Shannon V. OKeets
Posts: 22095
Joined: 5/19/2005
From: Honolulu, Hawaii
Status: offline
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September 1, 2011 Status Report for Matrix Games’ MWIF Forum
Accomplishments of August 2011
Project Management
I monitored all the threads in the MWIF World in Flames forum daily - well, almost every day.
On August 1st I was diagnosed with a detached retina in my left eye due to an ocular melanoma. Only 6 lucky people in a million get this cancer (roll a 10 die sided die 6 times; the first 5 times it has to come up 0 and the last time it has to come up less than 6). Technically it is a skin cancer since it occurs in the choroid tissue of the eye. In brief, the retina is the back lining of the eye which receives light that has passed through (in series) the corona, pupil, lens, and transparent vitreous tissue. The retina is attached to the choroid which is the inner layer of the eye’s skin tissue. The outer layer is the ‘white’ of the eye that you see when you look in a mirror.
The cancerous growth on my choroid eventually separated the retina from the choroid and let some quasi- liquid intrude between the two. From my point of view, things were normal on Friday, on Saturday my left eye added a yellow tint to everything it saw, on Sunday I lost the upper half of my field of vision in my left eye, and on Monday (August 1st) I was diagnosed with an ocular melanoma by a retinal specialist.
I flew to Philadelphia on August 13th and underwent surgery at Wills Eye Hospital on August 18th. The treatment for this melanoma is to insert a ‘plaque’ into the eye, next to the melanoma. The plaque is made out of gold and contains micro-radioactive nodules on one side. It is left in the eye for 4 days after which the radiation has killed all the cancer cells and the plaque is removed (i.e., on August 22nd). No, I didn’t get to keep the gold.
The melanoma was 10.5 mm by 11 mm by 5.1 mm thick (at its thickest point). This is considered to be on the low side of medium, based on the thickness. They do not treat melanomas smaller than 2 mm. Medium ranges from 4 mm to 8 mm. The plaque was 14 mm by 14 mm, roughly square. To insert it, they cut into the white of the eye and shove it in, perhaps using a rubber mallet - I don’t know for sure since I wasn’t paying attention at the time. I now have 2 really nifty scars (one vertical and one horizontal) on the left side of my left eyeball.
This is considered an out-patient treatment and I was required to stay at the Watermark hospice in Philly, confined to my room, while the plaque was in place. I also had the delight of having my eyelid sewn shut and wearing a lead eyepatch to prevent radiation ‘leakage’. At the time I felt like a Marvel Comics villain that emits deadly rays from his eye. The weirdest part of this story is that my brother was also at the Watermark for a 3 week stay while I was there (he had cellulitis). His suggestion was that I get a hook for a hand, a pegleg, and a parrot to complete my ensemble.
There were no complications and I returned to Honolulu on August 23rd. I am taking eye medication 4 times a day (mostly to prevent infection) and will continue to do so for the next 3 weeks. After 6 months my body is expected to have cleared out all the dead cancer cells and my local retinal surgeon can consider the possibility of reattaching my retina. But there isn’t a lot of hope for the vision in that eye improving substantially. Right now its visual field ranges from 40% to 50%, with the upper half of its world mostly black. While detached, the retina doesn’t get the blood that it needs and it kind of crumples up. The main gain in the future will be the removal of the liquid between the retina and the choroid. Counterbalancing that is the fact that radiation doesn’t kill off only the cancer cells, it does damage to the other parts of the eye in the immediate vicinity too. Exactly what good stuff gets radiated and how badly is more or less random.
I need to have cancer screenings every 6 months for the rest of my life. For now, all the tests have come back negative. The vision in my right eye is good but the left eye is sending ‘static’ to my brain; so even when my left eye is closed, I get a flickering image superimposed on my right eye. Reading text on a computer screen is problematic at best and I am forced to take a break after an hour or so: an hour on, an hour off.
All in all I lost about half the month of August due to vision problems as far as working on MWIF was concerned. For instance, while in Philly I only had my portable computer with me, so I was unable to work on the source code: no debugging and no code changes.
On the plus side, last month Aaron took over responsibility for maintaining my task list. He’s transferred it to a spreadsheet and does daily updates to it, reflecting my changes from the previous day and new bug reports from the beta testers. This has saved me tons of time and I find working with the spreadsheet much easier than the bland text file I had been using. All-in-all, this change has offset my decrease in working hours so I am actually getting more done each day than I had been previously.
Hardware and Software
The open items for Theme Engine remain unchanged: (1) scroll bars for the detailed map, and (2) its inability to display detailed listings of file directories (i.e., the dates and stuff when opening or saving a file). Neither of these is important.
Beta Testing
I released versions 9.00.02 (24 fixes), 9.00.03 (2 fixes), 9.00.04 (13 fixes), 9.00.05 (15 fixes), and 9.00.06 (15 fixes) to the beta testers last month. This totals 5 new versions and 69 fixes, which is way under my average number of fixes for a month, but actually a higher daily average if you allow for me being out of action for half the month.
During the past month I made the following changes:
• Fixed a group of bugs related to using the optional rule Fractional Odds with the 1D10 land combat CRT. That combination of rules hadn’t been tested very much - if at all.
