AE Team

[jwilkerson]

Andrew Brown

Andrew first created his own version of the WITP map about 3 months after WITP was released so

maybe October 2004? Also he reverse engineered the map data file - and was able to resolve a

key issue the forum referred to as "catapult movement". THis was an acceleration of movement

when "railing" down a transportation line, then moving into bad terrain like jungle, it was even

occasionally possible to jump two hexes down a trail - when exiting the train.

Intially Andrew's map was for stock, but within the first year, Andrew's map also became the

"signature map" for the CHS mod, originally produced by Don Bowen and Michael Johnston (Lemurs).

After Don stood down from CHS management and Michael got married, Andrew then took over as the

CHS caretaker and produced CHS 2.x which has contributions from many current AE team members

including myself, TheElf, Treespider, JWE, Kereguelen and others.

Andrew's role on AE was to build the new map, the art and the map data. With twice as many

hexes this was a huge task and many team members helped in spurts through the vast majority of

the work was done by Andrew himself.

Andrew also compiled all the base data - and there are at least twice as many bases in AE as in

stock - so this was another huge task.

And Andrew handled the new AE economic and production systems.

In addition, I consider Andrew, together with Don, to be my "managing directors" and I have

consulted with them when project threatening issues have arisen, usually involving "staffing

issues" in project management speak.

Andrew's family has grown from zero to three kids and he is now embarking upon a new degree

program - so his energy remains very high - and without years of that eneregy from him - AE would

definitely not be what it is today. Even after two years of looking at the new map - I still

enjoy the feeling of immersion I get when I try to plot a convoy to go to Pearl Harbor and start

scrolling over - and get impressed with how far it is. The new map definitely gives us a

better idea about how huge the Pacific Ocean is.

So thanks to Andrew both for the new map and to his assistance to the team and the community.

[khyberbill]

So thanks to Andrew both for the new map and to his assistance to the team and the community.

As soon as I saw the map in CHS I stopped playing stock. Thanks to all for a great job and to Mr. Brown for a great map! I cant wait to explore the new map in AE.

[Captain Ed]

Yea team.

[tocaff]

The who's who of many an altered life.  Thanks guys.

[wdolson]

ORIGINAL: jwilkerson

MichaelM

Michael is one of the less visible but most important AE Team members - besides being our Air Team programmer - Michael is also our code build manager. Each week for almost two years, Michael has done a weekly build of the code submissions from the various technical team members. On our team this is a manual process - so it takes some time. I don't think Michael has made a mistake - in over 100 builds .... wow ...

This has been a thing that has amazed me too. There have been some weeks where he's had to juggle many changes from 4 programmers at once and he always gets it all merged together correctly. Whatever his system is for keeping things straight, it's a good one!

Bill

[wdolson]

ORIGINAL: Wirraway_Ace

...You are really retired...

ORIGINAL: jwilkerson
Yeah, except for the 80 hour weeks he puts in on AE!!! [:)]

Since moving to Sun City, I think he's slacked off to 70 hours a week. He spends the rest of the time partying with locals. [:D]

Don has been the most prolific of the programmers on the project (not having a day job to worry about anymore probably helps [:)]). As the person who filled in for him when he moved and was unable to work on AE for a few weeks, I did appreciate that his code was very easy to figure out. I've had to maintain a lot of other people's code in my life as a programmer and Don's was among the easiest to follow.

Bill

[jwilkerson]

Treespider

Treespider was/is another CHS contributor - I had started working on redoing the Chinese when Treepider showed up on the WITP forums. He had substantially the same source material I had and he had the same love of research and debating sources - so I let him take over the Chinese redo. For CHS. This material was incorprorated in CHS 2.x

Treespider is also a long time gamer with a lot of experience with different systems, so when AE began, he and I got into a lot of detailed discussions about land combat changes that we could make - and we filled many pages of Andrew's WIKI up with specs for such changes. This evolved into Tree getting the job of Land Team Lead and fleshing out the specs for the new hexside system as well as the new Op Mod and Combat Mod systems.

During the middle of the project, Tree was disrupted by real life events and had to leave the team for a while. He then rejoined as a beta team member as AndyMac had taken Tree's Land Team Lead role. But Tree has operated as kind of a "beta tester"/researcher - in both roles - since returning. He helped drive major changes in the economic and production models based on extensive research from primary sources at the UT Library.

I'd like to thank Treespider, and his family [:)] for his contribution to the team and the community.

[jwilkerson]

JWE

John was in the US Army Artillery overlapping with the years I was in this branch. John then moved on the NSA and currently he is a patent attorney in So Cal.

John has had so many jobs on the team, that I doubt I can remember them all. I think he was originally brought in to be our Amphibous Warfare guy. His work with the Marines has led to development of a comprehensive and consistent rework of the land devices - so many if not all of the AE land devices are derivations of John's work.

