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Shannon V. OKeets -> RE: When? (3/1/2008 10:33:01 PM)
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March 1, 2008 Status Report for Matrix Games’ MWIF Forum
Accomplishments of February
Project Management
December 2008 is the scheduled release date for MWIF product 1. I am still planning on attending Origins 2008 and demonstrating MWIF with multi-player capability over a network there.
Communications
I monitored all the threads in the MWIF World in Flames forum daily and uploaded versions 7.02 through 7.04 to the beta testers. The beta testers send me numerous bug reports for each new release.
Patrice continues to be a tremendous help on the map and tutorials - amongst numerous other things. Marcus Watney gave us many helpful critiques of map sections this past month.
Capitan continues to coordinate work on the land unit descriptions written by himself and other forum members.
Peter Skoglund has been very helpful in fleshing out the details of LAIO (Language for Artificial Intelligence Opponent). Richard Dazeley has commented on same as well.
Harry Rowland pointed John Zielinski in my direction and John has started sending me detailed spreadsheets of the units in WIF (covering all the different add-ons and versions), comparing them to historical units. Essentially John has put together a definitive OOB (order of battle) for WW II and then lined it up side by side with the units from WIF products. I say WW II, but to be more precise, it covers pre-war and post-war units too: DOD through Patton in Flames/America in Flames.
My conversation with the printer about printing the entire world map resulted in an outlandish cost. Erik Rutkins at Matrix is looking into whether they can find a lower priced vendor.
Nothing from Rob Armstrong (graphics). All he has left are splash screens (2) and box art.
Dan Hatchen has been hired by Matrix Games to work on NetPlay and PBEM. My schedule has NetPlay technical code done in March and the technical code for PBEM done in May.
Robert Nebel (Nebert) has been getting help from Jimm in developing test scripts and plans. When he gets a chance he’ll upload revised test plans/scripts for the beta testers.
No communications with Chris Marinacci.
Software Development Tools
I have not installed ThemeEngine July/2007 yet. I am waiting until after we get NetPlay working.
Beta Testing
Versions 7.02 through 7.04 primarily corrected bugs. I did add new functionality and spiffed up the user interface in places. For details on the new functionality, see below.
Units
Unit writeups are continuing, with slow but steady progress on land units, although naval units have ground to a halt - unless I am mistaken(?).
The new information we received from John Zielinski has us reviewing what we have. But many of John’s comments are for significant changes in the units, including the addition of over 100 new land units. Clearly this is out of scope for MWIF product 1 and requires major decisions by ADG (Harry Rowland) before they can be considered for later MWIF products.
Some of John’s corrections to the units Patrice and I had already made. We’ll definitely make the cosmetic changes John provided, such as correcting the date sunk. It is likely that we will change some of the unit availability dates too, though that will done on a unit by unit basis - our main concern being whether it affects game play.
Map
Marcus Watney identified several major problems with the map, to which Patrice, with help from other forum members, was able to thrash out solutions. Most importantly, the rerouting of the Yellow River in China had been missed by everyone. In 1938, the Communist Chinese blew up the canals and dams that had been built to route the Yellow River to the north. This resulted in the Yellow River returning to it historical southern route to the sea, and the flooding of an enormous area. In game terms, this means that about a dozen river hexsides needed to be changed and 3 new lake hexsides added.
This change causes the historical front lines in China in 1939 to make a lot more sense. Previously, the Chinese frontline was across a bunch of clear hexes and they looked like dead meat. Now they have a river/lake line protecting them. Other revisions, usually prompted by Marcus, have been done to Australia, New Zealand, and the islands in the South Pacific.
Scenario Setup
Scenario data remains stable.
Optional Rules
No substantial progress on implementing the optional rules that remain to be coded.
