Someone’s been busy…

Of course, I can’t take credit for any of the eye candy, but the new capture buildings threw us a curve ball and we felt that the risk of delaying release was worth the effort of getting around to change the way capture works. I have had a burning desire to replace table-bumping with something constructive for a long time.

If the eye candy caught your eye, though, and you want to read more about it, see more screenshots and maybe a few videos… Rafter’s 1.31 preview is right here.

Where I come in right now, though, is those capture changes…

Mmm, when a good class comes together

I’m so not a DBA. We’re currently working on a bunch of stuff that relates to the way the game understands permissions and subscriptions; a neccessity for work we’ve wanted to do for a while and for our Chinese partners. The database portion has been a pain because I’ve been overly focused on how performance will translate to China.

How not to be seen

;)

It fell!

10 hours of serious warfare, and Antwerp falls to the Axis. But that’s by no means the end of the story: 

If you go down to the woods today…

… be wary of bugs under rocks.

The last couple of days have been “interesting” (especially in terms of getting any sleep here). The complex and scary stuff in Battleground Europe’s 1.29 patch has worked as you’d expect it to. But as any coder ought to expect, the little things went awry.

Battleground Europe 1.29 patched

Strewth what a long day. We’d gotten every thing scripted for publish the patch but a lot of it went well beyond the realms of what I’ve been able to automate to date, and there are so many external dependencies on the live cluster that I had to babysit each individual change. The meaty portion of the work was ensuring a smooth transition to UTF-8. It didn’t help that the reversed-map campaign is going well, so we couldn’t cheat and call it a reset.

Performance is up, eye candy is improved, the new default keymaps take a little adapting to but Bloo made really good calls on some of the keys and lots of it is combining functions to single keys so you have to remember less keys overall, and flying/driving with the keyboard is a doozy (god bless SgtSpoon) and WideScreen now works like it should.

Readme below:

WireTap now uses UTF-8

During today’s 1.29 patch one of the changes occuring is a transition from Latin1 (ISO-8859-1) encoding of names to UTF-8. This affects town names with umlats (Köln) and German and French brigade names (1. Fallschirmjäger 1.Gruppe, 13ème Demi-Brigade de Légion Etrangère).

1.29 Open Beta is out

Oh, it’s been a fun day. It turns out, for instance that 0 + 1 is not 0 (++counter; assert( counter == 0 ); no worky)

Anyway, with a little tweaking and figuring out of who had what checked in or not checked in and we finally got it stable. Gophur is uploading a 1.29.0.14 client patch with the first wave of fixes as I type but 1.29.0.13 Open Beta is available for download right now.

Open Beta Announcement (Battleground Europe subscription required, sorry)

God bless Xiper :)

Xiper is the author of the “Battleground Europe Game Monitor“. BGEM is the little tool that makes my desktop look like this:

BEGM itself appears as nothing more than a side bar with a bunch of stuff I can’t quite recall how we lived without before this sort of thing was available.

Campaign 46 begins

The Axis turned in another victory last weekend after a fairly epic 92 day Campaign that could have gone either way at various points during the battle. We’ve made some tweaks to movement timers (the full 60 minute timer now applies whether you are moving from or to a frontline town, and the behind-lines timers is now 30 minutes instead of 15) and I snuck in “Chat Shortcuts” ($orig, $targ, $lead, $unit, $miss). Doc reduced the armor in Infantry Brigades some more, Riflemen are down to 700 per non-armor brigade vs 900 previously.

It promises to be a fascinating campaign with relatively simple changes and no client patch as yet.