John also brought us our "ship art team" consisting of Brian (BigB), Kelley (TomLabel) and himself. These guys have churned out hundreds of new ships for AE.

And then John took over the Naval Team Lead job for about the last year of the project. In this role he worked with Don to define and refine the specs for loading, unload, rearming, damage and repair. In his "spare time" [:D] he also single handedly did the full OOB for auxiliaries and merchant ships for all the nations. Those of us who did the combat ships think we did a lot of work - we can hardly imagine the effort John took to do all the merchant ships - and they are not "generics" like in stock - they are individualized - whew!

John is also an excellent tester. When we start seeing some odd results in some of the combat routines, John set up a very organized and methodical testing process to compare stock, to AE, before and after iterative changes were made. This process enabled us to correct and stablize some very tricky code, quickly.

There is simply no way we could have built AE as well as we did without all these various contributions from John - I know the rest of the team joins me in thanking John for the professionalism of his efforts.

[jwilkerson]

Tankerace

Justin has been a WITPer for many years and in 2005 he produced the WPO game which takes WITP into the interwar period. Justin thus gained a lot of knowledge about the naval system and the devices and he was a natural choice as our first naval team lead. In this role, Justin drove the framing of the early specs for our changes. Also he rebuilt all the naval devices based on his understanding of the system. And he did the entire Allied combat navy OOB.

Justin's involvement in his graduate history studies as well as his involvement in carrier force required him to step down about one year into the AE project though he has returned to "groom" the OOB from time to time.

Justin brought in his "beta" team for WPO which included Brady and Terminus. When Justin had to step down - he passed his baton to Kristian.

I thank Justin for his efforts and hope to collaborate with him on some future projects.

[denisonh]

LOL!

ORIGINAL: timtom

ORIGINAL: Wirraway_Ace

From your previous descriptions of her, she should have been hard to miss.

Sorry, Don...[:D]

[jwilkerson]

TheElf

Ian has remained our Air Team Lead since day one of the project. He is an active duty US Navy officer with carrier fighter experience. He has also been a CHS contributor. His primary AE contribution has been to drive the air to air combat changes. Additionally he drove the training changes and the air unit support changes. Ian's efforts have definitely helped us address the areas that the team agreed at the start of the project - were top priority, the air to air combat and "air stacking" as some call it.

Ian did a tour in Italy during the project but is now in Texas - so he has been quite mobile - also while in the Med he seemed to be traveling almost constantly - so we have not had as much availbility from Ian as we hoped for - but the critical design things did get done - and we all thank Ian for successfully applying his expertise in these areas.

[jwilkerson]

Terminus

After working with Justin on WPO, Kristian came over to AE as the unit tester for the naval team. After Justin's departure, Kristian stepped up to the team lead role - and worked well with Don for a number of months. Also Kristian did the IJN Carrier and Submarine OOB work himself.

Kristian had to leave the team for a while - when he returned John had taken the Naval Team Lead role - so Kristian took responsibility for developing two scenarios - one was a port of the Coral Sea scenario from stock, the other was a new scenario covering 1943 in the Aleutians.

Kristian has also been available whenever we needed a guy to get something done - like he drove a relatively recent effort to put in and test out some UI improvements these included the new "lists" of operation and combat modes which enable more rapid changing of modes for large stacks.

I thank Krisitian for always being willing and able to step up and take on miriads of things that would pop up for me to do - so his assistance as been very valuable.

[jwilkerson]

TimTom

Thomas is our air OOB guy. I think Brian and Steve (ChezDejez) were involved as well - but to be honest I do not know exactly who did what. I do know that Thomas owns the area - and fixes whatever needs to be fixed. A glance at Thomas' sources in the designers notes section of the manual will show you that Thomas has left no stone unturned to attempt to get the most accurate information possible for the aircraft and air units. Thomas is a real life historian and is a stickler to the historian's creed of "be true to the sources" - and we wouldn't have it any other way.

[jwilkerson]

Kereguelen

Kereguelen and I collaborated on the CHS 2.x IJA OOB. I guess I did the work - but Kereguelen was doing the same research in parallel so we exchanged a lot of notes and ideas. Essentially K was my "peer reviewer" for CHS. In AE we reversed the roles. So K did virtually the entire Japanese land OOB and also was involved in many of the other land OOBs in AE, such as the Russians. K is a very thorough researcher and keeps good notes - so we will be well prepared for WITP_II and WITP_III and so on.

[denisonh]

Kudos Ian!

Great work. Given the professional and personal obligations you had in addition to committing time to AE, you are DA MAN.

ORIGINAL: jwilkerson

TheElf

Ian has remained our Air Team Lead since day one of the project. He is an active duty US Navy officer with carrier fighter experience. He has also been a CHS contributor. His primary AE contribution has been to drive the air to air combat changes. Additionally he drove the training changes and the air unit support changes. Ian's efforts have definitely helped us address the areas that the team agreed at the start of the project - were top priority, the air to air combat and "air stacking" as some call it.

