Menus unavailable/nonfunctional in World, and other 2.9 bugs

[a player]

I'm using the latest standalone client under Win8.1, and sometimes things become sketchy. I can do battle vs. the AI's characters, but have no access to the other menus.

So, I click on Boris and accept the match. Now I have a little icon in the lower left that has three horizontal bars on it. If I click the icon, I get some menu buttons: Concede, Exit, etc.... However, none of the buttons does anything but bring me back to the battle.

If I leave the client open - with everything functioning properly - and go off to check the forums or whatever, it takes several minutes with a black screen before I get the Shadow Era screen back again.

I sometimes have games where my opponent's cards don't display properly. At times even the hero is shown as a card-back. Newly summoned cards arrive first face-down, and then sometimes I can hover over them or click on them and they reveal themselves. Sometimes they will display their enlarged attack/health info but no art or text.

[Gondorian]

The card back issue sounds like you have very bad connection or slow computer. If they have any cards you don't own or you didn't let it preload your whole collection then you would need to download them on demand.

[a player]

I used to skip the pre-loading of cards, but with the last version or two I allowed all the preloading to occur.

It is conceivable at times for other connections to hog all the bandwidth, but my connection is not slow. Is it possible for Windows to reallocate the memory that had been holding the pre-loaded art? My computer isn't super-fantastic, but it's a fairly modern Intel CPU with 8GB RAM, was designed for Windows 8, and supports win10.

Simple games oughtn't to require frequent hardware upgrades. I used to run SE 1.2x on XP boxes from the turn of the century!

[Gondorian]

I used to skip the pre-loading of cards, but with the last version or two I allowed all the preloading to occur.

It is conceivable at times for other connections to hog all the bandwidth, but my connection is not slow. Is it possible for Windows to reallocate the memory that had been holding the pre-loaded art? My computer isn't super-fantastic, but it's a fairly modern Intel CPU with 8GB RAM, was designed for Windows 8, and supports win10.

Simple games oughtn't to require frequent hardware upgrades. I used to run SE 1.2x on XP boxes from the turn of the century!

I don't know how big your collection is, but if your opponent played any cards you don't own yourself then they will still be downloaded on demand. Maybe other stuff was hogging the bandwidth at the time, when your client tried to get those images.

As for simple games ... The Unity3d engine is fairly resource hungry, which means Shadow Era can't ever be considered simple from hardware-demands perspective. Each new version of Unity demands more and more from the hardware.

[a player]

This was my secondary account. On the PC client, I must scroll ninety-four times to view all the cards in the collection. Upon launch the client doesn't display any preload information, it just starts right up from the launcher, which reports that the client is up-to-date. This account certainly has all thirty-two heroes and the alt. art versions of the first twenty, plus foils of more than half of them.

I think it would be an error to assume that these glitches - which have occurred more than once or twice - are due to a lack of bandwidth.

If Unity is driving you guys to require new computers of all your players every couple of years you may face a diminishing market. My computer supports the next version of Windows that hasn't been fully released, yet.

I haven't figured out the cause of the problem yet, but I doubt it is my hardware or ISP that is at fault.

[Gondorian]

This was my secondary account. On the PC client, I must scroll ninety-four times to view all the cards in the collection. Upon launch the client doesn't display any preload information, it just starts right up from the launcher, which reports that the client is up-to-date.

That launcher progress bar is not where the preloading happens. That is comparing your client to the latest client. Since you are already at 2.912, it doesn't update and says you are up to date. The card images are completely separate to the client. When you hit PLAY from the launcher and the client launches, the progress bar on that screen that shows the News from April about 2.90 having issues on iOS is where the preloading of the images happens.

[a player]

Looks like the preloading never happens.

[a player]

Same problem in web-based app (firefox)
https://www.dropbox.com/s/zqnbifo94m...2019.54.28.png

[Gondorian]

Looks like the preloading never happens.

In that case, you might wish to hit Clear Cache when the pc client (not launcher) starts up and then see if it attempts to preload images during the news screen after you have logged into the client (not launcher). In a way, it's gonna screw you over because any cards your opponent has used that you don't own will no longer be cached even after a full preload of your library, but I think you said you have all the cards on one of your accounts, so be sure to use that one.

In terms of UI issues, can you try choosing a different resolution and also Fast graphics instead the higher options like Fantastic.

[a player]

For the moment, the standalone app is cooperating with a high resolution and fantastic graphics. If it messes up I'll clear the cache and try again.

The web client doesn't appear to offer preloading. I guess that makes sense, because the cache could be discarded at any time. But why are its menus vanishing?

I was wondering why you were referring to my incomplete card collection. I figured that your secret spy network was looking at the impoverished tertiary account in my signature. I've had viewing of sigs turned off for years, but if you had sent me the thousand crystals for my voice recording that laughed at the notion of you being the greatest Shadow Era player of all time, I could have fattened it up a bit. That account has over six hundred unique card images while my primary and secondary have over nine hundred.