World in Flames is the computer version of Australian Design Group classic board game. World In Flames is a highly detailed game covering the both Europe and Pacific Theaters of Operations during World War II. If you want grand strategy this game is for you.
I started playing WIF with one of my highschool friends about 20 years ago and my love for that game has not abated. I know you've all heard it before but I am giddy with excitement over the prospect of having this wonderful game available on the PC. To satsify my wargamer cravings I have played TOAW 2 and considered buying 3 but I held off since I saw the computer version of WIF was moving along. After all, TOAW is a great game but it's not WIF. I long for the days of fighting on all fronts!
My wishlist for the game would be as follows:
1) Make the game playable on a P4 1.4ghz machine with 768 RAM running XP Pro (yea that's my rig).
2) Make the AI a worthy opponent so that playing solo is a viable option, I beg you! As an aside, a couple of years back I found some guys nearby me that played WIF and I trekked out to see them on their gaming day. I arrived to find that they decided not to play that day but didn't bother to let me know. So I get there all ready to dig in and they're relaxing drinking wine. Besides not offering me a glass of wine, they were about as friendly as a sharp stick in the eye. Save me (and others) from having to deal with rude geeks to play this game and create a beefy AI!
3) Eventually include Days of Decision somehow. I know that’s a tall order and I certainly don't expect it on the first release.
Lastly, I gladly offer my services to aid in development. I am not a programmer, only player of many years and I'm even a bit rusty at that. But I do have a keen eye for detail and troubleshooting and I am WW2 trivia buff. What I have been reading, it seems you have more than enough volunteers in the trenches at the moment but if not, draft me!
Thanks to you all for the hardwork and I can't wait till this is done,
Max
Welcome.
If you would like to help with writing descriptions for the land units, Capitan is coordinating those efforts, and he is looking for help. See the thread on Unit Descriptions: Air, Naval, Land.
And please feel free to state your opinions on what you read in the forums. This game is so large with so many possibilities that no one has complete knowledge, and the more voices the better.
You should read the Directory thread if you haven't already, to get a quick overview of what the forum contains.
And you might enjoy the thread on the tutorials, since they contain a lot of screen shots (though all are draft screen shots and some are out of date).
Steve,
The screenshots are tasty indeed and they have only wet my appetite to play. Is it safe to assume that there isn't any need for beta testers at this time?
Max
The screenshots are tasty indeed and they have only wet my appetite to play. Is it safe to assume that there isn't any need for beta testers at this time?
Max
Greyshaft is maintaining a list of want-to-be beta testers, so send him an email.
I talked to David Heath a couple of weeks ago and he said that at some point we should increase the number of beta testers. Currently there are 20, and expect to go to 40. That won't happen for a while yet (months?) but the people who do good work go to the top of the list.
I went to the member list and found Grayshaft but when I tried to email him it said that I didn't have enough permission to do this. I then tried to send him a PM but it said that he had this feature disabled. Any suggestions?
I went to the member list and found Grayshaft but when I tried to email him it said that I didn't have enough permission to do this. I then tried to send him a PM but it said that he had this feature disabled. Any suggestions?
I was curious about the current beta testing at the moment:
Are the testers actually playing full game turns, or just testing various buttons and links on the GUI?
I was hankerin' for AAR's... but I imagine some NDA's would might inhibit AAR's from being written at this time.
I was also thinking that you can have AAR's in the release that have links to various parts of your tutorial chapters... with notes by the player(s) on what they might have been thinking at the time they made certain decisions. (Maybe not the full Global War scenario... that's a monster.)
Example: "I decided on this turns builds because I need to prepare for my Operation Blueberry, my eventual return to North Africa.... and I'm weak on Amph's and Transports at this time. Also, I wanted to keep my Air unit gearing limits up around "x", so I threw in a couple of my cheapest CV planes even though I didn't have the flattops to put them on at the moment."
ORIGINAL: mlees
I was curious about the current beta testing at the moment:
Are the testers actually playing full game turns, or just testing various buttons and links on the GUI?
I was hankerin' for AAR's... but I imagine some NDA's would might inhibit AAR's from being written at this time.
