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Shannon V. OKeets -> RE: When? (11/1/2006 7:17:57 AM)
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November 1, 2006 Status Report for Matrix Games’ MWIF Forum
Accomplishments of October
Project Management I have a revised project plan but I need to discuss it with David Heath before I post summary information from it for all the read. I should be able to present that here within the next couple of days.
Communications
Rob Armstrong provided new coastal and river/lake bitmaps for Africa and revised ones for Scandinavia.
I monitored all the threads in the MWIF World in Flames forum daily.
A half a dozen members of the forum have newly volunteered to help write up unit descriptions. Jesper Pehrson has taken on the task of orchestrating the writeups on land units.
Terje continues to work on the naval units and has accepted my offer for him to organize the naval units writeups. Graham Dodge has agreed to do the same for the air units.
Patrice has wrapped up all the preparatory work on the maps. Patrice is also assisting Peter Kanjowski with a project on the Yahoo WIF Discussion group to clarify all outstanding rules questions. To that end, they will have Harry Rowland act as the judge of last resort - which Harry has agreed to do.
I sent Chris Marinacci and Harry Rowland some samples of the tutorials and they were enthusiastic about them.
Graham Dodge contacted the current list of beta testers and determined that we had 5 openings to fill in order to bring our head count back up to 20. Withstanding enormous pressure placed on him in having to choose just 5 individuals from a long list of people wanting to participate, Graham selected the new beta testers. So far 3 of them have completed the process of signing a NDA agreement, setting up accounts, et al, and have successfully downloaded version 2.00.
Dan Hatchen (I hope) is waiting on me to install what he has already done on NetPlay.
No activity with the AI Opponent team, mostly because they are waiting on me for more specifics.
Beta Testing
I decided to upload 3.00 even though it contains dozens of bugs that I have already identified. This accomplishes 3 goals: (1) it lets the beta testers look for yet more problems, (2) it will let Patrice examine the maps in detail as the new bitmaps arrive from Rob, and (3) it will let the text writeup coordinators (Graham, Terje, and Jesper) post screen shots to the forum on unit writeups (rather than me taking the time).
I expect to spend half of November just correcting bugs in 3.00 through 3.0x.
Units
Terje and Eric Osborne have sent me samples of their writeups on the naval units, but I believe there are several other people working on them as well. Jesper Pehrson, Gary Bezant, Wosung, and Hazpak have sent me writeups on land units, and again I believe there are several other people also working on them.
I completed formatting all the writeups I had received earlier, which was 1200+ air units and several hundred naval units. By informing the authors of the rather simple mechanics required to format writeups, and having them do that task, I won’t do that any more. In addition, by delegating responsibility for coordination to Graham, Terje, and Jesper, I should have minimal involvement in the whole process. Which is as it should be since it does not involve programming skills.
I tidied up some loose ends with how the units are displayed on the screen. In particular I moved the shadow to the bottom right and fixed transparency problems with unit pictures on forms. All that remains are: (1) implementing low resolution and (2) cleaning up some dirty edges (non-transparency that should be transparent) when units are moved around on the map.
Map
I processed Africa and Scandinavia coastal and river/lake bitmaps from Rob and integrated them into the program. After a couple of passes on these, we have just a few touch ups left to do. I expect to leave those undone for now, to see if the beta testers find any more, before asking Rob for a final set of bitmaps for those map segments.
Rob is now working on the USSR east of the Urals, from Siberia down to the Indian Ocean. As mentioned above, Patrice completed a review of the world map and has uploaded draft coastlines and river/lake JPEG files for Rob to work from. There are dozens of those files so Rob should be busy on them for some time to come.
CWIF Conversion
I’ve installed the new player interface, with the usually caveats about loose ends that need to be cleaned up. Tracking down and correcting the bugs created by the conversion from the old style interface to the new really delayed the release of version 3.00 to the beta testers.
Game Interface
I decided on all the game interface component conversions and implemented at least several examples of each. Actually, I have converted all the individual components except ten or so.
I extended the language for formatting text descriptions to 6 symbols. The most commonly used ones are .P for paragraph, .B for bullet, and .T for tab. These have been heavily used (over 1500 writeups) and the code is sound.
Internet - NetPlay
No changes here. This is the only area where I will be putting in new code in November.
