Matrix Games Forums

ORIGINAL: jwilkerson

The basic idea of 1807 (or whatever it winds up being called) is to port over a sub-set of bug fixes from AE - The idea also includes not bringing over - or adding enhancements - AE is the enhancements. But, the biggie for me, is that we will be trying to port over some of the "anti-synch bug" improvements from AE.

Trying to understand: will the futur patch help repair or avoid sync bugs ???
This will be great, because these sync bugs are a real pain for my PBEM.
Thanks for any answer.

ORIGINAL: gladiatt
Trying to understand: will the futur patch help repair or avoid sync bugs ???
This will be great, because these sync bugs are a real pain for my PBEM.
Thanks for any answer.

We will try to put some anti-synch bug improvement into the next patch yes.


In the mean time - ways to mitigate synch issues include:

01 - Make sure both installations are identical (you and your PBEM partner).

02 - Ideally, leave all switch setting the same - as they are out of the box. If you change any switches settings, send each other screen shots of your switch settings - get them to be the same - and then never change them.

03 - Only play one game in each instsall of WITP. If you want to play multiple games make multiple copies of WITP on the same machine. If you need help with this ask - many forumites know how to do this.

04 - Japanese player should not hit any keys while the animations are running. Or to be safest, play the game with animations off.

Our synch bug improvements basically try to implement the issues that can be resolved manually by doing the above things.

Games versus the AI do not have the above issues. You can play as many AI games as you like in one installation of WITP. But play all PBEM in their own unique installation of WITP if you wish to maximize avoidance of synch issues.

ORIGINAL: jwilkerson


We will try to put some anti-synch bug improvement into the next patch yes.


In the mean time - ways to mitigate synch issues include:

01 - Make sure both installations are identical (you and your PBEM partner).

02 - Ideally, leave all switch setting the same - as they are out of the box. If you change any switches settings, send each other screen shots of your switch settings - get them to be the same - and then never change them.

03 - Only play one game in each instsall of WITP. If you want to play multiple games make multiple copies of WITP on the same machine. If you need help with this ask - many forumites know how to do this.

04 - Japanese player should not hit any keys while the animations are running. Or to be safest, play the game with animations off.

Our synch bug improvements basically try to implement the issues that can be resolved manually by doing the above things.

Games versus the AI do not have the above issues. You can play as many AI games as you like in one installation of WITP. But play all PBEM in their own unique installation of WITP if you wish to maximize avoidance of synch issues.

Thanks for the answer and advice [:)][&o]

oh, btw, could you address being captured after bailing out above your own base with no enemy in a 300 nm radius? imagine defending Truk against B-29 raids and getting shot down, resulting in a capture of my 80+ experience pilot.

ORIGINAL: Distiller

oh, btw, could you address being captured after bailing out above your own base with no enemy in a 300 nm radius? imagine defending Truk against B-29 raids and getting shot down, resulting in a capture of my 80+ experience pilot.

Any chance of a sub being in the square? Otherwise he's a defector![:D]

happens in landlocked situations, too, must be those damn partisans again. these guys are everywhere, even Hokkaido in a pinch [8|] i like the sub idea, though, the skipper is going to risk his boat just to snatch my pilot as POW... if only this, ...err... feature was limited to agressive commanders on subs that are actually in the hex...

btw, have you ever considered giving the Allies an opportunity to expand their shipyards? i mean they can already do that with forts, airfields and ports....

ORIGINAL: rominet

In CHS 155, at the end of the war, there are about 22000 allied planes and 12000 jap planes.
So if there is no complete destruction of air groups and even if the 2 players are putting in each group exactly the same number of pilots, the pilot bug will occur before end. It is mathematical[:'(].

Of course, as Damian said, WitPtracker is very useful to check each day how many pilots we have.
I decided to have never more than 10500 pilots and Emek, 19500.
We hope so we will avoid this bug.

And yes, complete destruction of MIA and KIA pilots would be a good thing.

I don't know if your limits will work rominet. We have just got hit with this in our game and the pilots were at 27,491 combined total, or 23,959 combined active pilots per WITP tracker. The next turn pushed the total over 27,500 and that seemed to trigger the crappy purge that vacuumed up about 6,000 pilots total (2k from Japan, 4k from Allies).

I've seen a lot of references to the pilot limit being 30,000 but we were still 2,500 pilot below that when the bug hit. Not sure what the exact limit really is. I also do not think I have ever seen a dev say it was 30,000, just other forum members.

Any word on the patch?

It appears I will be skipping the AE for the foreseeable future and would be very happy to see this game patched.

Thanks!

