FC: Southern Storm - v.2.1.3.7735 Public Beta Now Available

[MaximKI]

Hello everyone,

There's a new public beta update installer (v2.1.3.7735) available at the following download link: HERE

What’s New in Version 2.1.3.7735

Animated Fire Lines

Flashpoint Campaigns offers two types of fire line animations. The default basic fire lines or direct-fire based weapon animations. You can turn on the weapon-based effects from the Options menu. See Sections 11.9 and 16.13 in the Game Operations Manuel for more information. For additional detail you can see the WhatsNew doc here:

FPC What's New-5Nov23.pdf

(1.76 MiB) Downloaded 87 times

Classic Fire Lines

These are the fat red/blue (default colors, transparency, and width, can be changed in the User Preferences dialog) lines from shooter to target.

Main Gun Fire Animation

These are narrow “semi-transparent” straight line from shooter to target. Fast moving colored projectile with a thin vapor trail moving from shooter to target. A wide muzzle blast smoke animation at the shooter location.

Autocannon/Machine Gun Animation

These are narrow “semi-transparent” straight line vapor trail from shooter to target with three short colored projectiles moving from shooter to target. Three narrow muzzle blasts smoke animations at the shooter location.

Anti-Tank Guided Missile Animation

These are wiggly trajectory vapor trails from shooter to target (representing ATGM course corrections) and a fat, colored projectile with bright orange tail (engine) and vanishing smoke trail. There is launch blast smoke animation at the shooter location.

Surface-to-Air Missile (SAM) Animation

These are hooked trajectory vapor trails from shooter to target (representing off-angle launch followed by tracking) and a fat accelerating color projectile with persistent smoke trail. There is launch blast smoke animation at the shooter location.

Fire Line Colors and Scaling

Projectile colors follow User Preferences for Line of Fire colors for both sides. You may want to switch to more tracer like colors like yellow, orange, or red to brighten up the default colors (brighter is the new default for new installs).
Animation sizes follow map scaling and will scale up and down with changes in zoom levels.
Animation speed follows other animation speeds, but capped at a maximum speed of 10. Reduce animation speed below 10 to slow down fire exchange animations.

What’s New in Version 2.1.3.7618

Lost Transport Indicator

Another quality-of-life addition to the unit counter is the Lost Transport Indicator. When a unit (mechanized or motorized – vehicles and squads/teams) can no longer move its troops due to losses of the transport subunits, the Leg movement indicator (L) turns orange to note this condition. This helps to show the difference between a dismounted unit that shows the “L” indicator when troops are out of the transports in a non-movement order. For additional detail you can see the WhatsNew doc here:

FPC What's New-16Oct23.pdf

(2.14 MiB) Downloaded 98 times

What’s New in Version 2.1.3.7555

Content Updates
The following new scenarios are being released.
• New standalone Canadian scenario: “High Sticking” by Mike Johnstone
• New standalone Canadian scenario: ‘’Breakaway” by Mike Johnstone
• New standalone French scenario: “The Neckar Line” by Joao Lima.
• New standalone French scenario: “Once More Unto The Breach” by Joao Lima.

New Feature – SOP Management
The following is a summary of the new SOP Menu feature and how to use them. Please see FM FCCW-01 Game Operations for detailed information on this feature. You can also refer to this document for additional details:

FPC What's New-26Sep23.pdf

(1.53 MiB) Downloaded 209 times

Improvement: Confirmation Dialog prior to ‘Apply SOP’ Changes
All SOP changes made by the SOP Manager can now be confirmed or canceled. When pressing Apply in the SOP Manager, or from any other menu, a dialog will be displayed listing the units involved (in OOB order), with the ability to confirm, cancel and/or change the selection of units.
New SOP application confirmation dialog, supporting cancellation and selection of units to apply the SOP to.
Clicking a counter on the dashboard toggles the selection and highlights that unit’s position on the map (including scrolling the location in view).
The ability to unselect units in the confirmation dialog also allows you to keep a group of units selected, and selectively apply changes (instead of having to deselect/reselect units on the map).
The earlier implementation solely displayed those units whose SOP had changed, without offering the means to cancel or exclude units.

New SOP Menu and Options
The changes consist of two new ways to change or apply SOPs, available from a new SOP menu.
The SOP menu with two new ways to change or apply SOPs.

Adjusting SOP
The top-most menu, ‘Adjust SOP’ allows you to apply changes of one SOP element to the selected unit(s). For example, to quickly change the Relocate When… SOP of a group of units to relocate on receiving direct fire, use the SOP menu, Adjust SOP, Relocate When…, After Receiving Direct Fire.
The image above shows walking the menu structure to solely change the SOP for Relocate When Receiving Direct Fire.
The game will present a confirmation dialog for the Relocate When change, listing all selected units along with their currently active SOP for ‘Relocate When’. The dialog repeats the SOP change you have chosen in bold.
In this dialog, you can select or select units for whom to change the ‘Relocate When’ SOP, by toggling the checkbox underneath the unit counter.
You can also select whether the SOP change applies to the Default SOP, SOPs for movement orders, and SOPs for non-movement (arrival) orders.
To confirm the selection and change, press Proceed. To back out of the change, press Cancel.
To quickly invert the selection, use the small button left of the Proceed button. This comes in handy when you have a large group of on-map units selected and want to make changes to only a few units. It allows you to stick with the same selection of units, instead of having to make different on-map selections for every SOP change.

