When?

[mlees]

No need for a designated driver either!

Except for when you run out...

[stretch]

<sacrasm> And I'm not drunk right now. </sarcasm>

[thrud]

no one to hold up the beer bong[:)]


Eric

[Zorachus99]

It's almost time

[Jeff Gilbert]

Tick, tock. Tick, tock.
Soon, very soon for my monthly fix. [&o]
-----
I am especially interested in anything new from the paytest side of the house.
It is amazing, even with the length of time for development MWif needs, how my interest and desire level has not waned a bit. I must attribute most of this to the timely updates given, mapping detail being paid attention to and the in-depth discussions by so many different points of view ...

[Norden_slith]

Isnt it a tad early for paytests yet?
&nbsp;
Norden [:)]

[Shannon V. OKeets]

September 1, 2006 Status Report for Matrix Games’ MWIF Forum

Accomplishments of August

Project Management
I am looking at 1st quarter 2007 as a release date, without the ability to be any more specific than that,

Communications
Rob Armstrong was on vacation for half of August so things were slow in the graphics area.

Erik Rutkins of Matrix Games has taken a month off to be with his wife and 1st born.

I exchanged several emails with Rob Crandall (author of Flashpoint Germany) about 3rd party software tools. More on that below.

I monitored all the threads in the MWIF World in Flames forum daily. Members of the forum continue to be very helpful.

Beta testers were quiet because I owe them a new version to fix existing bugs.

Dan Hatchen is waiting on me to install what he has already done on NetPlay.

Patrice did a ton of work on the maps, which is discussed in more detail below.

No word from Terje on changes to the naval unit descriptions. Greyshaft has been occupied with family matters.

Ian Wilson and Richard Dazeley are waiting on me to provide more examples of what the AI rules will look like.

No communication with Chris Marinacci over the past month.

Beta Testing
Revising the player interface has rendered the version of the program I am working on (Version 3.0) unplayable from the beta testing point of view. I need to get the code stable before I can upload 3.0 as the new beta test version.

Units
The units are done except for the low level resolution depictions and I plan on designing those in conjunction with redesigning the player interface forms for naval movement and combat. That’s because I expect the low resolution depictions to only be of any great value when planning naval operations over a large expanse of ocean. Adding the automatic change feature so the unit resolution changes when the zoom level changes will be added after the low resolution depictions are done.

The other item related to units still hanging fire is completing writeups for individual units. For that task there are 4 groups of units: (1) Greyshaft’s original air unit writeups did not include the lend lease aircraft, which should be fairly easy to complete by simply referencing existing writeups for the base aircraft types, (2) Greyshaft’s writeups on the HQs were reviewed in detail by Peter Kanjowski and need some edits in accordance with Peter’s comments, (3) the naval unit writeups have been mostly completed by Terje and Fred Zimmerman but need edits to add some numeric information about each ship, and (4) nothing has been done on the non-HQ land units - I am still looking for someone to volunteer to do a few of them (perhaps the most famous units for each major power?).

Map
Patrice completed making the edits to the map data for all the portions of the world map that have been examined in detail by the forum members - with Patrice spearheading that work. In particular, the map of Scandinavia received close inspection by and detailed commentary from the forum members who live there. Hopefully the map we now have for Scandinavia is the best achievable with the (sometimes conflicting) goals of matching WIF FE, being realistic, and simulating WW II within the WIF system.

Graphics for the fortifications were completed by Rob and we are closing in on the final renderings of the weather overlays. Another loose end here is adding more blue tint to the ice terrain so it doesn’t look so much like there is no terrain at all in the hex. This problem appeared when depicting a Norwegian glacier as ice terrain surrounded by mountain hexes. Other than that, the basic graphic elements for the map are done. Once the whole world map has been completed I expect to do another review of all the terrain types for minor buffing and polishing - though that shouldn’t result in any major changes.

