Matrix Games Forums

When setting manual patrols for ASW but wanting the majority of a unit to fly, say, an airfield attack - you are hampered by having to set the asw altitude to be under 10k to be effective. Unfortunately, LBA often gets massacred on naval strikes/airfieled/ground attacks at low altitude

A great feature - and would probably be easy - would be for all asw patrols for aircraft that are NOT assigned ASW primary missions be set to '6000' feet behind the scenes by the game engine, and let the altitude selector set the alt for the *strike* part of the mission - so in effect you are divorcing the strike package from having to fly at the same altitude as the asw mission.

Too much fiddling is required to have to constantly change the altitude bands for aircraft units that mostly fly asw missions but every few turns want to conduct an offensive strike.

ORIGINAL: jackyo123


A great feature - and would probably be easy -

Everytime I see this written by anyone it always makes me chuckle.[:)][:)][:)]

For every non-programmer out there, if you think your idea will be easy to program...more often than not you are incorrect with your assumption. Improving games would be so much simpler if this were not the case.

ORIGINAL: flipperwasirish

ORIGINAL: jackyo123


A great feature - and would probably be easy -

Everytime I see this written by anyone it always makes me chuckle.[:)][:)][:)]

For every non-programmer out there, if you think your idea will be easy to program...more often than not you are incorrect with your assumption. Improving games would be so much simpler if this were not the case.

Changing one line of a two line program is easy (usually). That is about the limit of "easy" in the wonderful world of software [:D]

Changing one line of a two million line program will probably induce cascading effects that are still reverberating at the heat-death of the universe [&:]

While I doubt that AE is two million lines (anybody have a count?) I am quite certain that no change qualifies as "easy"[:)]

ORIGINAL: flipperwasirish

ORIGINAL: jackyo123


A great feature - and would probably be easy -

Everytime I see this written by anyone it always makes me chuckle.[:)][:)][:)]

For every non-programmer out there, if you think your idea will be easy to program...more often than not you are incorrect with your assumption. Improving games would be so much simpler if this were not the case.

ahh, you programmers can produce miracles! [:)] Should be a piece of cake

actually though, in this case, locking a certain mission at a specific altitude might not be that difficult - iirc, the logic is already there in discerning what altitudes to run certain kinds of bombing missions - i.e 100ft for skip bombing, >15000ft for glide, etc. So lock a value for ASW patrols, and let the altitude adjuster only affect the offensive part of the mission.

Please see "line 2" from Pompack's response. Enough said.[;)]

Hi-Would someone please give me a link to Beta 3?

Thanks, Hugh Browne

ORIGINAL: hbrsvl

Hi-Would someone please give me a link to Beta 3?

Thanks, Hugh Browne

http://www.matrixgames.com/community/pr ... sp?gid=351

Login to Members Area first.

About 270,000 lines of code. But much is written obscurely which basically doubles the "lines".

ORIGINAL: pompack

ORIGINAL: flipperwasirish

ORIGINAL: jackyo123


A great feature - and would probably be easy -

Everytime I see this written by anyone it always makes me chuckle.[:)][:)][:)]

For every non-programmer out there, if you think your idea will be easy to program...more often than not you are incorrect with your assumption. Improving games would be so much simpler if this were not the case.

Changing one line of a two line program is easy (usually). That is about the limit of "easy" in the wonderful world of software [:D]

Changing one line of a two million line program will probably induce cascading effects that are still reverberating at the heat-death of the universe [&:]

While I doubt that AE is two million lines (anybody have a count?) I am quite certain that no change qualifies as "easy"[:)]

I've called it about 400,000 LOC because the 270,000 LOC only covers the "game code". But the 100,000 LOC for the "engine code" should be counted as well, even though we don't mess around with that as much. Note that in Keith and Gary speak the "engine" is more like the "low level graphics and mouse, keyboard IO code" than what forum members usually call the "game engine". So adding in the 100,000 LOC for the engine and then some for the editor and you can round up to about 400K LOC.

I've been staring at this code for almost 4 years now - and unless I clearly remember how a particular section works - I cannot guess what is "easy" and what is "hard". The devil is in the details. A player may think something like "weather effects" could be easily improved. But there is no "weather effects module". The "weather effects" are just the some of at least 100s of little code fragments strewn all over the 270,000 game specific LOC. No one knows where they all are - no one knows what their logical union is. So even answering questions like "what are the weather effects" is a non-starter. It would take hours and hours of exhaustive study and note taking and running the code in the debugger to be sure type of analysis to answer such questions. We've done that we a few areas like "air to air combat" but give our part time engagement on this project - to really understand how air to air combat worked took months of time. Then we could start to change it.

We have variables like:

qq

What does that mean?

No way to tell except to run the code in the debugger and start to understand how qq is used - then after a while you can figure it out - for that routine. Then three routines down, you encounter qq again. What does it mean this time? Who knows!

This is part of what Michael means when he says "obscure". We accept that. The game code was not written with an eye to publishing it in a coding magazine!!! [:D]

Everyone must remember - that the original code must work pretty darn well - or we would not be here having this conversation!!!
[:)]

ORIGINAL: jwilkerson

...
Everyone must remember - that the original code must work pretty darn well - ....

Actually, I think we could elevate it all the way to "pretty Dang well". [&o]

Nothing is easy in WITP AE due to the "Butterfly Effect"! 

ORIGINAL: jwilkerson

This is part of what Michael means when he says "obscure". We accept that. The game code was not written with an eye to publishing it in a coding magazine!!! [:D]

I hear you. But the issue here isn't publishability, but maintainability. What was GG's position on bugfixes? I'm sure he never expected that anybody else would have to modify his code. I'd guess that a lot of the code originates from "Carrier Strike" by way of PacWar and UV and would have been pretty well debugged by the fourth implementation. But "C" doesn't keep you from writing spaghetti code, and for many of the early "C" coding experts it was a point of pride to reduce the code to the bare minimum; I'd describe the result rather as obfuscated than as merely obscure. Writing cleaner code probably wouldn't have made much of a difference to the size of the object code or the speed of the program, but would have saved a lot of grief for maintainers. I find it remarkable that the original programming team didn't have some kind of written documentation on the code, if only to protect their own sanity (I personally always found that a worthwhile investment), but perhaps there were time constraints, and if you are racing a deadline, documentation is typically one of the early victims. The original team seems to have hanged itself neatly on the rope the language gave them, judging just from the Synch Bug and the Disappearing Leaders Issue which seem harder to kill than Michael Myers. If they have declared those nice concise variables in several different places, this can easily lead to nasty scope-of-visibility problems (especially if you move or copy code around) where the variable you're actually modifying may not be the one you think you're addressing, leading to strange hiccups five minutes down the line.

Really, Developers, I feel your pain. You're now stuck with the mess.

BTW, which compilers do you use? GNU C or one of the commercial packages?

I've noticed that the "news" audio via Tokyo Rose is much louder than the WitPAE delivered music and sound effects.
Is there any way to normalize the news volume? I've tried to tone it down with a windows application but only succeeded
in causing it to not play at all.[:(]

In addition, would be nice to have Hotkey for "Patrol around target" for TFs. [8D]