I was also thinking that you can have AAR's in the release that have links to various parts of your tutorial chapters... with notes by the player(s) on what they might have been thinking at the time they made certain decisions. (Maybe not the full Global War scenario... that's a monster.)
Example: "I decided on this turns builds because I need to prepare for my Operation Blueberry, my eventual return to North Africa.... and I'm weak on Amph's and Transports at this time. Also, I wanted to keep my Air unit gearing limits up around "x", so I threw in a couple of my cheapest CV planes even though I didn't have the flattops to put them on at the moment."
The Non-Disclosure Agreement prevents the beta testers from commenting on the game in development.
I continually 'break' the game when I add new features. As an example, for a period of about a week this past month I was having trouble getting a clean compile and link. At times simply compiling the program would cause my system to crash (I would have to reboot to get the compiler working again). Though frustrating, this is all standard stuff for program development where small changes can have disasterous results, from a user's/player's point of view. To some degree, this is a lot like building an airplane, where a missing nut can make the plane unflightworthy.
I had trouble logging into Matrix this morning or I would have posted this earlier.
------------------------------------------------------ December 1, 2006 Status Report for Matrix Games’ MWIF Forum
Accomplishments of November
Project Management
I did my first detailed project plan in mid-October and have more or less kept on track against that to date. However, my estimation of my time required to complete MWIF product 1 is over 3300 hours. Roughly, the big items are coding/modifying: Player Interface and the AI Opponent (~800 hours each), Game Engine and Rules (~400 hours each), and the Tutorials, PBEM, and Documentation (200 - 300 hours range for each). These are broken down into finer detail, with everything rounded off to units of 10 hours.
Altogether, I have 70 items on the project plan spreadsheet with what gets worked on when scheduled by month. This is only one of 5 task lists I maintain. The others are: reported bugs from versions 2 and 3, programming to-do list, and project tasks. The last deals with the project overall and includes people other than myself, while the other 3 are specific to programming. The programming to-do list priorities the bugs to be fixed and interleaves new items (e.g., new optional rules).
At this point I am the bottleneck in the project schedule, but there doesn’t seem to be much more I can do about that. I delegate tasks whenever possible and then step aside, taking care to not micro-manage items I have given to others. Of course, this still requires staying informed of how things are going and providing assistance whenever it’s needed. Still, management, and all that implies, places few demands on my time. I figure it is only 10 - 15 %, and I include in that all the report writing and communications to forum members and other members of the MWIF project team: email, posts, status reports, plus a few rare phone calls.
I calculate I have spent around 5000 hours on MWIF since I started in July 2005. Someone in the forum wasn’t sure whether I was working full time on MWIF. Well, I am using 9 productive hours a day as my metric for scheduling tasks, with no days off. By productive, I mean after the 10 -15% for management has been accounted for. In reality I work 10-12 hours a day on MWIF. That lets me fit in some barbershop singing, but otherwise I am a recluse: me and MWIF. My wife keeps me fed and points out lapses in personal hygiene.
This works out to me completing my tasks in December 2007. David Heath translates that to a release at Origins in July 2008.
Why so much longer than originally thought? Mostly it is a lack of documentation. The programming tools I am using explore all the possible ways to do poor documentation: none, incomplete, misleading, obsolete, written by a non-English speaker (Theme Engine - Russian), and, most common, frequent use of words with special meanings that are never defined. For example, every so often, while I am entering text comments into the source code, the compiler crashes with the error message: “Target of an invocation failed.” Reboot and start again. I also lost 4 days last week before I figured out that adding a directory to the search path for the compiler was resulting in it ‘automatically’ recompiling all the Theme Engine modules - incorrectly. I removed the directory from the search path and dozens of problems disappeared.
When I write new code, programming is easy. When I need to go into the CWIF code and make changes, extreme care is required or things can go wrong without me knowing. Tracing the repercussions of changes, especially when it involves the Windows User Interface routines is time consuming. Failure to understand exactly what is going on is even worse and can lead to a great loss of time later spent finding and fixing bugs.
You now know most of what I know about the MWIF project schedule.
Communications
Rob Armstrong provided new coastal and river/lake bitmaps for about 2/3rds of Russia, the Caucasus, Mid-East, India, Burma, China, Malaysia, Australia, New Zealand, and the Solomon and Caroline Islands.