ORIGINAL: Feurer Krieg

ORIGINAL: rominet

In CHS 155, at the end of the war, there are about 22000 allied planes and 12000 jap planes.
So if there is no complete destruction of air groups and even if the 2 players are putting in each group exactly the same number of pilots, the pilot bug will occur before end. It is mathematical[:'(].

Of course, as Damian said, WitPtracker is very useful to check each day how many pilots we have.
I decided to have never more than 10500 pilots and Emek, 19500.
We hope so we will avoid this bug.

And yes, complete destruction of MIA and KIA pilots would be a good thing.

I don't know if your limits will work rominet. We have just got hit with this in our game and the pilots were at 27,491 combined total, or 23,959 combined active pilots per WITP tracker. The next turn pushed the total over 27,500 and that seemed to trigger the crappy purge that vacuumed up about 6,000 pilots total (2k from Japan, 4k from Allies).

I've seen a lot of references to the pilot limit being 30,000 but we were still 2,500 pilot below that when the bug hit. Not sure what the exact limit really is. I also do not think I have ever seen a dev say it was 30,000, just other forum members.

Pretty sure it also counts the "dead/wounded/MIA" pilots... so even if you had less than 30K in active pilots you will run out of room... this is one of the reasons a purge routine was put in to remove the lesser "dead" pilots, iirc.

ORIGINAL: Distiller

oh, btw, could you address being captured after bailing out above your own base with no enemy in a 300 nm radius? imagine defending Truk against B-29 raids and getting shot down, resulting in a capture of my 80+ experience pilot.

MIA means missing - usually captured, but not always... even today military pilots go MIA in crashes (esp. over ocean).

Pretty sure it also counts the "dead/wounded/MIA" pilots... so even if you had less than 30K in active pilots you will run out of room... this is one of the reasons a purge routine was put in to remove the lesser "dead" pilots, iirc.

Tracker counts KIA,MIA,WIA pilots and even including those we were only at 27,500. Now if there are pilots that tracker isn't counting that would explain the difference.

ORIGINAL: Feurer Krieg

Pretty sure it also counts the "dead/wounded/MIA" pilots... so even if you had less than 30K in active pilots you will run out of room... this is one of the reasons a purge routine was put in to remove the lesser "dead" pilots, iirc.

Tracker counts KIA,MIA,WIA pilots and even including those we were only at 27,500. Now if there are pilots that tracker isn't counting that would explain the difference.

i'll admit i haven't played with WITP Tracker much... does it count replacements not yet taken?

Of course, the oft bandied 30K number could be wrong, or there could be other factors that are in play that make the 30,000 number somewhat variable.

It would be interesting to hear from Damian/Floyd exactly where Tracker is getting its pilots figures.  Playing Japan in CHS 157 (Nik Mod, which tends to keep pilot losses down), I have been monitoring pilot numbers from 1st March to mid-May 1943.  I have seen JAAF pilot numbers fluctuating in a way that may well reflect the combined effect of losses plus new airgroup arrivals.  But with the JNAF there have been some radical changes in the pilot total - on one day exceeding 500, which clearly did not reflect losses/new airgroup arrivals.  Looking at pilot stats within individual airgroups the impression I get is that the code is already recycling previously used pilot slots by this stage of the war.  At this stage the Japanese pilot total is around the 6000 mark, so even if the current Allied pilot total were double that number (which I doubt, at this date), it would imply an aggregate of used pilot slots not much greater than 18,000 - still way short of the 27,000+ figure at which the bug may be biting.
 
I would certainly like to see the pilot bug fixed in WitP, particularly for the game in which I'm involved, since at this stage I'm still in possession of substantial quantities of highly competent pilots. Were the pilot bug to bite me, it would probably bite very hard.
 
The only other serious glitch I find myself encountering with WitP is an occasional CTD when I spend time cycling through shipboard airgroups for some reason.  I'm now experiencing the same thing in WitP AE rather more frequently, but this may simply be because I am having to spend more time setting search arcs in such airgroups.  However, I suspect the CTD's I am getting may have a common cause in both games.
 
Am I correct in recalling that there were problems in the grand campaign with the Soviets' August Storm offensive in 1945?  If so, would be good to hear that whatever may have led to this has been corrected.

ORIGINAL: Local Yokel

It would be interesting to hear from Damian/Floyd exactly where Tracker is getting its pilots figures.  Playing Japan in CHS 157 (Nik Mod, which tends to keep pilot losses down), I have been monitoring pilot numbers from 1st March to mid-May 1943.  I have seen JAAF pilot numbers fluctuating in a way that may well reflect the combined effect of losses plus new airgroup arrivals.  But with the JNAF there have been some radical changes in the pilot total - on one day exceeding 500, which clearly did not reflect losses/new airgroup arrivals.  Looking at pilot stats within individual airgroups the impression I get is that the code is already recycling previously used pilot slots by this stage of the war.  At this stage the Japanese pilot total is around the 6000 mark, so even if the current Allied pilot total were double that number (which I doubt, at this date), it would imply an aggregate of used pilot slots not much greater than 18,000 - still way short of the 27,000+ figure at which the bug may be biting.