Player Interface
I added functionality to the Naval Review Details form (NRD). Specifically, the form can be used to cycle through all the sea areas and ports on the map and see the units therein, sorted by naval unit type (e.g., carriers, battleships, etc.). Approximately 50 units can be seen at once. You can also filter the units displayed by Axis, Allied, and current major power. Those filters are cumulative and are intended to let you look at just your units (major power) or just one side’s units. If a sea area or port contains no units, then it is skipped; and given that there are 83 sea areas and even more ports, that’s a good thing.
What remains to be done for the NRD is to line up the cargo with its transports. For instance, to have the carrier air units right alongside their carriers so at a glance you can see which carriers have air units assigned and which are empty. I also need to create vertical scroll bars for the unit lists.
I laid out the design and functionality for the Naval Review Summary form (NRS), down to the level of having actually created/coded the form. However, I haven’t yet written the code to instantiate it using game data. The NRD and NRS will work together, with each of them taking up half a screen width. The idea here is that the NRS will show 13 sea areas and ports, with summary statistics for each of them. The player can then click on any sea area or port and the NRD will show all the units therein. Because the NRS can only show 13 locations at a time, I will let the player create, save, and restore groups of 13 locations. Here the purpose is to let the player review the sea areas and ports important to such things as: a convoy pipeline, a strategic sea area (e.g., North Sea), and a potential invasion site (e.g., Honolulu, Italian Coast).
I vastly improved several of the Naval Combat forms. Note that there are almost a dozen forms designed expressly for naval units. I am increasing the size (i.e., screen footprint) of the forms so more units can be displayed at once. I have also added a maximum resolution (zoom 8) depiction of a single unit so the player can move the cursor over individual units and see each one clearly.
Yesterday I tried increasing the basic size of units appearing in unit lists in naval forms from zoom 4 to zoom 5. That makes a big difference for naval units - you can easily read each unit’s name at zoom 5. I don’t know if I want to do that everywhere, since increasing the size of the unit depiction means that fewer units can be seen simultaneously. But in the one case I tried, it worked very well, so I think I will use zoom 5 whenever space isn’t a serious constraint. The NRD already uses zoom 5.
Internet - NetPlay
Nothing new.
CWIF Conversion
I revised all the code related to building lists of sea areas and ports. These are used for: (1) determining legal moves for naval units, (2) determining supply for units overseas, and (3) routing resource and build points over seas. When the player clicks on a naval unit, or units, in the naval movement phase, the program immediately determines all the legal moves for that unit, taking into consideration weather (e.g., iced in ports) and political restrictions (e.g., Gibraltar). This includes checking for where the moving unit might be intercepted by enemy units. Armed with this foreknowledge, the program can instantly provide feedback on legal/illegal moves as the player hovers the unit(s) over sea areas and ports.
Other than the above, nothing new on the supply line routines.
MWIF Game Engine
I continue to convert game play decisions to Game Record Log entries to support NetPlay.
Saved Games
I keep this functioning at all times. Sadly, I still have to change the format structure occasionally, which renders all previously saved games obsolete. That’s an ongoing aggravation to myself and all the beta testers.
Player’s Manual
Rules as Coded (RAC) is stable and I consider it finished. No other work is planned on documentation until May.
PBEM
Nothing new, scheduled for early summer.
Historical Detail, Animations, and Sound
Nothing new, scheduled for fall.
Help System and Tutorials
Nothing new, scheduled for late summer.
AI Opponent
I have the AIO tasks scheduled for the summer, but since Peter has been willing to put in a lot of time and effort on this, I have shifted some of that work to the present.
I finished typing in my AIO notes specific to each of the 8 major powers, which I wrote up when I was in Europe in the spring. I made some progress on doing the same for my notes that apply to all major powers. By the way, I have decided to call the later the Universal Rules Set, since they apply to all major powers. Rules within the Universal Rules Set are then replaced by rules in each Major Power Rules Set, when the latter are available. The majority of the rules specific to a major power are for its strategic planning, of course.