MWIF Game Engine
I would like to get to this in November but that depends on what progress I can make on the debugging 3.00 and NetPlay.
Saved Games
I fixed a couple of small bugs in Game Save & Restore. Though it appears to work at this point, it needs much more testing before I’ll be confident about that. The massive rewrite of code for the player interface had numerous repercussions I had not anticipated, some of which were in the save and restore routines.
Player’s Manual
The Optional Rules writeups are finished and they look good as far as I have examined them. Further review is a task for the beta testers.
Scenario Information
I had the beta testers proofread the Barbarossa scenario data as it appears to the program for processing. They gave it the ok. I would really like to have 7 more of the scenario data code proof read too, even though I, myself, have gone over those 8 repeatedly. If they are not right, it will be difficult for players to detect because of the randomness of drawing units and the sheer volume of units referenced when setting up a scenario.
If I can get 8 of the scenarios to run correctly, then the last 3 should be vastly simpler to do. Each scenario has a little something weird about it that makes it unique; and I am not referring to the start date. No, there’s special code, unique for each scenario, that has to be written and tested to make sure it works.
Help System, Tutorials, and AI Assistant
I created the content for the first 6 Introductory Tutorials which was about 60 pages with a couple of hundred screen shots total. I got pretty efficient at doing them but they still take time. After posting them to the forum, I received numerous comments from forum members which enabled me to correct mistakes and improve the clarity of the content.
I expect to do the remaining 4 Introductory tutorials towards the end of November if time permits. The reason I am giving these a rather high priority is that I want the Introductory Tutorials done and out of the way prior to starting on designing the much more difficult Interactive tutorials.
The Interactive tutorials will have to permit the players to mess around with units and the map, plus a host of different forms (e.g., for combat, production, and US Entry). Presently the player interface is hard coded to proceed through the sequence of play. Therefore, a redesign of the game engine is necessary to enable the Interactive tutorials to perform as intended. This leads to me wanting to have a very good understanding of what the Interactive tutorials will do prior to implementing the game engine redesign. In project terms, specification of player interface requirements for the Interactive tutorials is a prerequisite for redesigning the game engine.
Artificial Intelligence (AI)
Nothing new here.
Other
An earthquake in Hawaii cost me a day. It’s very hard to work on the computer without electricity. I have a UPS and it cut in smoothly, as it has done before. But the UPS is only for shutting down the machine without loss of data; it does not support continuing use of the computer. Being forced to work solely with pen and paper for 12 hours was annoying to the point of being upsetting. I also lost a couple of days doing work for the chorus: I generated the 3500 labels for the mailing after updating the customer database (which I maintain) and I revised the script for the Xmas show (Sleigh Daze).
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October summary: Good progress on the bitmap graphics for the map, the tutorials, and unit writeups. Too little on fixing bugs and none at all (still) on NetPlay (sigh).
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Tasks for November
Communications
Continue monitoring the forum threads.
Beta Testing
Fix more bugs, so that version 3.00 can play through the entire Barbarossa scenario cleanly. [est. 80 hours]
Map and Units
Continue adding coastal and river/lake bitmaps as I receive them from Rob. [est. 30 hours]
CWIF Conversion
Thoroughly test the new random number generator (I really mean it this time!). [est. 1 hour]
Game Interface
Get the bidding capability to function cleanly and modify other aspects of the Player Interface to support NetPlay. [est. 20 hours]
Redesign of MWIF Game Engine
Continue refining the superstructure of the MWIF game engine (if time permits). [est. 0 hours]
Software Development Tools
Finish replacing all the old components with new ones from JEDI (as part of the debugging process for 3.00). [est. 10 hours]
NetPlay
Incorporate the Indy10 code for the new design for the multiplayer system into MWIF. [est. 100 hours]
AI Opponent
Nothing planned for November.
Player’s Manual
Nothing planned for November.
Historical Detail, Animations, and Sound
Nothing planned for November.
Help System, Tutorials, and AI Assistant
Finish the Introductory Tutorials. [est. 30 hours]
Other
Perform in the Xmas show - as one of the anonymous basses in the back row. We sing pretty much the same music every year so it is just a question of dusting off the brain cells.
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November summary: Debug version 3.00. Continue mass production of the coastal and river/lake bitmaps. Implement NetPlay.
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