Position Fighting

There seem to be two main mindsets to playing our game. One sees the infantryman in-front of them as a “life” of a player, the total number of which is a product of dividing the amount of infantry in the armybase supply list by the number of humans playing the team.

The other sees a town as a force of N units, the the “strength” of which will be determined by the total number of players who spawn them out simultaneously.

The first mindset tends to see spawning systems as “teleporters” – one minute bob was over here and now he over there.

The second mindset suspends disbelief and considers that the infantry that suddenly appears in-front of them was already “here”, just hadn’t been spotted yet.

I think the biggest obstacle to the second mindset for some people is that those infantry can appear behindyou or where the enemy hasn’t duly earned a foothold; however that’s a secondary issue that needs to be addressed separately – it shouldn’t preclude finding a good middle-ground solution.

You can’t capture a berm, there’s no table in the ruins buildings… But historically, soldiers often fought for hills, ridges, treelines, farmhouses…

1.27 Mortars

I spent some time playing with mortars in 1.27 earlier today. Frankly, I’ve had my doubts that mortars would have any real impact on gameplay. While I was testing, though, I finally noticed that they have smoke rounds. Quite a few of them.

Along with other changes in 1.27, I’m starting to think otherwise. Especially after tonights fight in Merzig, I think mortars could significantly change infantry play for the better.

Maybe I just suck, but it seems pretty hard to accurately place the explosive rounds; the smoke grenades, however, you can be very handy with. I do hope we’ll have chance to add smoke emitters to tanks and scout cars etc

No mercy at Merzig

There I was, rifle in hand, looking at a group of 8 or 9 German infantry crawling thru the bushes towards the depot the Armee Francais commanders were adamant we take. It’s a quiet, sleepy looking town, but looks were definitely deceiving.

At the start of the fight, we were being lead by downu, who seemed to keep us well supported with forward bases and supply trucks. The view in the screenshot is from after the battle of the southernmost depot that was where I saw most of my action.

I quickly dropped my machine gun’s tripod and opened fire on the line of infantry and for an opening volley my aim was perfect. I scanned for movement amongst the gray uniforms, folded up my tripod and ran for fresh cover.

Campaign 37

Campaign 37 looked to be getting off to a rough start; yesterday with the Axis rapidly breaking out past French lines and beginning something of a blitz past French brigades. The Allies, who are starting to buy into Axis propoganda, had to fight a third side – Allied players who were declaring the fight already lost.

AT&T vs Roadrunner

So far, Roadrunner has done nothing but suck.

The service I bought was 7Mbps. I haven’t gotten above 2.1Mbps. The service has had drop-outs every 2-3 hours and there’s consistent packetloss. Switching from wireless to wired made no difference.

Connection speeds may vary.

That really doesn’t cut the mustard, does it. If it made 5-6Mbps periodically, maybe. But 2.1Mbps isn’t even half the speed I’m supposed to have. I.e. it’s never given me close to the speed of my 3Mb DSL.

This could all have something to do with the fact that the connection box outside our apartment complex is wide open. Several of us reported this to Time Warner Cable, they said an engineer would be out to fix it but he left the case unmounted. I went out and put the case back on the junction, and the next day another TWC engineer removed it and left it ontop of someone’s aircon unit blocking airflow to that unit.

Right now my cable internet has been down for the last 30 minutes. Glad I didn’t cancel the DSL.

Improved capture ticker

Now that I have more detailed information in the database, I decided it was time to expose it via Wiretap. You can see attacks starting, towns changing hands and towns being saved.

The information for all this comes from new fields in the captures.xml and you can use it to look specifically for towns falling.

There’s still a few issues I seem to need to clean out – the FBs all showed as “open” after the campaign started – I think that’s probably an optimization in the start startup code the disables saving until it’s fairly sure that everything has been loaded.

 And so, rather quietly, ends my 36th birthday ;)

Testing is development too

I haven’t yet reintroduced resupply. That particular line of work is still where I stopped yesterday – close but not yet done.

It makes sense to switch development track just there because resupply will begin modifying spawn lists, which makes all the other testing that little bit harder to do.

So today I’m putting together some more test units and updating my test harness to check out some of the obvious, dumb, basic things.

/feedback wins again

Yay! Live update #36 and I score more wins for /feedback that made teh patch!

Dual Homed

Set up my wireless router with the Time Warner Cable connection, left my DSL connected to my VPN for access to work. A feel a little naked having my firewalls in parallel rather than serial, but there it is. I configured the wireless router to specific MAC addresses as an extra measure.

What made me chuckle, though, is all the insecure networks on the local neighborhood.

For … chuckles. I connected to 8 of them, found the offending Windows PC, and dropped a note into “C:\Documents and Settings\<user>\Desktop\Thank you for the use of your PC.txt” containing the text “your wireless network was open to the world and your PC is accessible to anyone” and Geek Squad’s number ;)

I wonder if I’m going to have to set up the freakin routes each time I reboot.

Follow-up: Missing C++ Operator

I mentioned before that I think there needs to be an operator for expressly stating when you mean to replace a pre-existing virtual function in a descendant class. I noticed that C++ is preparing for the C++0x (they are aiming for C++09) standard which includes some very nice improvements (formalized hash tables, regular expressions, library recognition of the Container concept to simplify many STL operations).

Realizing that a working group is in-progress I decided I might as well throw my idea into the mix, and wrote a quick email to C++’s daddy, Bjourne Stroustrop.

I was rather surprised by how quickly he replied and then embarrased at my mistake :)

This has of course been discussed for decades, see for example D&E. Your suggested variant is very nice, but it won’t satisfy those who insists that the main problem is accidentally overriding using no keyword. Also, of course, since you are not overloading, the keyword would have to be something like “override”.

I have some more thoughts on the idea, but I’ll go away and think it through further before maybe trying to present my full idea to someone who has already tried to get a similar idea through – maybe adding a name to the proposal will give it a little extra muscle.