Peter and I have defined the fundamentals for LAIO (Language for the Artificial Intelligence Opponent). We have the constants, variables, operators, syntax, and overall structure for a rule laid out in pretty good detail. What we are working on now is refining how to call functions, manipulate lists (e.g., sort a list of air units by air-to-air value), and access variable attributes (e.g., anti-air factors for a surface combat ship).
We have 1 of the 143 rules partially complete: FM 33, choosing assault or blitz as the land combat results table. There are scads of language details to fill in but if we can get the basic elements of LAIO down, that will be mostly tedious typing. For instance, every unit has numerous attributes associated with it within MWIF. We will have to type in the correspondence between LAIO variables and MWIF variables: Air2Air AirAir, Air2Sea AirSea and so on for hundreds of attributes and functions that a rule may need to reference.
Other
My quartet delivered 16 singing valentines on the 13th and 14th of February, though most of those were done with a substitute baritone, since Kamu had to work during the day. A singing valentine is 4 guys singing 2 very short barbershop 4 part harmony songs, a rose, and a card. We had about a 60% success rate, where we measure success by whether the woman cries or not. At one gig we sang for a beautician in a nail salon and had her, her boss, and the customer who was getting a pedicure all crying. Women just love this romantic stuff. At another gig we sang for a kindergarten teacher, and because they have classrooms without walls, the audience was 100+ kids and a dozen teachers. Her husband (who had ordered the singing valentine) was there, and though his wife managed to mostly keep her composure during our singing, her husband had tears running down both cheeks.
The guys next door, working on the 5 story children’s hospital, are now putting in the floor for the first level. I couldn’t figure out how they were going to pour concrete for the higher floors. The solution , obvious in retrospect, is that they are using precast sections and simply putting them in place. Precast horizontal beams span the vertical columns and the precast floor sections lay between the beams.
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February summary: Progress on the naval phases is slow but steady. I hadn’t given naval routines and forms much attention until now, so it is taking me time to understand that CWIF code and add comments once I figure out what the code is doing. AIO development is running ahead of schedule, which is good since NetPlay is behind schedule.
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Tasks for March
Communications
Continue monitoring the forum threads.
Map and Units
Make corrections to the map on the 15th. This is now my standard schedule for map updates.
Beta Testing
Upload versions weekly. [est. 2 hours]
Redesign of MWIF Game Engine
Continue to work through the sequence of play giving each phase its own module. [est. 100 hours]
CWIF Conversion
Continue converting from CWIF style internet formats to Game Record Log Formats. [est. 10 hours]
Test the new random number generator. [est. 1 hour]
Player Interface
Finish the code for determining and displaying supply lines. [est. 15 hours]
Complete the Task Forces and Naval Review forms. Implement Task Forces as a new “unit type”. [est. 60 hours]
Create Unit and hex lists for air missions. [est 20 hours in May]
Display the sequence of play (SOP) on the screen so the player knows where he is within the SOP and what is coming up next. [est. 20 hours in May]
NetPlay
Test the bidding capability using NetPlay. [est. 10 hours]
Incorporate the Indy10 code for the two player system into MWIF. [est. 20 hours]
Incorporate the multi-player (more than 2) system into MWIF. [est. 30 hours]
AI Opponent
Define LAIO variables with their supporting functions. Write a parser for LAIO. Create a few rules as text and encode them for testing the parser. [est. 10 hours in March; 140 hours in June - July]
Help System and Tutorials
Nothing scheduled until September.
Player’s Manual
Nothing scheduled until May.
Historical Detail, Animations, and Sound
Nothing scheduled until July.
Other
It looks like our chorus will have a gig every weekend in March. We use them to practice the new songs we will be singing in our annual show (first weekend in May).
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March summary: Keep the beta testers busy and respond to their bug reports. Work with Dan on NetPlay. Continue work on Game Record Log conversions to support NetPlay for entire sequence of play. Devote the most time to the getting the New Game Engine to advance through the sequence of play. Finish the revisions to the player interface for Naval Review and Task Forces.
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