Shannon V. OKeets
Posts: 22095
Joined: 5/19/2005
From: Honolulu, Hawaii
Status: offline
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quote:
ORIGINAL: BallyJ
So whould I
quote:
ORIGINAL: niclasil
I've been following this forum for years, but I never "bothered" to register until now. I just want to note - and I know I'm not the first and I know the issue seems decided, but I REALLY wish you will release this without an AI. By all means, develop the AI and re-release (perhaps do the real release when the AI is done), but PLEASE let us by this product without the AI. I'm in a stage in my life where I don't have the time and space to set up this game anymore, and my friends and I haven't been able to play for two years now. I'll gladly pay $200+ for this, with or without the AI.
A year gone by that I haven't been able to play WiF at all is a wasted year...
The AIO is not the problem.
The hundreds of interacting rules are. Combine that with a certain vagueness on how the rules are written (requiring rewriting the code once rule clarifications are received from Harry Rowland et al), and undocumented code from CWIF, and ...
I spend a lot of time reading through code to see if it follows the rules correctly, documenting the code once I have figured out what it is doing, and revising it when necessary.
For example, a better understanding of how the Chinese Communist activity limits are a function of the action choices by the USSR and Chinese meant:
1 - adding new variables to track the CC activites,
2 - writing the new variables out to/reading them from the saved game file,
3 - which meant changing the GAM file structure,
4 - revising the forms where activity limits are shown,
5 - changing the documenation in the Players Manual, and
6 - revising the on-line help files.
There were 50 places in the code where I needed to make changes. And no mistakes are ever permitted, so the modifications have to be done perfectly (carefully, with repeated checking of the logic). When I do this I always take care to choose good variable names and document what the code does, and why. Sometimes I include segments of the rules' text as part of the in-line code documentation (e.g., references to Rules As Coded - RAC - which serves as MWIF program specifications). Because the program size is approaching 400,000 lines of code, there is no way I can retain all the details about how the program works in my head for instant recall 6 months later when I want to make another change. Hence the absolute necessity for in-line documentation.
The CC stuff only took me a day and a half.
Reworking the routing of resources to factories is now going into its 5th week (I work on this 7 days a week). Besides the search algorithms, which only took a couple of days to straighten out (CWIF did those very well and I just needed to understand and document them), I needed to add a dozen new variables and make a ton of changes to the player interface to enable the players to see and modify the resources ==> factories information and routes.
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For the AIO, there is no player interface (yay!). There are only one or two forms for each of PBEM and Netplay. The rest of the game has 150 forms with ~1500 buttons that have code that responds to the player clicking on them.
_____________________________
Steve
Perfection is an elusive goal.
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