Bugs found during Campaign Design

[Laryngoscope]

As you probably know I have investigated the xml files with some rigour and have found several design issues +/- bugs +/- miss-understandings which I hope you could clear up.

1. Scenario descriptions should be moved out of english.xml and into the scenario xml itself to aid in scenario distribution. I have written a scenario export utility to get around this problem but it is suboptimal.

2. The whole campaign xml text hunter is a royal PITA consider needing to edit the campaign xml in the campaign folder, then edit a seperate victory xml in a seperate folder under text then edit english.xml for the actually descriptors. Thats at least 3 different files in 3 different places.

3. At the moment when I try to construct a campaign of just one scenario I get the following error on campaign completion:

23/07/2006 11:58:18 AM: MessageManager.Notify: message = 'END_OF_CAMPAIGN_COMPLETE', reference = ''
23/07/2006 11:58:18 AM: System.NullReferenceException: Object reference not set to an instance of an object.
at Lib.Data.DataReader.GetRollingTextList(Stream stream)
at GameLib.GameState.GamePlayMachine.EndCampaign.OnEnter()
at Lib.StateMachine.TransitionState(State state)
at GameLib.GameState.GamePlayMachine.GamePlayStateMachine.OnMessage(GameMessage message, Object reference)
at Lib.Messenger.MessageManager.Notify(GameMessage message, Object reference)

These log messages are often really cryptic, turns out the problem was with the victory xml file for that campaign, but beats me what was wrong with it!

4. Don't know if it is a bug or design decision but the defending side always gets 50 less points for equipment purchases that is coded for in the scenario xml file. I couldn't find any documentation regarding this in the manual. Shouldn't this be left up to the scenario designer and not enforced upon us?

5. The campaign screens have scroll arrows to scroll the campaign text if it is too big. They don't work, and long text will overflow the background box graphic looking ugly.

6. The animation for dead russian truck drivers is faulty. May also be true for dead German drivers see the following pic. After death they fall through the ground, or was this just a short cut to remove the drivers from view?

[Erik Rutins]

Laryngoscope,

ORIGINAL: Laryngoscope
As you probably know I have investigated the xml files with some rigour and have found several design issues +/- bugs +/- miss-understandings which I hope you could clear up.

Sure thing, we'll look at all of these and help wherever possible.

1. Scenario descriptions should be moved out of english.xml and into the scenario xml itself to aid in scenario distribution. I have written a scenario export utility to get around this problem but it is suboptimal.

We did this to make localization easy. However, that does make scenario portability less than ideal. I'll discuss with Koios and hopefully we'll come up with a good solution for both situations.

2. The whole campaign xml text hunter is a royal PITA consider needing to edit the campaign xml in the campaign folder, then edit a seperate victory xml in a seperate folder under text then edit english.xml for the actually descriptors. Thats at least 3 different files in 3 different places.

We'll see if we can streamline this to make for fewer files to edit.

3. At the moment when I try to construct a campaign of just one scenario I get the following error on campaign completion:

23/07/2006 11:58:18 AM: MessageManager.Notify: message = 'END_OF_CAMPAIGN_COMPLETE', reference = ''
23/07/2006 11:58:18 AM: System.NullReferenceException: Object reference not set to an instance of an object.
at Lib.Data.DataReader.GetRollingTextList(Stream stream)
at GameLib.GameState.GamePlayMachine.EndCampaign.OnEnter()
at Lib.StateMachine.TransitionState(State state)
at GameLib.GameState.GamePlayMachine.GamePlayStateMachine.OnMessage(GameMessage message, Object reference)
at Lib.Messenger.MessageManager.Notify(GameMessage message, Object reference)

These log messages are often really cryptic, turns out the problem was with the victory xml file for that campaign, but beats me what was wrong with it!

A one scenario campaign is not something we had tried, we'll see if we can duplicate this. The Game Log is intended to be understandable for us, primarily. It's not always going to be clear for the end user.

4. Don't know if it is a bug or design decision but the defending side always gets 50 less points for equipment purchases that is coded for in the scenario xml file. I couldn't find any documentation regarding this in the manual. Shouldn't this be left up to the scenario designer and not enforced upon us?

Agreed - I think this was a late tweak based on the difficulty setting - but the Normal level should keep to the designer's point settings. I'll discuss with Koios.

5. The campaign screens have scroll arrows to scroll the campaign text if it is too big. They don't work, and long text will overflow the background box graphic looking ugly.

Sounds like a bug, thanks for the report - we will fix it up.

6. The animation for dead russian truck drivers is faulty. May also be true for dead German drivers see the following pic. After death they fall through the ground, or was this just a short cut to remove the drivers from view?

Yes, that's a shortcut to remove them from view - how did you get that angle? Normally, they are invisible since the camera can't actually look below the map.

Regards,

- Erik

[Erik Rutins]

1. Scenario descriptions should be moved out of english.xml and into the scenario xml itself to aid in scenario distribution. I have written a scenario export utility to get around this problem but it is suboptimal.

FYI, we discussed this and decided to include all descriptions in the scenario files going forward, with language-specific tags to allow easy localization. It will take a bit for this change to actually make it through to the public, but that's the plan going forward. Same thing for campaigns, integrate all related text into the campaign file, with language-specific tags.

4. Don't know if it is a bug or design decision but the defending side always gets 50 less points for equipment purchases that is coded for in the scenario xml file. I couldn't find any documentation regarding this in the manual. Shouldn't this be left up to the scenario designer and not enforced upon us?

We discussed this - it was a last minute tweak for difficulty vs. AI, was not in PBEM games. We've removed it so that playing on Normal you always get the exact points as assigned by the designer. On Hard, the human player gets 25% fewer points, though never less than what's needed for the Core Force in the campaign. On Easy, the AI player gets 33% fewer points.

Regards,

- Erik