In defense of Netterhsiem, Pt4…

Allies have the North Armybase zipped up tightly, Axis hold the most strategic location between the last depot and the AB, overlooking the tract of otherwise open ground. Can either side take control of the no-mans-land and secure the town?

Battleground Europe 1.31 is live

For a change, my lack of blog-posting is due to playing Battleground Europe excessively ;)

Man 1.31 really rocks. It’s kind of hard to explain the level of change. I mean, visually, when you go in, depending how long since you last played, you’re either going to say “HOLY S**T” or “yeah? it’s not alan wake is it?”. But the changes aren’t just cosmetic. So many little things that change the feel of the game in subtle ways…

Battleground Europe 9th Anniversary

11 years since John “killer” MacQueen and co formed Cornered Rats Software and began the WWII Online / Battleground Europe project and 9 years since the game’s launch also finally sees the release of version 1.31…

It’s one hell of a readme.

1.31 marks our departure from 33.6Kbps dialup support (56K users may just about get away with it if they avoid larger battles, but probably not for much longer).

You can download the client now – we’ll be rolling it out onto the servers shortly. Speaking of which, I think my ride is here…

Thinking to 1.32

1.31 (or the lack thereof, as yet) has been almost as frustrating for us as it has for our players. It is likely to become known as the “if I’d known that” patch.

I’ve been wholly mired in cell host performance issues for a while, stuck in the maw of code that I really, really, really hate. Code that resists or springs a leak at every turn. It is the code that any sober refactorer would say rewrite to.

But it’s not just some subsystem, or some corner of code. It’s the fundamental basis for the cell host.

What I need to do …

… is make one of these with 1.31. Especially given the time travel reference :)

1.31 Capture Testing

Had my head buried in server code for a while so I haven’t really seen much of 1.31. So I was in for a few pleasant surprises when I went into the game world to test the preliminary guise of the new capture system, and I had to share :)

It’s taken me a lot longer than it should have – there have been countless distractions. But if I’m really honest, I was also struggling from a bit of writers block. I’d done a mental back-of-napkin design of what I wanted to do in the first minute of Ramp and I originally discussing this. But when I actually sat down to code it, I got mired in “how it works” – where “it” is the old, legacy system.