Shannon V. OKeets
Posts: 22095
Joined: 5/19/2005
From: Honolulu, Hawaii
Status: offline
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October 1, 2006 Status Report for Matrix Games’ MWIF Forum
Accomplishments of September
Project Management
I am looking at 1st or 2nd quarter 2007 as a release date. I will revise the detailed project plan in the first week of October and have a somewhat improved estimate then.
Communications
Rob Armstrong had family health troubles during September (his wife was in hospital), so very little new was done on creating new graphics.
I monitored all the threads in the MWIF World in Flames forum daily. Members of the forum continue to be very helpful.
Beta testers were quiet because I owe them a new version to fix existing bugs.
Dan Hatchen is waiting on me to install what he has already done on NetPlay.
Patrice continues to do a ton of work on the maps, which is discussed in more detail below.
Terje finished his portion of the naval unit descriptions and is posting queries to the forum to fill in some holes. The holes are mostly for fictional naval units that ADG added to the game so players could build more units of each type than was done historically (e.g., more battleships and carriers for the Japanese). Nobly, he has continued on, past his original allotment, in his documentation of naval units. For instance, he notified me that he finished all the German units today.
No activity with the AI Opponent team, mostly because they are waiting on me for more specifics.
No communication with Chris Marinacci over the past month.
Beta Testing
Revising the player interface has rendered the version of the program I am working on (Version 3.01) unplayable from the beta testing point of view. I need to get the code stable before I can upload 3.01 as the new beta test version. With a little luck that should happen in the first 2 weeks of October. As of my last count, I have 70 bugs/suggestions from the testing of version 2.00 and 50 new bugs/remaining interface tasks that I have created/identified over the past 3 months. The latter are due to changes I have made to accommodate Delphi 2006, Theme Engine 6.06, and the replacement of virtually every component on the 100+ forms. In aggregate those required roughly 10,000 edits to existing code, described some more below.
Units
Terje has given me writeups for about half of the naval units. Which is all that he had originally planned on doing. Picking up the slack though, he is now continuing on through more of them. I am extremely grateful, and thankful for every extra one he gets done.
I’ll finish the little routine to process formatted writeups today and then I will go back over all the text writeups that have accumulated and start editing them so they look nice on the screen. More on this below.
Map
I processed the Qattara Depression bitmap and integrated it into the program.
Patrice has now completed a review of the world map with the exception of the western hemisphere. Even there he has the northern half well under way with the forum members critiquing the USA and Canadian map segments. All that remains is the Carribean, Mexico, and Central and South America.
Patrice has also done draft coastlines for all of the world map except the western hemisphere. Those drafts are waiting for Rob to process them into final versions. I tested my little program that cuts large bitmaps into: (1) individual coastal hexes (BMP files) and (2) heavily encoded files for the river and lake bitmap overlays (RVR files). So, the final processing of Rob’s work into files that can be used immediately by the program is ready now. Patrice and the forum members will then be able to evaluate if everything has turned out as expected.
Just to enumerate, Patrice has headed up review and modification of: Scandinavia, China, the USSR from the Urals to the Pacific, Siberia, India, the rest of the Asian mainland, Africa, Japan, Australia and New Zealand, all the islands in the Pacific, and all the islands in the Atlantic, including Iceland and Greenland. He then did draft coastlines for them all. Perhaps the zero meridian should be moved from Greenwich to Marseilles in honor of this feat?
CWIF Conversion
I methodically reviewed all 100+ forms, adding 6 new ones. In so doing, I replaced almost every graphical element (i.e., component) with a new version either from the Theme Engine library or the JEDI library. It took me about half the month simply to nail down which replacements to standardize on and figure out how to set the parameters each component uses. On average, each component has about 50 parameters/variables that can be set. I modify about 4-6 of them from the defaults for each occurrence of the component in the player interface. For example, I set the font type, size, and color for every little box that displays text. And give every component a unique name.
As part of the fall out from this activity, I removed a couple dozen components I inherited from CWIF that were circa the late 1990's.
Game Interface
I had expected to simply run a Theme Engine utility program to convert all the components from old to new. Because Theme Engine could only do about 1/4 of what I wanted it to, I ended up doing almost all the conversions by hand. Now Rob Crandall was very helpful here, by telling me about GExperts, which simplified the conversion process. Still, a lot of individual decisions needed to be made and carefully performed using mouse and keyboard. Because of the change in font to Verdana size 10, all the components had to be repositioned on each form.
There are 5 components that I haven’t replaced yet. These occur rarely and in total appear only 10 times in the program. I’ll decide on which replacements to use for them next week.
I did use a new component I found in the libraries to display progress bars. They let you know that the program is working as it loads in the data and bitmaps when starting a new game or loading a saved game.
I have gone with transparency whenever possible to permit the theme backgrounds of textured colors to show through. For each of the major powers I defined complementary solid colors that were as close to matching the theme backgrounds as I could achieve. I also defined font colors to be used against the backgrounds and solid colors. In combination that lets me create forms that have a consistent appearance for each major power. To make these work correctly, each form checks for the current major power in order to set the color scheme prior to displaying the form. While the Theme Engine components are automated and require no extra code, the use of the other colors (e.g., for radio buttons and check boxes) have small preprocessing routines.
The most extensive use of the new player interface design is for the Opening Screen and Start New Game form. There I preview all 8 major powers for the players, displaying the backgrounds, colors and flags the players will see later throughout the program. Both of those forms received numerous adjustments and refinements during the month as I tried out various solutions. The latest piece of the puzzle for the Start New Game form has been the addition of contextual help text for each optional rule. That I got to work successfully just yesterday.
