the script."
- I have handed this one over to Brett.

#2897874 - 18EU bid problem
- "18EU will not let players place an initial bid higher than 100, 
nor will it allow players to increase the current bid by more than 5."
- This only happened after loading from a saved file. The enabling of
the "Bid Amount" spinner was not done in this case. Fixed.

#2897582 - Worth does calculate the P share as 10%
- "...Rails does count the P share as just 10% when calculating net 
Worth. This is serious and not good!"
- Serious indeed, and all too true. Fixed.

#2897066 - T4 does not rust when trade in for a Diesel
- This was caused by an exception occurring in version 1.0.6,
- Does not occur in 1.0.7, as it had already been fixed before.

#2894525 - Cannot trade in 4 for Deisel because slot full
- "Last 6 has been sold, buy train option available, 
trade 4 for Deisel available Denied because company is "slot full""
- Confirmed and fixed.
(#2895066 and #2894518 duplicated this one)

#2894495 - Token "swaps sides" on upgrade
- "PRR Token on Hex H18 western track position swapped to eastern 
position after upgrade."
- What in fact happened, is that in version 1.0.6 the upgrade logic 
incorrectly ended up linking both #65 cities to the same track.
This had already been fixed in the meantime and does not happen 
in 1.0.7.

#2894277 - 18EU minors 7,9 reversed on map
- "The beginning map in 18EU shows the minors in Berlin as 9,7. 
It should be 7,9."
- My response: "Home company names are currently drawn on the hex 
in arbitrary sequence. In fact I am amazed that it isn't done in 
numeric sequence; perhaps the XML parser does not parse the companies 
in the defined order. In any case, there is currently no relationship 
between the company name sequence [as drawn on the emty hex] and 
the city locations on such a hex. Drawing the home names in the 
city circles rather than on the fixed hex position would be a worthy 
improvement, and I'm putting it on my list of things to look at 
after release 1.0.7 has come out."
In addition: the home tokens are laid in the right spots.

#2891711 - D&H token is not free.
[I think I reported this one before, but anyway]
- "When I buy D&H with my PRR I can lay the tile. No problem. 
But ewhen I try to lay the free token the Rails engine says 
it is free but I must pay for it. This is very annoying as 
I want the rail head free there."
- My repsonse: "Confirmed. This is an error in the UI: if more 
than one possibility to lay a token exists (in this case: 
lay a token normally and lay a token using a private special property), 
always the first one was chosen. The user sees the company token 
displayed twice, so far without distinction indicating which token 
lay option is attached to each one.
Fix: The UI will now display the private name alongside the token (in this
case: "PRR (D&H)" for the case where the special property must be used.
That option will now be honoured correctly. This fix will be included in
version 1.0.7.
N.B. In the case of 1830, showing the token twice is actually unnecessary,
because there is no reason not to use the special property, because the D&H
will not close while using it. However, the UI Is generic and has to count
with potential cases where a player might not want to use a special
property if a normal lay is also possible."

This last one is perhaps a tricky one in game play: the same token is
displayed twice, and the one marked with "D&H" must be clicked
to use the private special property. The program currently has
no way to know of the company does or does not have a route that
would enable a 'normal' token lay.


I'm omitting the bugs handled (either fixed or not found 
reproducable) before November. If anyone wants to check on these, 
please have a look in the Bug Tracker.

>From my POV we are ready to release a new RC for 1.0.7,
to give users another stab at it. Then we can finally
release 1.0.7 one or two weeks later. This should be the
most bugfree Rails version ever!

Erik.