The last big item for map graphics is doing the individual coastal bitmaps and river/lake bitmap overlays for the non-European map (i.e., 90% of the world). We have started work on that in the last week and have devised a production line as follows:
(1) Patrice creates a blank grid bitmap for a section of the map (e.g., Scandinavia) using a little program I wrote that makes each hex the exact size that MWIF needs (24 bit color, 136 by 152 pixels per hex).
(2) Patrice transfers to a blank grid the rough coastlines and lake outlines he has drawn for a section of the map and adds the MWIF generated rivers as an overlay. These MWIF rivers follow the hexsides rigidly - quite ugly.
(3) Rob takes the draft that Patrice has created (as a PSD file) and transforms it into two beautiful bitmaps with nice coast lines, lakes, and wavy river lines. The last two are combined on a separate bitmap.
(4) Patrice runs another little program I have written that cuts the large bitmaps into individual coastal hexes (BMP files) and heavily encoded tiny files for the river and lake bitmap overlay (RVR files - a file type of my own invention). The resultant files can be used immediately by the program and Patrice can evaluate if everything has turned out as expected.
(5) As each section is done, we’ll post screen shots of the results to the forum for review by the forum members.

So far Patrice has completed two sections (Scandinavia and USSR east of the Urals) through step 2. Once Rob has processed the first one and we are sure everything is functioning correctly, we’ll start on the rest. As you can tell, I have taken myself out of this process for the most part, so I can focus on other tasks.

CWIF Conversion
I had to go back into the CWIF components and make substantial changes, replacing most of the CWIF unique components with plain vanilla ones to accommodate the needs of Theme Engine.

I also started work on extracting into their own modules the Player Interface Control routines, and Game Control routines. In combination with the Message Control, Simulation Control, and Phase Control modules I have already created, I am getting closer to the architecture I want for the program as a whole. PIC deals with the mouse, keyboard, and screen display. GC starts, saves, and restores games. MC handles NetPlay and PBEM. SC enforces the MWIF rules and, lastly, Phase Control advances the game through the sequence of play (e.g., phases). Internal to SC are all the changes that happen to the map, units, et al during a game, and writing the game events to the Game Record Log.

Game Interface
Rob has provided separate skins for each of the 10 major powers (Communist China and Vichy France are the 9th and 10th). The differences are zero in terms of functionality - they are purely cosmetic. And Theme Engine lets me trivially change from one skin to another as a function of which player is making decisions. I like this a lot. Frequently, who has to make decisions changes as each phase ends and the next one starts. By having the screen appearance change in sync with the changing phases, you get a better sense of the simulation progressing.

However, to get MWIF code to work in conjunction with Theme Engine code took a ton of effort. I spent about 90% of my time working on this the past month and there are still a few wrinkles I have yet to iron out. After about 1 week of effort I was able to get the Theme Engine scroll bars to appear on all 40 or so of the little maps that pop up on the different MWIF forms. For instance, each combat form has a little map of the area where the combat occurs.

Here is one example, taken from many, of the reason this takes so much time and effort. I ran a recompile of all the MWIF modules. This is known as a ‘Build’ in the world of programming and it is a fairly standard practice to do this from time to time just to make sure that everything is recompiled fresh with the latest and greatest changes that have been made. The response I got from the Theme Engine software was that it generated an IO Error 105 every time I tried to use one of its elements - during program design and during program execution. This was even true for a brand new program containing only 10 lines of code. Fault isolating this wasn’t easy and the only remedy that worked was to uninstall Theme Engine in its entirety from the computer, then reload and reinstall it from zipped files. On my second try at doing that the problem disappeared. Poof, there went 2 days. By the way, the Microsoft documentation on fixing IO Error 105 is totally focused on transforming the program into a DOS console application. Sort of a classic example of how helpful their documentation is.

Theme Engine for all intents and purposes is an undocumented program where you learn what it is capable of doing, and how it does it, through trial and error. When really desperate, you read the source code listings to try to figure things out. This is a rough way to work, but the alternatives aren’t any better. After talking things over with Rob Crandall I have decided to limit Theme Engine to enhancing Form basics (borders, header, minimize/maximize, background), scroll bars, buttons, and menus. What I am leaving out are all the text renderings: labels, edit fields, prompts, large text messages, etcetera.

For text fields I will use one of 3 other packages that Rob Crandall uses and recommends. Which one remains to be determined. My objective in all this is to enhance the visual appearance of the screen, and the forms in particular. Once I get the tools I will be using sorted out, making the actual changes will be easy, since all these packages work within Borland’s Delphi Interactive Development Environment.

