COTA Conversion

[kipanderson]

Hi,

Yup... great news.

As with many here I am after as much as possible with this engine. I want more and more Command Ops stuff . Now .

Lots to look forward to....
All the best,
Kip.

[Deathtreader]

Hi,

Just curious as to how things are coming along............


This exp pack will be an instant sale for me..... heck, so will the yet to be publicly named East front game, the yet to be discussed WestWall pack and I'll probably even try the platoon level thingy esp if it has a demo. And I normally avoid small unit level games like the plague.........[:'(]

Rob.[:)]

[simovitch]

All of the Marita-Merkur and North Africa scenarios are converted and tweaked to take advantage of the new features like initial depot levels, initial orders delay, and historical/standard reinforcement schedules. We have playtested several of them and they play out really nicely. The AI is much improved.

All of the maps got a once over as well to clear up some lingering issues with lakes and road wipeouts, and we updated the Mediterranean map graphics.

There is an issue though with the estab images showing up in the game but not the estab editor. We wanted to flesh out as many of the vehicles and equipment images we could in order to take advantage of the new in-game image display but I can't start on that until Panther Games fixes this issue. Also there is still an issue with the debug version of the latest build not working with XP so many of our beta testers can't even bug-test. We are waiting on Panther to fix that issue as well.

[Arjuna]

Paul has started working on this issue. But since we don't use XP anymore it has meant working up a virtualisation system. This is now up and running and Paul can get the release version running under XP. But we need the debug version to test with. So we need to be patient while Paul beavers away.

[VilleYrjola]

I know I might be a bit impatient but what's going on with this expansion? I know these things take their time but I'm dying to know something new. [:D]

[Arjuna]

I have been away or on other business for the last two weeks. Today is my first day back in the office. I need to check on others to see how they are progressing.

[balcazrvam]

I'm off to test that next.

[Txema]

So... How is everything progressing?

How are the patch and the conversion?

Looking forward to news!


Txema

[Arjuna]

It's been a frustrating time for me since finishing a Defence conmtract 6 weeks ago. I had hoped to finish off the COTA Ex Pack by now but one issue after another has prevented that. FIrst off, as I mentioned earlier we cannot get our XP autoptetsers working with the latest builds. Something we have introduced or that MS have introduced is causing the game not to run on these machines. We also have encountered a game lockup that occurs because of either a massive memory leak or the AI thread crashing. These are outside my level of expertise and I am relying on Paul, but his work has been very busy. So progress on both of these has been slow.

Meanwhile I have been wrestling with what turned out to be a Microsoft know bug that they finally acknowledged to me earlier this week. It appears that I can either turn off iterator debugging and run the debug version of our game fast or I can see strings displayed in the debugger while the game runs along ata snails pace but I can't have both. I cannot run the game with iterator debugging turned on because it takes over 7 minutes to load a scenario and hors to go through the game play. So I have opted to turn the iterator debugging off and now when it comes time to step through the code I must identify which unit is affected by recording its ID, re-run the recording, take a data dump of what I think the unit is, check if the ID matches an if not try another unit. So a lot of wasted time all because MS can't get their act together.

But apart from that little frustration (don't worry I am calmer now) I have been working on improving the progress in the attacks. I have fixed several bugs so far, including one that meant certain arty units were spending their entire bombardment time registering their target. From what I have tested so far, arty are much more effective in providing on call support. I have also added mods to reduce the bombardment period of on call support if the unit's arty ammo level drops below 50%. This has involved reconverting the estabs.

Hopefully Paul can wrap up the memory leak and XP issues soon. Then we can start full time testing of the COTA scenarios.

[Txema]

Arjuna,

Thank you very much for the information.

I am really looking forward to the new patch with the fixes to the progress in the attacks !! [:)]

Are you planning to release it prior to the COTA Ex Pack if it is ready? That would be really nice...

Txema

[Arjuna]

I will release the patch once I know that we have the memory leak and XP issues solved.