Ian did a tour in Italy during the project but is now in Texas - so he has been quite mobile - also while in the Med he seemed to be traveling almost constantly - so we have not had as much availbility from Ian as we hoped for - but the critical design things did get done - and we all thank Ian for successfully applying his expertise in these areas.

[denisonh]

Kudos to Thomas as well,

I think AE will be much better as a result of the Air Team efforts to "trim down" the excessive air unit structure that "choked" the late game. Thomas' efforts in working the air units withdrawl should help remove the clutter of Allied air groups later in the game and really improve the hisrtorical feel of the game.

ORIGINAL: jwilkerson

TimTom

Thomas is our air OOB guy. I think Brian and Steve (ChezDejez) were involved as well - but to be honest I do not know exactly who did what. I do know that Thomas owns the area - and fixes whatever needs to be fixed. A glance at Thomas' sources in the designers notes section of the manual will show you that Thomas has left no stone unturned to attempt to get the most accurate information possible for the aircraft and air units. Thomas is a real life historian and is a stickler to the historian's creed of "be true to the sources" - and we wouldn't have it any other way.

[jwilkerson]

AndyMac

My goodness - Andy came in rather late to the project - but has more than made up for his late arrival with his efforts. He started off taking charge of the British, Indian and Dutch (IIRC) OOBs.

When Treespider had to leave the project mid-stream (Tree eventuall returned in a different role) - Andy stepped up to take the Land Team Lead role (I'll bet he often regrets that decision!). This got him involved in most of the other Allied OOBs to some extent.

Then came the AI. Originally we thought it would be a simple matter to groom the existing scripts and plug in the new bases and units. For six months we tried this - and kept thinking "it is almost working". Then I got a call from Andy while at Origins last year - and he told me the AI was bad broke and could not be fixed. I don't recall the exact time table - but I wrote up a short 2 page spec - and sent over to Andy and James - they both liked it. I ran the idea by Erik he agreed (were we all crazy?) and we jumped off the cliff!!! We decided to ditch the AI processor - and write a new one! This also allowed us to pull the "scripts" out of the code and put them in the editor. This made scripting much easier - and now programmer involvement was not required.

Well it took about 3 months to get things "almost working" again - but now we knew we were controlling things and knew we could eventually solve any issues.

Well I won't bore everyone with the details - but here - over a year after we jumped off the cliff - we are now ready to let every one else try it out. I'm sure like any AI it can be beaten and it will get boring eventually - but it seems far more active than stock and I think it will entertain for some time. I'm currently trying Japanese against the AI and struggling

So, Andy is the guy that really drove making the AI work. I guess I was the initial "inspiration" and remained as a coach and cheerleader during the months - but James fixed the code and Andy fixed the scripts and they finally got it to work. Of course many team members contributed - especially Don - who had to keep helping out with the "nada-Naval AI"

But everyone who will play against the AI owns Andy (and James) their thanks - these guys are the ones who made the aeAI work!!!

Thanks Andeeee!!!

aeAIaeAIaeAI !!!

[jwilkerson]

Blackhorse

Joel did the bulk of our US Army and Marines land OOB - many others helped (even moi) but Joel owns this area and keeps the whole monsterosity up to date as needed. I'll been doing WWII research for 30 years - but I still find the thought of doing the entire American PTO OOB to be mind boggling - I'm definitely glad we had Joel to take this job!

[jwilkerson]

BigJ62

James is/was also a "late commer" to the project. We originally brought him in to do up a version of his editor. But then I fractured my wrist just as I was in the middle of implementing the new map code - and I would be holding up the whole project which needed the new map to work to really make AE be AE (we had been doing everything on the stock map up to this point). So we needed another programmer fast - James was a programmer and he was available - so he got hired!

James has been a great asset to the technical team - he works fast and his code works correctly. We got along well enough that we even hooked up for a real world project in Atlanta - the only team member I've actually worked with outside AE!

So James has done Land Code and Map Code and over the last year the AI Processor code and OBTW the Editor code - so a very prolific member of the coding team.

Without James, there would be no AE as it is today - not even close.

Thanks James!!!

aeAIaeAIaeAIaeAI !!!!!

[jwilkerson]

BigB

Brian has long been one of the best of the ship art guys on the WITP forum - subsequently he authored his series of "Big B" mods which are still popular today. Brian's contributions to our project included more ship art - and I especially like his Japanese cruisers (I did the cruiser data - and we had to collaborate to make sure I had correct art for each major upgrade). Also Brian worked with the air team I think on the Allied aircraft data. Brian has had some real life issues on occasion and has had to drop out and come back a time or so - but we definitely appreciate the contributions he has been able to make.