I made a bunch of changes to the Map Views and Screen Layouts while revising the components they used for Theme Engine. This code is cleaner now and it should be easier to correct any remaining bugs (assuming this tidying up didn’t fix them already).

MWIF Game Engine
I coded the first dozen routines that write out to the Game Record Log. These work nicely and every time I run a test of the player interface, I get another Game Record Log file on the disk. Every other day I delete the 100 or so files that have accumulated. The code structure is in place to do the remaining 450 of these routines but other tasks have higher priority at the present.

Internet - NetPlay
No changes here. I need the player interface stable before I can work on this.

Saved Games
No changes here.

Player’s Manual
I took the Optional Rules writeups that Mziln extracted from RAW and turned them into something more intelligible to WIF newcomers. With a lot of advice from forum members, I completed all 81 of these during the past month. The next step for these is to display them on the screen when a player starts a new game.

The concept is that a player can click on an optional rule and a description will pop up that explains it. This should enable a player to decide whether he wants to include the optional rule or not. I am holding off on coding this until after I decide on the 3rd party software I will be using for displaying large text messages.

Scenario Information
Nothing new here.

Help System, Tutorials, and AI Assistant
Nothing new here.

Artificial Intelligence (AI)
Nothing new here.

Other
One of my wife’s coworkers describes what I have been doing as “Software Battles”, where the user tries to defeat the hordes of defects in the software through brute force, perseverance, cunning, luck, prayer, and cursing.
====================================================================
August summary: Time spent rewriting existing code still seems like time wasted to me. While the slowness of player interface inching closer to completion is annoying, the light at the end of the tunnel for finishing the map can now be seen as a beacon of hope.
====================================================================

Tasks for September

Communications
Continue monitoring the forum threads.

Beta Testing
Fix more bugs, so I can get version 3.00 out to the beta testers. It will contain all the map data revisions that Patrice has made, the medium resolution units, and some of the new interface design.

Map and Units
Start generating coastal bitmaps and river/lake overlays for other sections of the world map.

CWIF Conversion
Thoroughly test the new random number generator (this task maintains its death grip on the bottom of the pile of things to do).

Game Interface
Decide on which 3rd party software to used for text. Add the bidding capability to the Start of Game Form so the beta testers can play one-on-one over the Internet.

Redesign of MWIF Game Engine
Continue refining the superstructure of the MWIF game engine.

Software Development Tools
Finish correcting bugs caused by the changes to accommodate Theme Engine and other 3rd party software.

Multiplayer Internet
Incorporate the Indy10 code for the new design for the multiplayer system into MWIF.

AI Opponent
Work out detailed rules for several more decision points so the language for the AIO can be finalized.

Player’s Manual
Finish the table of contents and transfer all the various write ups I have done for different portions of MWIF into the Player’s Manual (e.g., Optional Rules, PBEM design).

Historical Detail, Animations, and Sound
Start listing all the places the program will use historical video footage, sound, and music. Begin fleshing out the content for the first half dozen tutorials.

Help System, Tutorials, and AI Assistant
Set up forms dedicated to viewing the sequence of play, so they can be used later as an index/table of contents into the context sensitive help files.

Other
Finish the scrip & dialogue for our barbershop chorus Christmas show. The plot line is that Mrs. Claus takes Santa’s sleigh to a shopping mall in Nome, Alaska in late November where an SUV smashes into it while it is parked. To deliver Xmas presents Santa needs a sleigh, which involves having him deal with repairmen, an insurance claims adjuster, his master accountant elf (no cash on hand), new & used sleigh salespeople, and, finally, buying one over the Internet.
================================================================
September summary: Finalize the player interface design and apply it to the full set of 104 existing forms. Give the beta testers something new to test. Start mass production of the rest of the coastal bitmaps. Get the system for playing over the Internet to work.
================================================================

[Froonp]

Theme Engine for all intents and purposes is an undocumented program where you learn what it is capable of doing, and how it does it, through trial and error. When really desperate, you read the source code listings to try to figure things out. This is a rough way to work, but the alternatives aren’t any better. After talking things over with Rob Crandall I have decided to limit Theme Engine to enhancing Form basics (borders, header, minimize/maximize, background), scroll bars, buttons, and menus. What I am leaving out are all the text renderings: labels, edit fields, prompts, large text messages, etcetera.