I would certainly like to see the pilot bug fixed in WitP, particularly for the game in which I'm involved, since at this stage I'm still in possession of substantial quantities of highly competent pilots. Were the pilot bug to bite me, it would probably bite very hard.

...

John(Local Yokel),
Floyd and I found enough data slots to represent 30K pilots, I believe this was confirmed by Joe in some post a long while ago (I think it was in the tech section, but can't find it). Tracker reads that 30K worth of pilots slots each turn and resolves the numbers. We can't see the underlying code, just the savefile, so I can't comment authoritatively on what happens, but can confirm that the slots are reused. Nemo and I are into 50K losses over the course of the war, so obviously they are...

I'd say that the code does have a cut off point (27.5 ~ 30K), where it does start the cull, remember the numbers are calculated by named pilots + WIA + KIA and some pilots delayed (their a/g are usually based on CV's) but NOT other delayed pilots (those in the pool).

[*]Total pilots = total list size.
[*]Active pilots = pilotList.size() - tot_inactive - tot_delay - tot_mia - tot_kia - tot_wia

If you want me to look into the "radical changes", send me the files before and after and I'll get back to you. PM me for email.

I'm not 100% sure how you will overcome the CHS problem of too many airgroups and hence pilots ... but a self imposed cull seems better than the code doing it.

--Damian--

CHS is LESS likely to run into problems than standard WITP (i think) since it has less pilots and planes in it - at least to start... that doesn't mean there aren't mods where this will happen eventually. Mods that "soup-up" the game (like Empires Ablaze, i think) run into problems far sooner.

AFAIK - AE has a lot more slots for everything, so it is unlikely to run into limits like this, well, at least until players mod the game, that is... [;)]

ORIGINAL: rtrapasso

CHS is LESS likely to run into problems than standard WITP (i think) since it has less pilots and planes in it - at least to start... that doesn't mean there aren't mods where this will happen eventually. Modes that "soup-up" the game (like Empires Ablaze, i think) run into problems far sooner.

AFAIK - AE has a lot more slots for everything, so it is unlikely to run into limits like this, well, at least until players mod the game, that is... [;)]

50K in AE by my reckoning [;)] ... and yeah Nemo121 & I will run into problems sometime using Empires Ablaze. I just thought CHS had the same probs[&:].

--Damian--

ORIGINAL: n01487477

ORIGINAL: rtrapasso

CHS is LESS likely to run into problems than standard WITP (i think) since it has less pilots and planes in it - at least to start... that doesn't mean there aren't mods where this will happen eventually. Modes that "soup-up" the game (like Empires Ablaze, i think) run into problems far sooner.

AFAIK - AE has a lot more slots for everything, so it is unlikely to run into limits like this, well, at least until players mod the game, that is... [;)]

50K in AE by my reckoning [;)] ... and yeah Nemo121 & I will run into problems sometime using Empires Ablaze. I just thought CHS had the same probs[&:].

--Damian--

This is the first time i've heard of anyone hitting the 30K (or 27.5 K) pilot bug in CHS.

My game that I mentioned above is a CHS game that was hit by the pilot bug.

ORIGINAL: Feurer Krieg

ORIGINAL: rominet

In CHS 155, at the end of the war, there are about 22000 allied planes and 12000 jap planes.
So if there is no complete destruction of air groups and even if the 2 players are putting in each group exactly the same number of pilots, the pilot bug will occur before end. It is mathematical[:'(].

Of course, as Damian said, WitPtracker is very useful to check each day how many pilots we have.
I decided to have never more than 10500 pilots and Emek, 19500.
We hope so we will avoid this bug.

And yes, complete destruction of MIA and KIA pilots would be a good thing.

I don't know if your limits will work rominet. We have just got hit with this in our game and the pilots were at 27,491 combined total, or 23,959 combined active pilots per WITP tracker. The next turn pushed the total over 27,500 and that seemed to trigger the crappy purge that vacuumed up about 6,000 pilots total (2k from Japan, 4k from Allies).

I've seen a lot of references to the pilot limit being 30,000 but we were still 2,500 pilot below that when the bug hit. Not sure what the exact limit really is. I also do not think I have ever seen a dev say it was 30,000, just other forum members.

Thanks for information Feurer Krieg, it doesn't reassure me.

Every one is talking about the 30000 pilots limit but in the editor, there are only 20000 slots for pilots;
there are also 20000 slots for leaders, including of course air groups leaders, i don't know what to think about it[&:]