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Shannon V. OKeets -> RE: When? (3/2/2009 10:47:26 PM)
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March 1, 2009 Status Report for Matrix Games’ MWIF Forum
Accomplishments of February
Project Management
Firm release date for MWIF product 1 is July 27th, 2009.
Communications
Matrix assigned a new editor (Jim) for the Players Manual and I am working with him on organizing the preparation of its 250+ pages (@8.5" by 11").
Sean Drummy (Matrix Games) is up-to-date with posting screen shots of World in Flames on the Matrix website.
I monitored all the threads in the MWIF World in Flames forum daily and uploaded version 12.01, 12.02, 12.03, and 12.04 for the beta testers.
Greyshaft continues to send me text from Rules as Coded for the Players Manual, which I am merging with the dozens of screen shots I am receiving from Patrice of the forms.
Dean Stow (a forum member) sent me some of his comments on Section 7 of the Players Manual. They were great and I made almost all his suggested changes.
Peter Skoglund is working with me on scripting the setup of Spain and Turkey. We’re using a more sophisticated system to analyze threats from air, sea, and land.
Patrice asked Harry Rowland a simple rules question about Frogmen and Harry answered it immediately.
Patrice has found 700+ radio clips from WW II (MP3 format). I don’t know about copyright issues (and MP3 format) with using these radio clips though.
Vlad has joined with Andy, Terje, and Robert working on the naval unit writeups.
Erik is looking into pricing a printed copy of the map.
No communications with Robert Nebel or Chris Marinacci.
Hardware and Software Development Tools
I have not installed ThemeEngine July/2007 - this status is unchanged.
Beta Testing
I uploaded versions 12.01 through 12.04 for the beta testers. Version 12.03 was a disaster with all new games crashing immediately and restored games crashing rather quickly too. I had accidentally overwritten “(S = nil)” while making some edits [so much for making code changes between 1 AM and 2 AM]. Luckily it only took me a couple of hours to figure that out and upload 12.04. But it does make you think: remove 9 characters from the source listings and nothing works! Then ponder the fact that there are close to 300,000 lines of text in the source listings for MWIF.
Patrice pitched in and uploaded a data file patch as version 12.02a. I was off delivering singing valentines and couldn’t find 2 consecutive hours to make those edits. The patch 12.02a solved about 1/4 of the reported problems for version 12.02.
11 of the 12 new beta testers are slaving away; and inundating me with bug reports. There is a lot of redundancy in the bug reports I receive, which I really like, even though it requires me to do some extra bookkeeping. When I see 3 or 4 reports on the same bug, then I am more confident that some obscure ones are likely to be caught.
I have version 12.05 ready to upload and will do so after I finish writing this monthly report. The main reason this monthly report is a day late is that I was deep in the code fixing bugs with anti-aircraft attacks and didn’t want to break away and risk losing the thread of that logic.
There is a possibility that I will add another 3 or 4 beta testers this month. But I am just not sure about that at the moment. Right now there are almost 40 beta testers who have reported to me (this past month) that they are testing the program.
Units, Map, and Scenarios
Patrice had a few more map name corrections that I made and the beta testers saw in version 12.04. I haven’t made the final pass on the coast map bitmaps yet. But I’ll probably do it sometime this month.
The naval unit data needed a new data field added to accommodate a weirdness in 4 of the 1300 naval units. Making that change for version 12.02 resulted in the diacritical marks (e.g., acute, grave, umlaut) in the foreign ship names to be lost - hence the need for the 12.02a patch.
I have given the authors working on the unit writeups until the end of April to finish them. If you have an interest in this, they are always looking for a few more helping hands. The air units writeups are done and the land and naval writeups and in the 50% to 60% range of being complete .
Optional Rules
I spent a few hours on optional rules, but not any serious time. In the course of doing other things, I sometimes come across code concerning optional rules that I haven’t read through and commented. Since one of the things on my task list is to finish checking the code for all the optional rules, I typically will do so when the code for one of them is staring me in the face.
Player Interface
I created a new form for players to select units from the queue of aborted naval units (part of version 12.00). This needs substantial testing. I activated the Selectable Units form for a couple of the subphases of naval combat which makes it easier to identify which units are capable of moving in those subphases.
I made substantial changes to the Land Combat Charts form so it can be used prior to, during, and after resolving land combat. This lets the player decide on the order for resolving land combats and to make decisions about the use of snow units and choice of Assault versus Blitz. While I was doing that, I revised the Land Combat Resolution form, yet again. My objective this time was to present all the details of the different shifts and die modifications so the final outcome doesn’t appear to be generated by a black box.
Internet - NetPlay
I didn’t spend any time on NetPlayComTest in February - the new beta testers swamped me with work. I need to spend a few more hours on the test program and then I’ll incorporate those routines in MWIF proper. I did correct some ancillary problems related to assigning major power groups to players, which was essential for testing the bidding system (used to decide who plays which major power groups).
CWIF Conversion
Overstacking and Collapse Vichy ‘phases’ still need to be converted into Digressions.