Is Rob also using this Theme Engine software for his "Flashpoint Germany" Game too or other games ?
I'm wondering what led you to use this software. It is not critizism, it is wondering.

Thanks for the report anyway

So far Patrice has completed two sections (Scandinavia and USSR east of the Urals) through step 2. Once Rob has processed the first one and we are sure everything is functioning correctly, we’ll start on the rest. As you can tell, I have taken myself out of this process for the most part, so I can focus on other tasks.

Well, in fact I only uploaded two, but I have 6 others that are ready for gridline adding and who would allow to finish the coastlines, lakes & rivers from Cairo to Nikolayev, plus 3 more for the Pacific Islands from the Bonin to the Solomons & from the NEI to the Hawaiian islands, but I'm waiting for the feedback from Rob to see if the process is alright.

[Shannon V. OKeets]

ORIGINAL: Froonp

Theme Engine for all intents and purposes is an undocumented program where you learn what it is capable of doing, and how it does it, through trial and error. When really desperate, you read the source code listings to try to figure things out. This is a rough way to work, but the alternatives aren’t any better. After talking things over with Rob Crandall I have decided to limit Theme Engine to enhancing Form basics (borders, header, minimize/maximize, background), scroll bars, buttons, and menus. What I am leaving out are all the text renderings: labels, edit fields, prompts, large text messages, etcetera.

Is Rob also using this Theme Engine software for his "Flashpoint Germany" Game too or other games ?
I'm wondering what led you to use this software. It is not critizism, it is wondering.

Thanks for the report anyway

So far Patrice has completed two sections (Scandinavia and USSR east of the Urals) through step 2. Once Rob has processed the first one and we are sure everything is functioning correctly, we’ll start on the rest. As you can tell, I have taken myself out of this process for the most part, so I can focus on other tasks.

Well, in fact I only uploaded two, but I have 6 others that are ready for gridline adding and who would allow to finish the coastlines, lakes & rivers from Cairo to Nikolayev, plus 3 more for the Pacific Islands from the Bonin to the Solomons & from the NEI to the Hawaiian islands, but I'm waiting for the feedback from Rob to see if the process is alright.

Yes, Rob Crandall used Theme Engine for Flashpoint Germany - and the themes for that game were developed by Rob Armstrong.

Software tools are notoriously poorly documented; programmers who write code for other programmers rarely document their software, other than some in-line comments. Obtaining an overview of a software package is virtually unheard of, aside from advertising splash which contains nothing of substance ("Hundreds of great new routines that do wonderful stuff!"). As you well know, there is a sub-industry in the world of software that exists solely of writing books that explain how software works and how to best use it. For most software tools the market is usually too small to justify writing a book - hence the yawning abyss that faces the programmer whenever he starts working with a new software package.

The alternative is to write your own routines from scratch but that requires delving into a similar abyss in trying to understand the inner workings of Microsoft's code and/or Borland's Delphi code. Lastly, you can choose to build everything from ones and zeroes (binary), which, - you knew this was coming - requires understanding the hardware platform's poorly doumented underlying BIOS etc.. At no point in this process is the phrase Blissful Ignorance appropriate. Ignorance produces many wasted days of frustration. Knowing/learning just a few small things can make a task extremely simple to do in minutes. But that's just the way things are - and have been for all the years I have programmed (38).

[npilgaard]

Thanks for the update.
&nbsp;
Regards
Nikolaj

[Jeff Gilbert]

ORIGINAL: Norden
Isnt it a tad early for paytests yet?
Norden [:)]

Play ... Beta ... OK, got my terms screwed up. [:D]
I just like the info and updates.

