Voici le carnet de développement du 1er décembre du jeu World in Flames développé par Matrix Games sur PC et qui devrait sortir au printemps 2009 :

December 1, 2008 Status Report for Matrix Games’ MWIF Forum

Accomplishments of November

Project Management
Current planned release date for MWIF product 1 is late April 2009.

Communications
I monitored all the threads in the MWIF World in Flames forum daily and uploaded versions 11.04 and 11.05 for the beta testers.

Patrice keeps his hand in answering rules questions, sometimes by contacting Harry Rowland.

Peter Skoglund continues to help with developing scripts for the AI Opponent.

Nothing new from Robert Nebel or Michael Andersen (convoy pipelines).

Nothing new on unit writeups.

No information from Matrix about getting a price on a printed copy of the map.

No communications with Chris Marinacci or Harry Rowland.

Hardware and Software Development Tools
I have not installed ThemeEngine July/2007 - the status on this is unchanged.

Beta Testing
I uploaded 11.04 and 11.05 for the beta testers. The changes for 11.04 primarily concerned fixing bugs in the land combat resolution processing and interface. There are many combinations of results possible with land combat resolution and some of the rules were somewhat vague. With the help of forum members and the beta testers, I worked out precisely what the sequence of play is when the numerous optional rules are being used. There were a few obvious bugs from all the changes I made to land combat resolution and those were corrected in 11.05. 11.05 also enables placing two carrier air units on a carrier, which CWIF did not permit.

Units, Map, and Scenarios
Nothing new on any of these items.

Optional Rules
Nothing substantially new here. I did review and revise my list of the tasks remaining concerning optional rules. Oh, and I also enabled setting up Warlords within 6 hexes of their home city. That’s a deviation from RAW but it has been discussed in the forum and has met with general approval.

Player Interface
The land combat resolution and air-to-air combat forms are now similar in layout. I need to go back and make cosmetic changes to the air-to-air combat form for how the subphases are displayed. The newer style I developed for the land combat resolution is much better.

Internet - NetPlay
I made very little headway on writing the technical code for communicating between computers in November. This leaves me with the task of finishing the fundamental technical code plus integrating it into the master program for playing the game in December. I find it very difficult to work on new technical aspects of programming when there are other loose ends that are dangling in the wind. Hopefully I have cleaned up enough of them that I get focus on NetPlay at least half the time in December.

CWIF Conversion
The rewrite of the land combat resolution phase is complete. This includes retreats and advance after combat. I still need to do a similar task for naval interceptions and naval combat but I expect that to be easier since CWIF already had naval combat broken down into subphases. Not much remains in terms of removing unnecessary phases. There are some that I want to fold into naval combat (e.g., naval combat aborts are a separate phase and they should be a subphase of naval combat). Other than that I just have Overstacking and Collapse Vichy to convert into Digressions. Happily, most of that code is already written.

MWIF Game Engine
My final list of subphases for the LandCombatResolution phase is:
• Roll the dice for HQ support (not really a subphase, but it gets done first thing here),
• LCRspLandCombatSelection,
• LCRspDefSnowUnits,
• LCRspAttSnowUnits,
• LCRspChooseCombatType,
• LCRspLandCombatResolution (i.e., rolling the dice),
• LCRspConvertShattered,
• LCRspAssignLosses,
• LCRspHexControl (i.e., overruns due to successful invasions/paradrops),
• LCRspRetreats, and
• LCRspAdvanceAfterCombat.

In the process of making these changes I generated all the accompanying Game Record Log entries needed to support NetPlay.

Saved Games
Nothing new - it works.

Player’s Manual
Nothing was scheduled but I made a quick edit through the section on the introductory tutorials, to bring it up-to-date.

PBEM
Nothing was scheduled.

Historical Detail, Animations, and Sound
Nothing new.

Help System and Tutorials
Nothing new.

AI Opponent
Peter Skoglund and I spent some time working hard on the script for setting up Persia. One of the reasons this took so long was that part of the process included defining/refining elements of LAIO (Language for AI Opponent). I’ve brought my design specification for LAIO up-to-date with the various changes we decided upon.

This is looking pretty good; so much so that I began writing up the design for the parser. The parser will take the scripts and transform it into executable code for the main program. When the AIO needs to make a decision, it branches to a function for the specific decision (there are 90+ decision points). Associated with each decision point is a script. At the beginning of program execution, all the scripts are read in and parsed. This means that when the time comes to make a decision, the AIO will simply execute the parsed/compiled code.

Today Peter sent me a new version of the script for setting up Afghanistan, and he is working on encoding the script for setting up The Netherlands. I figure those 3 will be enough for me to develop and debug the parser.

Other
The aftermath of the Pan Pacific 2008 convention still drew my attention in the beginning of November. And then I needed to clean up all the MWIF items that I had let slide. For instance, I typically update my master task list every two weeks with all the bits and pieces of stuff that gather on my desk, in my email, and in the MWIF development forum (i.e., beta testers bug reports). When I turned to do that this month I found that the last time I had done so was August 19th! Mercifully, there were only 23 new bugs to add to the list, which is around 4 per each new version I uploaded. After bringing my list up-to-date I managed to fix 18 of those while simultaneously solving all the new ones reported for 11.04.
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November summary: I am now back to full steam on MWIF, though there were some rough spots at the beginning of the month..
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Tasks for December

Communications
Continue monitoring the forum threads.

Map and Units
Nada.

Beta Testing
Upload versions every week. [est. 2 hours]

Optional Rules
Review, comment, modify, and create code for optional rules [est. 20 hours]

Redesign of MWIF Game Engine
Continue to work through the sequence of play giving each phase its own module. As part of this task, convert CWIF style internet formats to Game Record Log Formats. [est. 100 hours]

Player Interface
Finish the code for determining and displaying supply lines. [est. 10 hours]

Create hex destination lists for air missions. [est 10 hours]

Complete the Task Forces forms. Implement Task Forces as a new “unit type”. [est. 30 hours in Jan.]

NetPlay
Write the technical code for communicating between multiple computers [est. 100 hours]
Implement the bidding capability using NetPlay. [est. 10 hours]
Incorporate the Indy10 code for the two player system into MWIF. [est. 20 hours]
Incorporate the multi-player (more than 2) system into MWIF. [est. 35 hours in January]

AI Opponent
Define LAIO variables with their supporting functions. Design and code the parser for LAIO. [est. 50 hours]

Help System and Tutorials
Nothing scheduled until March.

Player’s Manual
Nothing major scheduled until February.

Historical Detail, Animations, and Sound
Nothing scheduled until April.

Other
The chorus has 2 gigs this coming week, one of which is a block from my house. Then we have our Xmas show the following weekend. After the Xmas show, singing will disappear from my life until January. We have had 3 meals from the 14 pound turkey so far and it looks like 4 or 5 more remain.
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December summary: Get NetPlay functioning, and finish most of the remaining revisions to the sequence of play. Keep the beta testers busy.
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