Set SOP (aka Apply SOP Preset)
The second menu ‘Set SOP’ allows you to apply a SOP Preset to the selected units based on their type. A collection of SOP Presets has been made available from the menu, organized by unit type.
To apply a ‘APC Ambush’ pre-set to a selection of units, use the SOP menu, ‘Set SOP’, ‘APC’ and ‘APC Ambush’.
The game will then present a confirmation dialog for the ‘APC Ambush’, with a brief description of the key SOP elements being set (in italics), and the same selection mechanism as the other SOP confirmation dialogs.
The preset can be applied to (any combination of) Default SOP, movement order SOPs and Non-Movement order SOPs (i.e., arrival orders).

Tips and Tricks
The following sections note a few tricks to make use of the new SOP Menu feature and make ordering SOPs easier for the user.

Use (large) Unit Selections
The SOP Adjust and Set SOP mechanisms have been designed to work with (large) selections of units. Even when you want to apply different changes to the HQ and ‘line’ units of a group, it typically is quicker to select the whole group (ctrl + click), apply changes to the whole group and confirm, then apply another SOP preset to the line units, exclude the HQ and confirm, finally followed by select an SOP preset for the HQ, invert selection and include the HQ and confirm. That way, you end up with the whole group still being selected, and ready to accept a group move order.

Use the ‘Movement Orders’ and ‘Non-Movement Orders’ Selections
Frequently, you want your units to behave differently ‘on the move’ compared to when arrived and in place. For example, to have your mechanized units quickly move into their screening positions you want them to use roads. But once screening, you want them to fall back via locations and paths offering concealment.
To do so, select the mechanized units, and adjust the SOP to prefer road movement for all SOPs (all checked). Next, issue the movements to the screening positions. Finally, select the mechanized units, and adjust the SOP to not care about road movements, prefer concealed movement, and apply the changes only to the Default SOP and Non-Movement Orders (so uncheck the Movement Orders). That gets the job done.

Abuse the ‘SOP Adjust’ for a quick inspection of specific actual SOP settings in your selection
For example, to check which units are set to not engage, select the relevant units, then use SOP Adjust, and choose any Fire Discipline change. The resulting confirmation dialog will show you the current fire discipline setting for each selected unit.

Major Bug Fixes and Enhancements
The following items are major bug fixes or game enhancements for this update.
• Units were swimming on major rivers rather than taking available roads and bridges. We have reduced the tendency to swim, even when moving in formation lanes, and to avoid defensive support positions in water.
• Reinforcing units were arriving prematurely (the ‘quantum shift’) bug. They now arrive when they should.
• All SOPs and SOP Pre-sets have been changed to default to avoid NBC contamination.
• SOP change menus are unavailable during game pause.
• Artillery default fire mission presets. The ‘Custom’ preset label in the orders drop-down list was missing so it did not show when the player customized the mission. It does now.
• Units with amphibious river crossing capability were sometimes swimming major rivers quite unnecessarily. They avoid this now.
• Next-Unit and Prev-Unit are now global. They were ineffective when the Dashboard or other form was selected. We have added Ctrl-B and Ctrl-N support to the unit Dashboard and to the Spotlight as requested. We also changed the order of the units to match that of the units in the Spotlight (the ‘sorted order’) rather than use the physical order as before.
• Fixed automatic kill of passenger when unit is moving with passengers dismounted.
• In Tutorial 3 a US MLRS unit threw a 'range check error' when the player tried to give it Barrage orders in the Dashboard orders editor. The Barrage order in the Dashboard orders editor did not have the submenu items the way the main Barrage order does in Unit1, so it did not know how to default the arty mission. It guessed "HE" but the MLRS had none, so it threw an error. The proposed barrage order now checks to see what ammo types are actually available rather than assuming HE by default. If the unit only has ICM, FASCAM, any of three types of smoke, etc. it will pick up on this. If multiple types are found, then the FIRST found will become the default and the player can manually change it from there.
• Fix pathfinding to recognize roads as mitigation for steep hills (just as the MCOO displays it).
• A change was made to scenario loading to disable unnecessary computer player processing and this speeds up scenario loading now.
• Combat engineer units have some issues fixed with dropped orders, bridging, and missing Blow Bridge orders.
• Showing and hiding the Core Info Panels also showed or hid the Radio Log. This was overkill since the Radio Log has its own menu items and hotkey, so it is no longer considered part of the core group of info panels.
• Players can now place reinforcing aircraft and arty to "not-under FSCC" control **before** they arrive. The danger, particularly for aircraft, is that the FSCC would use them and lose them before the player had a chance to turn off FSCC control. The 'toggle FSCC control' menu item for reinforcing aircraft and artillery units is now live prior to its arrival so that this can be done by the player.
• Artillery units with SOP to ‘refuse all FSCC requests’ still processed fire missions. Fixed.
• CPU multithreading failed on computers with too many cores. We updated the supporting library, and it works well now.
• Refined the armor ratings calculations for a unit’s turret and hull armor rating by aspect (Flank/Rear/Top) to correct the various top armor ratings on vehicles. This will reduce the top armor on all units to a more realistic level.