[Norden_slith]

Hi Steve,
thx for the monthly.
Im not much of a programmer and someone much wiser in these ways noticed that the coding of the AI will be the really, really hard part in making this thing work, especially with all the testing that undoubtedly will involve. Now I notice that the AI coding hasnt even begun yet, obviously you need a solid foundation (final map, units setups etc) before building the house and all, but still. Wont this take much longer than you anticipate in your september update?

best regards,

[Shannon V. OKeets]

ORIGINAL: Norden
Hi Steve,
thx for the monthly.
Im not much of a programmer and someone much wiser in these ways noticed that the coding of the AI will be the really, really hard part in making this thing work, especially with all the testing that undoubtedly will involve. Now I notice that the AI coding hasnt even begun yet, obviously you need a solid foundation (final map, units setups etc) before building the house and all, but still. Wont this take much longer than you anticipate in your september update?

best regards,

Perhaps. Perhaps not. It is more a question of getting tools to work correctly than straight coding time. For example, I've written a lot of code for the program that took very little time (redoing the map, automating the rail lines, adding the coastal bitmaps, adding the air and naval unit bitmaps). At other times I have spent days working on solving one small problem. New code is much easier to write than debugging changes to existing code (that I didn't write). The Map View code worked correctly rather quickly (a couple of days) but the Screen Layout code took weeks. These were very similar but the latter had to replace some existing code, which required understanding numerous interactions and assumptions (undocumented).

As another example, I was able to write about 11,000 lines of code in 2 weeks for generating the game record log. That was possible because I had done the detailed design work earlier. The specifications for that design had taken me about 1 month to complete. In regards to the AI, I have done a lot of preliminary work on the design (80 pages). Once I have all the tools in place, writing the actual code should go very quickly.

For the PBEM, no code has been written, but I have the complete design document of over 100 pages done.

One of my favorites sayings is "time sure flies when you don't know what you're doing". Installing Delphi 2006, upgrading the CWIF component library to work with that upgrade, and learning how to get the most out of Theme Engine 6.06 has cost me about 2 months. I was worknig on other things concurrently so that isn't a complete waste of 2 months, but it did take a lot of my working hours during that period.

So, if the tools work the way I expect, I should be able to grind out functioning code consistently. But small, inexplicable glitches can add days to the schedule. I can't really plan for those specifically, just add in extra time as a contingency.

I do not see writing the AI Opponent as "really, really hard". Non-programmers view the AIO as mysterious, but think of the screen depiction of the map and units as routine/straightforward, even boring stuff to do. The presentation of the game to the player is not easy to do. That's because (in addition to working with Microsoft/Windows tools) for WIF there is a ton of information to communicate, numerous phases/decision points in the sequence of play, and a very high level of expectations in the player community as to how a game should work. The players demand a smooth interface with nice looking screens or else they say nasty things about the game. I am not complaining about the player community here, simply noting the reality of the marketplace.

The AIO is much less troublesome to me than many of the other things I am dealing with. And actually, I look forward to coding the AIO most of all. The rest of the work is merely a means to that end.

[composer99]

ORIGINAL: Shannon V. OKeets
Other
Finish the script & dialogue for our barbershop chorus Christmas show. The plot line is that Mrs. Claus takes Santa’s sleigh to a shopping mall in Nome, Alaska in late November where an SUV smashes into it while it is parked. To deliver Xmas presents Santa needs a sleigh, which involves having him deal with repairmen, an insurance claims adjuster, his master accountant elf (no cash on hand), new & used sleigh salespeople, and, finally, buying one over the Internet.

Good to see you're keeping up with things outside of this project, like eating, sleeping, breathing, and the barbershop chorus even if only marginally. [:)]

[Shannon V. OKeets]

ORIGINAL: composer99

ORIGINAL: Shannon V. OKeets
Other
Finish the script & dialogue for our barbershop chorus Christmas show. The plot line is that Mrs. Claus takes Santa’s sleigh to a shopping mall in Nome, Alaska in late November where an SUV smashes into it while it is parked. To deliver Xmas presents Santa needs a sleigh, which involves having him deal with repairmen, an insurance claims adjuster, his master accountant elf (no cash on hand), new & used sleigh salespeople, and, finally, buying one over the Internet.

Good to see you're keeping up with things outside of this project, like eating, sleeping, breathing, and the barbershop chorus even if only marginally. [:)]

Here is part of the dialogue I wrote for Mrs. Claus on why she has to go to Nome (apologies to John Masefield):

I must down to the stores again, for the mall of the discount sale,
Is a wild mall, with a clear call, I resist, to no avail.