I monitored all the threads in the MWIF World in Flames forum daily.
Work on the unit writeups continues, with a few new volunteers.
Chris Marinacci sent me some bug corrections he has made to the version of CWIF being sold by ADG. I hope to be able to reciprocate from time to time.
Beta testers sent me numerous reports on the versions 3.02, 3.03, 3.04, 3.05, and 3.06 I uploaded for them during the month.
No activity with the AI Opponent team, though the forum members are helping with the strategic plan for France.
No word from Patrice and Peter Kanjowski about their project on the Yahoo WIF Discussion group to clarify all outstanding rules questions.
Dan Hatchen (I hope) is waiting on me to install what he has already done on NetPlay.
Beta Testing
I have been able to fix a dozen or so bugs identified by the beta testers but there are still major difficulties, even playing Barbarossa. More on my attempts to iron out the fatal crashes below.
Units
Other than some new unit writeups, there has been no new work on the units. The code and data are pretty stable at this point.
Map
I processed all the coastal and river/lake bitmaps that Rob sent me (see the list given above) and incorporated them into the current version of MWIF. Patrice took those images and made corrections to the map data they revealed. He also has been going gang-busters on adding new names/labels to the map. Once the detailed coastlines, rivers, and lakes have been drawn a lot of touch-up work is needed. Part of that is to place the map icons in reasonable places (keep the factories out of the ocean), reroute the rail lines through each hex so they do not cross water, and place the names/labels so they are both legible and do not cover important game elements.
Somewhere in the middle of the month I provided both Rob and Patrice with the utility program I use to cut Rob’s large coastal bitmaps into individual hexes and generate the river/lake quasi-bitmaps. I included documentation on how to run the program. Patrice now runs it so he can edit the map data files without waiting on me to process them.
The coastal bitmaps are 50% complete and the river/lake bitmaps are 55% complete.
Scenario Information
I learned that the version of the WIF FE unit setup information I had been using was obsolete. I now have the correct one and I will ask the beta testers to proofread the scenario setup code to identify needed changes. Most of the mods have to do with Cruisers in Flames and Convoys in Flames.
CWIF Conversion
Problems popped up with the pop-up unit menu. Since I wanted to do it anyway, I restructured this earlier than I had planned. The routines that process the unit menu items are now in a separate module and the main program module is down to a svelte 11,200 lines of code. Unit menu items are: split/merge convoys, breakdown/reform units, place units in sentry mode, and dozens of others.
I began work on a new system to route resources to factories. This is needed by the AIO but it will also help players route resources and save oil points. The design is 95% done and I will use a similar one for determining supply for units. Basically calculating supply status for units is the same routing problem but with different rules.
Game Interface
Most of my time this month has been spent working on bugs in the player interface identified by the beta testers. While working on that I kept coming across anomalous events, some of which were “now it’s a problem, now it isn’t”. Eventually I began to suspect that the software libraries were out of sync so I went back to bedrock. I uninstalled all the software libraries I was using, including the Delphi compiler itself. I then reinstalled everything from scratch. As is usual in performing this task, it required several days full of profanity and detailed discussion on the ancestry of the people who design, code, and document software packages.
This did result in identifying some systemic problems which I was able to correct without too much trouble. More importantly, I am no longer worrying about the code base with which I am working - or at least not as much.
Internet - NetPlay
I made some progress on this but had to stop work in order to debug versions 3.0x.
MWIF Game Engine
I also made good progress in writing events out to the game record log. This was much easier than I expected and should be completed quickly once the rest of the game engine redesign is complete.
Saved Games
I haven’t tested this recently. I have no bugs listed for this code at the present.
Player’s Manual
Nothing new.
Help System, Tutorials, and AI Assistant
I did a little more work on the Introductory Tutorials but I need Rob to redo the Weather bitmap overlays. I also need to get the code that determines supply corrected.
Artificial Intelligence (AI)
Started detailed work on the strategic plan for France.
