Any news..?

[Paul Wykes]

Just wondering if there is any news on how things are progressing?

I`m not nagging . Just wondering:)

[IronManBeta]

Hi Paul.

I keep thinking that I am turning the corner and heading into the home stretch and then more new considerations crop up again. Some relate to programming, some to artwork, and some to design. No one issue is all that tough, but taken together they have caused us to run a little late.

I have allocated maybe 20% of my time to finishing new features over the last 6 months (as opposed to testing, documenting, scenario creation, research, answering email from beta testers, etc, etc.) and apart from the last few details of internet play the game is feature complete at this point. The hard part now is to get all the features working smoothly together. I have lost count of the number of times I had to rewrite something slightly to get something else new to work, only to find that it broke half a dozen other things that I had considered 'done'. That is always true with software of course, but it is very laborious tracing down these reports.

If that wasn't enough, just to make things interesting I have been doing a 'final' (ha!) top to bottom review of all the code over the last few weeks and discovered a mass of little things to change (hey, if it works it must be obsolete). Everything from adjusting the exact positions of labels on the screens, to revamping armour penetration rates for consistency, to tweeking the pacing and flow of combat resolution events, to tracking the down source of annoying screen flicker, to second-guessing the AI and sorting out why it is freezing up every now and then. It was pretty overwhelming at the time but I am much happier now that I have put in the fixes and made the effort to touch base everywhere.

I have a pile of paper at least an 1" thick at my elbow with to-do lists, notes and screenshots to work on. My flocking routine to control small groups of units was causing me a lot of grief, for example, and I need to rewrite it from scratch. I also was a little quick to discard my special-purpose air sortie planning screen and I need to recreate it again because using the general-purpose Fire Support Control Center screen is just plain lame! Oh, and I need to figure out a consistent unit naming scheme for the Brits and West Germans forces in the database because they are all blank right now and really confusing and unusable. Oh, and I really need to finally write up some new AI for the helicopter units because recent testing is showing that they really can't behave like everyone else and expect to live very long. Lots of fun stuff....

Building a game like this is a bit like building a pyramid. You need a broad base of low-level routines, a moderate base of mid-level routines, and a few dozen high-level ones at the top to run it all. Each course builds on the one below it. If you change anything fairly low down (and I do so all the time) then there are consequences for everything above it. Sometimes these consequences are pretty indirect and it can simply take time to find them all and patiently sort it all out without propagating a fresh set of disturbances. I have been lucky so far really, but once the project gets large like this one you really have to slow down and act with care when you make changes if you want to prevent a runaway bug list.

Game project management is a discipline in itself - I believe that most games that fail to see the light of day do so for project management reasons more than any other. Matrix has some unique techniques in that regard but I should probably take the 5th before I give away any secrets. If you are interested though you can find a number of useful articles on this topic at www.gamasutra.com. It can make you wonder sometimes that any game ever manages to ship!

Bottom line - I am busting my gut to get this one ready to ship. Expectations are pretty high though and I don't want to disappoint. Please be patient!

Cheers, Rob.

[Paul Wykes]

Thanks for the update.

I couldn`t even begin to imagine the amount of work and planning required for such a project.

Take as long as required, I`m sure the wait will be worth it, and I promise to be more patient:D

Paul