...

I must down to the stores again, to the lovely shoes, some beaded,
And all I ask is a credit card whose limit’s not exceeded.
And the high heeled pumps, and the satin gowns, and the rooms made just for dressing,
And a string of pearls, so very long, against my skin caressing.

[Neilster]

Bravo!

Cheers, Neilster

[Norden_slith]

ORIGINAL: Jeff Gilbert

ORIGINAL: Norden
Isnt it a tad early for paytests yet?
Norden [:)]

Play ... Beta ... OK, got my terms screwed up. [:D]
I just like the info and updates.

Geez, I just saw the screens in the other thread. They are maginificent. Im ready for paytests now!

Norden [&o]

[Zorachus99]

Ooh ooh!
&nbsp;
It's nearly that time again!
&nbsp;
Where Steve &nbsp;and passes &nbsp;to make you go &nbsp;and wish you could .
&nbsp;
Nuff said

[Shannon V. OKeets]

October 1, 2006 Status Report for Matrix Games’ MWIF Forum

Accomplishments of September

Project Management
I am looking at 1st or 2nd quarter 2007 as a release date. I will revise the detailed project plan in the first week of October and have a somewhat improved estimate then.

Communications
Rob Armstrong had family health troubles during September (his wife was in hospital), so very little new was done on creating new graphics.

I monitored all the threads in the MWIF World in Flames forum daily. Members of the forum continue to be very helpful.

Beta testers were quiet because I owe them a new version to fix existing bugs.

Dan Hatchen is waiting on me to install what he has already done on NetPlay.

Patrice continues to do a ton of work on the maps, which is discussed in more detail below.

Terje finished his portion of the naval unit descriptions and is posting queries to the forum to fill in some holes. The holes are mostly for fictional naval units that ADG added to the game so players could build more units of each type than was done historically (e.g., more battleships and carriers for the Japanese). Nobly, he has continued on, past his original allotment, in his documentation of naval units. For instance, he notified me that he finished all the German units today.

No activity with the AI Opponent team, mostly because they are waiting on me for more specifics.

No communication with Chris Marinacci over the past month.

Beta Testing
Revising the player interface has rendered the version of the program I am working on (Version 3.01) unplayable from the beta testing point of view. I need to get the code stable before I can upload 3.01 as the new beta test version. With a little luck that should happen in the first 2 weeks of October. As of my last count, I have 70 bugs/suggestions from the testing of version 2.00 and 50 new bugs/remaining interface tasks that I have created/identified over the past 3 months. The latter are due to changes I have made to accommodate Delphi 2006, Theme Engine 6.06, and the replacement of virtually every component on the 100+ forms. In aggregate those required roughly 10,000 edits to existing code, described some more below.

Units
Terje has given me writeups for about half of the naval units. Which is all that he had originally planned on doing. Picking up the slack though, he is now continuing on through more of them. I am extremely grateful, and thankful for every extra one he gets done.

I’ll finish the little routine to process formatted writeups today and then I will go back over all the text writeups that have accumulated and start editing them so they look nice on the screen. More on this below.

Map
I processed the Qattara Depression bitmap and integrated it into the program.

Patrice has now completed a review of the world map with the exception of the western hemisphere. Even there he has the northern half well under way with the forum members critiquing the USA and Canadian map segments. All that remains is the Carribean, Mexico, and Central and South America.

Patrice has also done draft coastlines for all of the world map except the western hemisphere. Those drafts are waiting for Rob to process them into final versions. I tested my little program that cuts large bitmaps into: (1) individual coastal hexes (BMP files) and (2) heavily encoded files for the river and lake bitmap overlays (RVR files). So, the final processing of Rob’s work into files that can be used immediately by the program is ready now. Patrice and the forum members will then be able to evaluate if everything has turned out as expected.

Just to enumerate, Patrice has headed up review and modification of: Scandinavia, China, the USSR from the Urals to the Pacific, Siberia, India, the rest of the Asian mainland, Africa, Japan, Australia and New Zealand, all the islands in the Pacific, and all the islands in the Atlantic, including Iceland and Greenland. He then did draft coastlines for them all. Perhaps the zero meridian should be moved from Greenwich to Marseilles in honor of this feat?