MWIF Game Engine
I generated a few more Game Record Log entries to support NetPlay. As always, these are conversions from CWIF’s methodology of using internal Windows calls and replacing them with Indy10 calls. I did find a typo in the new Game Record Log code which caused problems (UnitNumber1 should have been UnitNumber2). Changing a 1 to a 2 fixed what looked like a massive problem from the beta testers’ point of view.
Saved Games
This code is stable.
Player’s Manual
Greyshaft has started helping me on the Player’s Manual by taking text from Rules as Coded and placing it into the section on Forms. For each form I want to have: (1) the pertinent text from RAC for the rules related to the form, (2) a screen shot of the form, and (3) a paragraph or two on how to use the form.
Patrice has sent me over 100 screen shots, in TIF, 300 DPI, which is the format needed for the Players Manual (as specified by Marc at Matrix Games). I haven’t been using them all but my estimate of screen shots in the Players Manual has doubled from 50 to over 100. That increase is mainly because I am cutting pieces out of full page screen shots and inserting them immediately alongside text that comments on them. This saves having to go back to a larger full page figure and hunt around for what the text is referencing. Hey, maybe by the time I finish writing the Players Manual I will have gotten the hang of how to do it.
Actually I probably spent too much time on the Players Manual this month. I finished Section 2 (Introduction), 90% of Section 4 (Starting as New Game), and roughly half of Section 8 (Player Interface). The first two are less than 10 pages each but Section 8 will run to about 140 pages, all by its little lonesome.
PBEM
Nothing was scheduled.
Historical Video, Music, and Sound
Nothing new. For historical video and sound, I want to finalize the former this month, and the latter next month: what happens, when, and for how long. Patrice found 700+ radio clips from WW II (MP3 format). I don’t know about copyright issues (and MP3 format) with using these radio clips though.
Help System and Tutorials
One of the new beta testers read through all the Picture and Text tutorials (115 pages) and provided several dozen excellent suggestions for improvements. I made changes for all but 1 of those suggestions and will do the last one when I get the time.
Once I get Section 8 of the Player’s Manual completed, I will copy the text therein describing each Form and transfer it into the context sensitive help file. I already have help buttons installed on all Forms and when a player clicks on one of them, the program fetches the corresponding segment of text from “Help Content.txt” (those pages are blank at the moment). However, there are finished descriptions of all the phases and subphases of the game. With the addition of the content for the Forms, the help system will be finished.
Erik and Dave at Matrix have persuaded me that there should be a Training Video for MWIF. I thought of having just one sequence, playing through an Axis impulse where the 3 different major powers take a Land, Naval, and Combined actions. But while I was writing up how to use the Setup Tray, I decided that there should be a second clip covering that; it can be quite complex compared to other computer war games.
AI Opponent
Peter continues to work on the scripts for setting up minor countries. I haven’t had time to do anything on the parser, but that is next in the queue after I get NetPlay into testing.
Peter and I have been developing a more powerful and general purpose system for setting up the units for Spain and Turkey. This will be the system the AIO will use for setting up the major powers. My hope remains that the design will be robust enough that the AIO will be able to set up the 7 scenarios that start late in the war without me (or anyone else) having to take time to figure out which units set up in which hexes.
Other
I spent two full days delivering singing valentines (4 part a capella harmony). We did 8 on Friday and 9 on Saturday. Fewer women cried this year, so either we performed better (fewer sour notes causing pain) or worse (fewer perfectly blended chords evoking rapture). This was the swan song for our baritone who is moving to Maui next week. The wife and I managed to refinance our condo at 4.5% before the rates popped back up.
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February summary: The beta testers were in fine form and kept me hopping. I now have the Players Manual to the point that it is “within striking distance” of completion - if I decide to push hard on it. NetPlay where art thou?
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Tasks for March
Communications
Continue monitoring the forum threads.
Map and Units
Finalize coastal bitmap graphics. [est. 1 hour]
Beta Testing
Upload a new version every 5 days. [est. 2 hours]
Work on the backlog of bug reports. [est. 130 hours]
Optional Rules
Review, comment, modify, and create code for optional rules [est. 5 hours]
Redesign of MWIF Game Engine
Fix bugs reported on the newly added code. [est 20 hours]
Add more Game Record Log entries for NetPlay. [est. 30 hours]
Player Interface
Finish the code for determining and displaying supply lines. [est. 10 hours]
NetPlay
Implement the bidding capability using NetPlay. [est. 5 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. 50 hours in January]
AI Opponent
Define LAIO variables with their supporting functions. Finish coding the parser for LAIO. [est. 30 hours]
Help System and Tutorials
Nothing scheduled until May.
Player’s Manual
Integrate text from others into the Player’s Manual. [est 10 hours].
Historical Detail, Animations, and Sound
Decide on Historical videos. [est. 5 hours]
Other
Nothing but programming in March, it appears.
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March summary: Get NetPlay functioning. Make another cut into the backlog of bug reports.
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