Other
Our Xmas show is coming up next week. We have been practicing a lot plus we have several other paid gigs scheduled. During the holidays we get to perform at parties which helps the chapter treasury. I have also found a new baritone for our quartet. We lost our previous baritone when he went off to college in western Massachusetts in August. ====================================================================
November summary: Good progress on the bitmap graphics for the map. Too little on fixing bugs and NetPlay.
====================================================================
Tasks for December
Communications
Continue monitoring the forum threads.
Beta Testing
Fix more bugs, so that version 3.00 can play through the entire Barbarossa scenario cleanly. [est. 60 hours]
Map and Units
Continue adding coastal and river/lake bitmaps as I receive them from Rob. [est. 20 hours]
CWIF Conversion
Thoroughly test the new random number generator. [est. 1 hour]
Game Interface
Get the bidding capability to function cleanly and modify other aspects of the Player Interface to support NetPlay. [est. 20 hours]
Redesign of MWIF Game Engine
Continue refining the superstructure of the MWIF game engine. [est. 45 hours]
Software Development Tools
Finish replacing all the old components with new ones from JEDI (as part of the debugging process for 3.00). [est. 10 hours]
NetPlay
Incorporate the Indy10 code for the new design for the multiplayer system into MWIF. [est. 100 hours]
AI Opponent
Finish the Strategic plan for France and begin work on the same for China and Italy. [est. 15 hours].
Player’s Manual
Nothing planned for December.
Historical Detail, Animations, and Sound
Nothing planned for December.
Help System, Tutorials, and AI Assistant
Continue work on the Introductory Tutorials. [est. 10 hours]
Other
Perform in the Xmas show - as one of the anonymous reindeer/basses in the back row. Start work on the script for the Spring show. ================================================================
December summary: Debug version 3.00. Continue mass production of the coastal and river/lake bitmaps. Implement NetPlay.
================================================================
I went to the member list and found Grayshaft but when I tried to email him it said that I didn't have enough permission to do this. I then tried to send him a PM but it said that he had this feature disabled. Any suggestions?
Not sure why... I've been receiving PM and email communications from Matrix forum members for many years now. There's no spam filter, abuse filter or naughty-word filter in operation so I get to read everything people send me.
Beta testing lists aren't open at the moment. I had (still have) a list of about forty names of people who want to get into the team but I doubt we'll be taking on anyone else this side of Christmas. I'm leaning towards the idea of restarting the list every time we make a call for new testers so we get those who are keen and involved with the Forums rather than someone who put their name on a list six months ago and hasn't been heard of since.
That's the offical story. In reality what happens is that every now and then the inner cabal have a secret meeting and after the ritual sacrifice of a WiF Rulebook in the lighting of the barbeque we enter the names of applicants into the WiF compiler and whichever name makes the best seed for the random number generator is accepted as a new beta-tester. So if you want to maximise your chances then make sure that your name is exactly fifteen letters including 'z', 'q', uppercase 'K' and no vowels.
Sorry, everyone. I was hoping Matrix WiF would be my entry point into the WiF world but I no longer have faith in this project.
This timeline revision to a July 2008 release is the third significant release date revision this year. Over the next 18 months, there's no reason to believe release won't be pushed back even further.
As much as I respect the work Steve is doing, and trying to do, I now believe too much is being bitten off for this first release. Earlier posters emphasized the development time risk associated with AI opponent programming, and I now concur with their beliefs. Focusing on multi-player online live play (a la VASSAL), and setting AI aside, would help get product into players' hands within a reasonable time frame. A computer AI opponent could then be added in an upgrade patch or expansion pack. I believe most players are interested in MWiF for online multi-player play, with an AI opponent being a secondary consideration.
It seems this project needs more development resources, and most particularly, a project manager with deeper scheduling experience. Good luck to Matrix and this development team and hopefully this project will come to fruition eventually.
Sorry, everyone. I was hoping Matrix WiF would be my entry point into the WiF world but I no longer have faith in this project.
This timeline revision to a July 2008 release is the third significant release date revision this year. Over the next 18 months, there's no reason to believe release won't be pushed back even further.
And for me, this is the most realistic of any date ever announced.
There are reasons to believe that this release date won't be eternaly being pushed back, and I prefer being announced a realistic release date, even far away, that any other pleasant, but unrealistic release date.