CWIF Conversion
I methodically reviewed all 100+ forms, adding 6 new ones. In so doing, I replaced almost every graphical element (i.e., component) with a new version either from the Theme Engine library or the JEDI library. It took me about half the month simply to nail down which replacements to standardize on and figure out how to set the parameters each component uses. On average, each component has about 50 parameters/variables that can be set. I modify about 4-6 of them from the defaults for each occurrence of the component in the player interface. For example, I set the font type, size, and color for every little box that displays text. And give every component a unique name.

As part of the fall out from this activity, I removed a couple dozen components I inherited from CWIF that were circa the late 1990's.

Game Interface
I had expected to simply run a Theme Engine utility program to convert all the components from old to new. Because Theme Engine could only do about 1/4 of what I wanted it to, I ended up doing almost all the conversions by hand. Now Rob Crandall was very helpful here, by telling me about GExperts, which simplified the conversion process. Still, a lot of individual decisions needed to be made and carefully performed using mouse and keyboard. Because of the change in font to Verdana size 10, all the components had to be repositioned on each form.

There are 5 components that I haven’t replaced yet. These occur rarely and in total appear only 10 times in the program. I’ll decide on which replacements to use for them next week.

I did use a new component I found in the libraries to display progress bars. They let you know that the program is working as it loads in the data and bitmaps when starting a new game or loading a saved game.

I have gone with transparency whenever possible to permit the theme backgrounds of textured colors to show through. For each of the major powers I defined complementary solid colors that were as close to matching the theme backgrounds as I could achieve. I also defined font colors to be used against the backgrounds and solid colors. In combination that lets me create forms that have a consistent appearance for each major power. To make these work correctly, each form checks for the current major power in order to set the color scheme prior to displaying the form. While the Theme Engine components are automated and require no extra code, the use of the other colors (e.g., for radio buttons and check boxes) have small preprocessing routines.

The most extensive use of the new player interface design is for the Opening Screen and Start New Game form. There I preview all 8 major powers for the players, displaying the backgrounds, colors and flags the players will see later throughout the program. Both of those forms received numerous adjustments and refinements during the month as I tried out various solutions. The latest piece of the puzzle for the Start New Game form has been the addition of contextual help text for each optional rule. That I got to work successfully just yesterday.

The contextual help text for optional rules is the prototype for contextual help text for the rest of the program. I am still somewhat undecided whether to use the standard Windows help system. Its benefits are that it is an existing standard and everyone is familiar with it. On the downside, it is awkward, at best, to create content for the system. So far I have only found some commercial packages whose sole purpose is to simplify creating content. It galls me to no end that a format standard requires purchasing extra software just to reformat text files. And then there is always the concern that a purchased software package doesn’t perform as expected. Another negative is that I have almost universally found other Windows help files to be worthless and a waste of time. When you try to find an answer to a question you tend to get one of three types of answers: (1) drivel - Question: “File I/O error”, Answer: “An error occurred during file I/O”, (2) huh? - “No information found, try rephrasing your query”, or (3) fire hydrant - “Here are 20,000 pages of text, enjoy!”

So I will definitely write specific responses for each contextual help message. Whenever possible, those will be extracts from the player’s manual. Indeed, every contextual help message should appear somewhere in the player’s manual. What I am undecided about it the aggregate help system. I would like to have a superstructure that holds everything together. At the present I have several ideas for that, but nothing definitive. There’s no rush though.

In keeping with my philosophy of simplicity, the text descriptions that appear on the screen are based on TXT files included as part of the product. These include, at a minimum, the unit descriptions (air, naval, and HQ), optional rule writeups, tutorial content, and contextual help. Formatting for these files uses combinations of symbols. Currently I am only processing 3 symbols combinations: .P for paragraph, .N for new line, and .T for tab.

MWIF Game Engine
For the first time ever, the call sequence for the program’s starting 70 routines is now documented. That takes the program up to where the players are about to scrap units. This week I’ll extend the call sequence documentation past that and through to completion of scenario setup. At that point, a better structure for the documentation than “call sequence” will be WIF’s “sequence of play”. Very little documentation presently exists on how that is implemented in MWIF.