Minor Fixes and Improvements
• The default mouse wheel zoom direction has been switched to scroll forward to zoom in and scroll back to zoom out. However, this will take effect only on brand-new installs because this user preference setting is stored in the flashpoint.ini file under "ZoomWheelForward=" to be used each time thereafter. For existing installs, just go to the User Preferences dialog General tab
and reverse the check for “Mouse wheel rolled forward zooms map
out” setting.
• We updated our HTML library to improve very high DPI support.
• Canadian Campaign. The Canadian unit “Bde Recce” was not starting in a valid setup hex by default. Now fixed.
• Fix the misplaced “Fo45” road label on the Forchheim map.
• PBEM++: If you select either the Game Refresh button or the Challenges Refresh button it should really refresh both for player convenience.
• Range check error in Tutorial 2. Fix the problem in the game where it was not consistently setting the active side when setting the active unit. We also made the overlays more robust against a side not being set.
• Hook the speed of the unit counter sliding movement across the map to use the user preference for animation speed.
• The game allows the resubordination of a core unit to a non-core unit despite warning it doesn't do that. We are removing the obsolete warning message now. We still prevent it in the scenario editor (as opposed to game time) though.
• The game can now be ended while paused during turn resolution.
• Standalone scenarios can be saved as .sav files to a Windows folder other than the default now. For example, it can be saved to OneDrive so that other computers you have can see and resume it.
• Fire lines during combat. Sometimes they were drawn but no ammo was used and there were no casualties. Fire lines were drawn when there was a good chance a shot could be taken but at the last instant it was ruled out. Now the fire lines are not drawn unless the shot was actually taken. Also, the units involved will not flash unless a shot is taken.

• UI polish:
• Align foreground and background colors of the weather update message with weather colors in the game clock panel.
• Some minor typos were fixed in the game and two of the scenarios.
• Automatically recolor the unit counter to the receiving group's colors when resubordinating.

[Stelteck]

Excellent, thanks !

[Jagger2002]

I have been waiting for this one! Unfortunately, I don't have much time now...

[Shadrach]

Really appreciate more fixes and the added SOP menu, will be very useful!

Minor issue with the unit spotlight - the arrows and lines are almost impossible to distinguish. Makes it very hard to see the OOB structure.

Could be a DPI Scaling issue?
Using 150% scaling here on a 2560x1440 display.

Clipboard01.jpg (35.46 KiB) Viewed 1979 times

Also (reminder) please make windows/dialogs close on hitting ESC

[IronManBeta]

Thanks Shadrach. This is a flaw in the third party skinning engine that we use. I thought it had been fixed by the author but apparently not. We will see what we can do because I agree that it is hard to see the outline controls properly. Thanks for noticing, Rob C

P.S. Which dialogs not closing with Escape bother you the most? Many already do but many do not. If you can help identify the key ones I can do them first!

Thanks again.

[Shadrach]

Hey Rob, thanks for confirming what I see here.

As for what dialogs should be looked at first, it would be the ones that are most used, i.e. the:
Unit Dashboard
Subunit Inspector
SOP Manager
Off-Map Assets

I know these have the keys as toggles now, but for me it's a lot about muscle memory - If there's dialog I want to get rid of, I just reach for the Esc key instead of trying to remember what the toggle key is

I use AHK codes like this to allow closing the dialogs with Esc:

Code: Select all

#If WinActive("ahk_class TfUnitDashboardNew")
Esc::Send {F4}	; Esc - Close Unit Dashboard
#If ; End

[IronManBeta]

Great! Prepare to be pleasantly surprised.

Grin, Rob C

[MaximKI]

A new public beta version is available! Please see OP for details.

[MaximKI]

Hey everyone, a new public beta version is now live! See OP for details.

[Shadrach]

Thanks a lot for the Esc key fixes

Too bad the arrows in the Spotlight dialog are still borked, any chance it will be fixed for the next one?
Probably a tricky one...

[CapnDarwin]

The arrows issue is a third party tool issue. It will take time to see a fix from the developer or look into a new tool. Not a quick fix unfortunately.