• I fixed two obscure bugs related to the Axis aligning Yugoslavia, and Germany setting up Rumanian units when that country is aligned because the Hungarian and Bulgarian claims are denied.
• I fixed several minor bugs with the Scrap Units form concerning City Based Volunteers and how many engineer units are needed for set up.
• I added some code so partisan units that are placed at the end of setup can never overrun enemy units. My solution here was to forbid major powers from setting up units such that they might be overrun. The effort required to write code to handle overruns during setup seemed far in excess of any potential gain to ‘game play’. The program now tells a player about any potential overruns and forces him to fix the problem so his units will not be overrun by partisans.
• I eliminated the possibility of France creating and using default scrap lists after France has been Vichied. That was because the list of units in the French force pool gets drastically reduced using random selection.
• I fixed several bugs in head-to-head play having to do with restoring saved games.
• I added code so players are informed during the reinforcement phase when units arrive and are move into the Construction Pool.
• I added code to handle obscure cases when Germany has been incompletely conquered: when no hexes are available to save build points and when replacement naval units are available but the naval unit to be replaced is in the Conquered Pool.
• I fixed some minor bugs in the setup tray related to theme colors and the use of the check box for centering the detailed map on a setup location.
• I fixed several bugs related to naval air combat; some to due with AA fire, and others to do with aborted air units.
I think the above list gives the flavor of the bugs I have been fixing. Some of them are minor, but annoying, others are major, but obscure. The primary areas where I still need to work on fixing bugs are: naval combat, land movement (mostly to do with undoing moves), US Entry (recently exhaustively tested by Rob W.), and Production Planning.
Saved Games
The new item here is that Aaron is making a concerted attempt to build a large library of saved games for testing the numerous phases in the sequence of play. Of course this is complicated by the number of different scenarios and optional rules, as well as the modes of play (e.g., solitaire, head-to-head, NetPlay). But he has made a good start on this and is cajoling other beta testers into sending him the saved games they use for testing. From my perspective, the best part of this are the saved games related to specific bugs. Those let me immediately reproduce bugs so I can both fix them and prove to myself that my changes work.
Map and Units
Rob and Jimm continue to send in new and/or updated naval and land unit writeups. Aaron keeps the master files and sends me replacement files periodically.
Scenarios and Optional Rules
I added code so the only legal sea areas in the Barbarossa scenario are the Black, Baltic, and Arctic Seas. I also made some preliminary changes to support the Unlimited Breakdown optional rule.
MWIF Game Engine and CWIF Conversion
While in Philly, I wrote out pseudocode to complete my revision of the Supply Determination routine. I need to type that in and start testing my full implementation of calculating which units are in supply using the various optional rules. The code already works for calculating which secondary supply sources are in supply so all that remains is to trace a path from each unit to a valid supply source - or determine that none exists.
I fixed a couple of bugs that had to do with nested digressions. A problem arose when a naval combat caused units to abort and on their way to a port, they were intercepted, resulting in a Naval Abort digression branching to a Naval Interception digression. The trick is to resolve all the digressions and get back to the next naval combat. Similar to that was when a Naval Interception digression resulted in a naval combat and as part of a naval air combat round, AA fire caused one of the naval air units to abort. In this case and Naval Interception digression branches to a Return to Base Digression (by the air unit). I think I have these nested digressions fixed now - but I have thought that on previous occasions too.
Player Interface
Nothing new.
Internet - NetPlay
Nothing new. I will begin working on NetPlay daily starting this weekend.
PBEM
Nothing new.
Artificial Intelligence (AI)
Peter continues to work on the data structures for AIO strategic plans. Much of this is coming together. For instance, last week he was grinding out the conditions under which France should surrender. I answer his questions from time to time but the bulk of this work is being done by Peter.
Player’s Manual
This is in the hands of the Matrix Games editor. I made a bunch of edits in the last week of July and messed up a lot of the small details. So in early August I made ~40 corrections to my corrections. But since then I have done nothing on the Players Manual, other than tweaking Rob’s bibliography for the naval unit writeups. The only missing section in the Players Manual is for setting up a NetPlay game.
Tutorials, Training Videos, and Context Sensitive Help
Nothing new.
Historical Video, Music, and Sound Effects
David Heath has uploaded the music and sound effects files to the Matrix Games FTP site, but apparently he placed them in a location which, due to security, I can not access. Hopefully this will get straightened out soon.
Marketing
Aaron continues to work with Sean Drummy of Matrix Games on updating the World in Flames screenshots displayed as part of the game’s description in Matrix Games’ list of products.
Communications
Nothing new.
_____________________________
Steve
Perfection is an elusive goal.
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RE: When? - 
you still manage to peek in now and then, looking for something Cruss, 
by the way for your information there are no tumbleweeds in Oahu and if Steve ever found one he would be glad to send it to you, [I think
]. 
, just a thought, but I do hope it was not a dig against our very positive, charming, intelligent, charismatic, patient, expert programmer and seeker of the truth at all costs, CrussDaddy 
. 
.
I am a beer and pretzel player [do not like long games] but I am looking forward to this game because I like challenges [not hard ones though
RE: When? - 
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