What the program call sequence documentation has enabled me to do, is intelligently insert the initialization routines for the player interface themes, the tutorial content, and the help system content. I’ll also use it to properly place the initialization routines for PBEM, Internet, and solitaire play. CWIF only initialized the Internet process and that was using DirectX calls, which I am replacing with Indy10 routines.

More work remains on relocating code into modules based on the new game engine design: player interface control, game control, message control, simulation control, etcetera.

Internet - NetPlay
No changes here. But I am close to having the player interface stable so I can start working on this again. Oh, I did some small modifications to the bidding system code here.

Saved Games
I added some new city names for China to the data files which had the indirect effect of rendering all previously saved games unusable. So it goes.

Player’s Manual
The Optional Rules writeups are now read into the program and presented on the screen as contextual help. They still need formatting symbols added (e.g., .P) but that is mindless editing. I want to get back to integrating all the bits and pieces of documentation into the player’s manual, but it keeps sliding down the priority list.

Scenario Information
Nothing new here.

Help System, Tutorials, and AI Assistant
Besides the preliminary work on contextual help described above, I also did some detailed mockups for the Introductory tutorials. I have an Introductory Tutorial form defined and functioning with navigation controls. It displays a bitmapped graphic with accompanying descriptive text. The graphic will almost always be a screen shot and I have determined the process for taking screen shots and preparing them for the tutorial form. The software I am using for that is HyperSnap which has worked extremely well for me over the past 6 months. I’ll do a few more tutorial pages next month to build my understanding and confidence in the process of creating the tutorials.

Artificial Intelligence (AI)
Nothing new here.

Other
New refrigerator purchased this month, which definitely improves the quality of life. My wife wants a whole new kitchen (est. - $25,000), but that won’t happen until MWIF product 1 is released. As one of my side interests, I have done the layout for the new kitchen with measurements and dimensions for everything. That was needed so we could be sure the new refrigerator would fit into the new floor plan.
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September summary: Well the player interface is defined and mostly implemented - as far as converting the existing game system to the new graphics. It still needs to be reviewed and revised with respect to functionality. The map graphics received tremendous work by Patrice but virtually none by Rob. Standardization on processing and presenting text is done.
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Tasks for October

Communications
Continue monitoring the forum threads.

Beta Testing
Fix more bugs, so I can get version 3.01 out to the beta testers. It will contain all the map data revisions that Patrice has made, the medium resolution units, and the new interface design.

Map and Units
Start generating coastal bitmaps and river/lake overlays for other sections of the world map.

CWIF Conversion
Thoroughly test the new random number generator (this task smirks at me every time I look at it).

Game Interface
Get the bidding capability to function cleanly so the beta testers can someday play one-on-one over the Internet.

Redesign of MWIF Game Engine
Continue refining the superstructure of the MWIF game engine.

Software Development Tools
Finish replacing all the old components with new ones from JEDI.

Multiplayer Internet
Incorporate the Indy10 code for the new design for the multiplayer system into MWIF.

AI Opponent
Work out detailed rules for several more decision points so the language for the AIO can be finalized.

Player’s Manual
Finish the table of contents and transfer all the various write ups I have done for different portions of MWIF into the Player’s Manual (e.g., Optional Rules, PBEM design).

Historical Detail, Animations, and Sound
Start listing all the places the program will use historical video footage, sound, and music.

Help System, Tutorials, and AI Assistant
Continue fleshing out the content for the Introductory Tutorials. Set up forms dedicated to viewing the sequence of play, so they can be used later as an index/table of contents into the context sensitive help files.

Other
Update the mailing list for the chorus so the flyers for the Xmas show can be mailed out in late October. I have been maintaining the database for the chorus for almost 10 years now. It contains over 11,000 names and addresses.
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October summary: Debug the changes to the player interface design and release version 3.01 to the beta testers. Start mass production of the rest of the coastal bitmaps. Get the system for playing over the Internet to work.
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[Froonp]

I methodically reviewed all 100+ forms, adding 6 new ones. In so doing, I replaced almost every graphical element (i.e., component) with a new version either from the Theme Engine library or the JEDI library.

May the force be with you Luke

[:D]