The contextual help text for optional rules is the prototype for contextual help text for the rest of the program. I am still somewhat undecided whether to use the standard Windows help system. Its benefits are that it is an existing standard and everyone is familiar with it. On the downside, it is awkward, at best, to create content for the system. So far I have only found some commercial packages whose sole purpose is to simplify creating content. It galls me to no end that a format standard requires purchasing extra software just to reformat text files. And then there is always the concern that a purchased software package doesn’t perform as expected. Another negative is that I have almost universally found other Windows help files to be worthless and a waste of time. When you try to find an answer to a question you tend to get one of three types of answers: (1) drivel - Question: “File I/O error”, Answer: “An error occurred during file I/O”, (2) huh? - “No information found, try rephrasing your query”, or (3) fire hydrant - “Here are 20,000 pages of text, enjoy!”
So I will definitely write specific responses for each contextual help message. Whenever possible, those will be extracts from the player’s manual. Indeed, every contextual help message should appear somewhere in the player’s manual. What I am undecided about it the aggregate help system. I would like to have a superstructure that holds everything together. At the present I have several ideas for that, but nothing definitive. There’s no rush though.
In keeping with my philosophy of simplicity, the text descriptions that appear on the screen are based on TXT files included as part of the product. These include, at a minimum, the unit descriptions (air, naval, and HQ), optional rule writeups, tutorial content, and contextual help. Formatting for these files uses combinations of symbols. Currently I am only processing 3 symbols combinations: .P for paragraph, .N for new line, and .T for tab.
MWIF Game Engine
For the first time ever, the call sequence for the program’s starting 70 routines is now documented. That takes the program up to where the players are about to scrap units. This week I’ll extend the call sequence documentation past that and through to completion of scenario setup. At that point, a better structure for the documentation than “call sequence” will be WIF’s “sequence of play”. Very little documentation presently exists on how that is implemented in MWIF.
What the program call sequence documentation has enabled me to do, is intelligently insert the initialization routines for the player interface themes, the tutorial content, and the help system content. I’ll also use it to properly place the initialization routines for PBEM, Internet, and solitaire play. CWIF only initialized the Internet process and that was using DirectX calls, which I am replacing with Indy10 routines.
More work remains on relocating code into modules based on the new game engine design: player interface control, game control, message control, simulation control, etcetera.
Internet - NetPlay
No changes here. But I am close to having the player interface stable so I can start working on this again. Oh, I did some small modifications to the bidding system code here.
Saved Games
I added some new city names for China to the data files which had the indirect effect of rendering all previously saved games unusable. So it goes.
Player’s Manual
The Optional Rules writeups are now read into the program and presented on the screen as contextual help. They still need formatting symbols added (e.g., .P) but that is mindless editing. I want to get back to integrating all the bits and pieces of documentation into the player’s manual, but it keeps sliding down the priority list.
Scenario Information
Nothing new here.
Help System, Tutorials, and AI Assistant
Besides the preliminary work on contextual help described above, I also did some detailed mockups for the Introductory tutorials. I have an Introductory Tutorial form defined and functioning with navigation controls. It displays a bitmapped graphic with accompanying descriptive text. The graphic will almost always be a screen shot and I have determined the process for taking screen shots and preparing them for the tutorial form. The software I am using for that is HyperSnap which has worked extremely well for me over the past 6 months. I’ll do a few more tutorial pages next month to build my understanding and confidence in the process of creating the tutorials.
Artificial Intelligence (AI)
Nothing new here.
Other
New refrigerator purchased this month, which definitely improves the quality of life. My wife wants a whole new kitchen (est. - $25,000), but that won’t happen until MWIF product 1 is released. As one of my side interests, I have done the layout for the new kitchen with measurements and dimensions for everything. That was needed so we could be sure the new refrigerator would fit into the new floor plan.
====================================================================
September summary: Well the player interface is defined and mostly implemented - as far as converting the existing game system to the new graphics. It still needs to be reviewed and revised with respect to functionality. The map graphics received tremendous work by Patrice but virtually none by Rob. Standardization on processing and presenting text is done.
====================================================================
Tasks for October
Communications
Continue monitoring the forum threads.
Beta Testing
Fix more bugs, so I can get version 3.01 out to the beta testers. It will contain all the map data revisions that Patrice has made, the medium resolution units, and the new interface design.
Map and Units
Start generating coastal bitmaps and river/lake overlays for other sections of the world map.
CWIF Conversion
Thoroughly test the new random number generator (this task smirks at me every time I look at it).
Game Interface
Get the bidding capability to function cleanly so the beta testers can someday play one-on-one over the Internet.
Redesign of MWIF Game Engine
Continue refining the superstructure of the MWIF game engine.
Software Development Tools
Finish replacing all the old components with new ones from JEDI.
Multiplayer Internet
Incorporate the Indy10 code for the new design for the multiplayer system into MWIF.
AI Opponent
Work out detailed rules for several more decision points so the language for the AIO can be finalized.
Player’s Manual
Finish the table of contents and transfer all the various write ups I have done for different portions of MWIF into the Player’s Manual (e.g., Optional Rules, PBEM design).
Historical Detail, Animations, and Sound
Start listing all the places the program will use historical video footage, sound, and music.
Help System, Tutorials, and AI Assistant
Continue fleshing out the content for the Introductory Tutorials. Set up forms dedicated to viewing the sequence of play, so they can be used later as an index/table of contents into the context sensitive help files.
Other
Update the mailing list for the chorus so the flyers for the Xmas show can be mailed out in late October. I have been maintaining the database for the chorus for almost 10 years now. It contains over 11,000 names and addresses.
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October summary: Debug the changes to the player interface design and release version 3.01 to the beta testers. Start mass production of the rest of the coastal bitmaps. Get the system for playing over the Internet to work.
================================================================
_____________________________
Steve
Perfection is an elusive goal.
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RE: When? - 
and passes 
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