Hubert Cater

Took a look at your site, interesting thing is that my friends and I played a lot of Axis and Allies growing up, so I have to admit I took a good look at your map changes/tweaks and it did bring back a lot of memories Looks pretty good, I've never really thought about province based gaming since the various shapes could make user input a bit tricky to keep track of, but a quick idea I had would be to use two maps. One would be the map everyone sees on the screen and the other map would be simply contained in memory with each province having it's own unique color. This way whenever someone clicks on the map on screen the mouse position is translated to the map in memory and depending on which color is selected you know exactly which province has been selected by the user. Here is a link to a pretty good game programming page that has info on hex based algorithms including path finding etc. I used some of the ideas for SC and then came up with a few of my own simplifications but it should help a bit in terms of getting things started. http://www-cs-students.stanford.edu/~amitp/gameprog.html Good luck! Hubert P.S. Bill's Xconq link looks very interesting as well and might provide some ideas since the code is open source

The half hexes should not count so it should only be able to reinforce to 5 Hubert

Me too

Moving this to the General Discussion Forums... Hubert

:confused:

The original setup for the Suez link was just a design decision, mostly to ensure balance and not too much favouritism to the Allies. Not to worry it will be something that will be looked into much more for an SC2. To answer the 1.06 patch question more specifically, I just wanted to fix a few bugs that were found with the patch itself but not get into the realm of another patch altogether, again any more changes will have to wait until SC2 Hubert

There is no Iceland, but Malta is there and I didn't have the right hex graphics for it, but Corsica is sort of added (admittedly poorly) in with Sardinia just that it's not drawn with the proper isthmus Hubert

This was also probably left out in the manual text , but there is a +1 action point penalty for river hexes that you do not control. Once it's in your control it's assumed you control or have built bridges across etc. and regular action point's apply. Hubert

Just wanted to quickly let everyone know that there has been a small update to the v1.06 patch. Two recent small and rare bugs were fixed, Axis AI crash bug and a TCP/IP autosave bug. I also changed Cape Horn to Cape of Good Hope. This is mostly a cosmetic change and not enough to warrant a new patch number or version, but I just wanted to ensure the playability of the final patch and I don't suspect there will be any more tweaks after this. The updated version is completely optional if you are concerned with the above changes and it can be downloaded and reapplied over the existing one. The updated v1.06 patch is available here: http://www.battlefront.com/products/stratcom/download.html Hubert

This is strange. Try physically deleting your saved games folder SAVE and see if that helps, you could also try just loading games from the autosave as well. Hope this helps, Hubert

It's a strange limitation but each memory handle for bitmapped info under Windows has a max size in square pixels. So I made the best sized map with this limitation in mind, i.e. I could make it wider but then I would have to make in smaller in height or vice versa. You can fit more hexes (rows and columns) but have to make the hex sizes smaller in pixels and so on. Long story short, there are ways around this, but in order to have the game backward compatible with older and slower machines alternate methods would not have been desirable, although by now using DirectX, and most people now having faster machines (remember I started this thing around 1999/2000) this will most likely change for an SC2 so expect a bigger map! Hubert

Yeah the interface button sizes etc. are set in stone by code, but something to consider for the future. Hubert

None of the Free French rules were changed, so some of the French navy can still become Free French, but the primary change was wrt the capture of Paris. This was to avoid some of the gamey play where Allied players would move the bulk of their army out of France and fight on without surrender. Now surrender occurs immediately when Paris is captured and may limit the above approach. It's not perfect mind you but there are consequences for bulk removal of the French land forces, for one a quicker surrender gives the Axis more buildup time for Barbarossa, and if the French abandon their Med. positions too early it may draw the Italians into the fray that much sooner. So there is still some flexibility and give in take for either approach depending on your overall strategy but with both approaches weighted more heavily now. Hubert

Ok checked the files you sent me and one of them was created with SC v1.0. This results in an improper reading of files located in your PBEM directory in this case files pbem_act1 and GW2. I believe the directory contents are read in alphabetical order so it will read files and display them in the LOAD PBEM DIALOG until it fails on an incompatible file, in this case GW2 was created with v1.0 and so it fails before it even has a chance to read pbem_act1 thus showing no files in the dialog list. Try removing the faulty GW2 and it should read your contents properly once again. Hope this helps, Hubert

Date format should not have any sort of effect on it, could you send me the contents of your PBEM folder and I can take a look to see what the potential problem may be. Hubert

OK I looked into this a bit more and for whatever reason this random freezing appears to only occur on systems that run ME. I checked through all my tech support emails and for those that reported random freeze's or lockup's they were all running ME. Now I don't know if this is for all systems that run ME or only that if there was a problem it seems to potentially occur on ME. I would suggest tyring the latest updates for ME from the Microsoft website and see if it makes any sort of difference http://www.microsoft.com/windowsme/update/default.asp Let me know if this helps and good luck! Hubert

Not really sure, you might want to try disabling any background programs like anti-virus software etc. and see if that helps. I don't know of any known conflicts with the Eiffel runtime but I can look into it. I know that SC does not work properly with NT, but with other flavours of Windows it should in theory be fine. Let me know if any of this helps and we can take it from there. Hubert

Eiffel was an easy choice for me as I was very familiar with it. (It was used quite often for some of my University courses). I had the opportunity to try C++ and JAVA as well but due to the design philosophy and personal preferences I went with Eiffel. There are a variety of reasons for this, but primarily for the strict Object-Oriented approach Eiffel uses, memory collection, multiple inheritance, and Design By Contract. Info on design by contract can be found here: http://archive.eiffel.com/doc/manuals/technology/contract/ Eiffel is a very good language mainly used to build technically sound or bullet proof programs found in the financial, or engineering fields etc., but does have some drawbacks, of course not with the language or tools itself , but more related to a serious lack of multimedia libraries available for game type programming. I liked the language but had to do a lot of multimedia library coding myself in order to ge the job done. C++ and JAVA will definitly have much more to offer in this respect. Not sure what your programming background is, but regardless of what language you choose I strongly suggest taking a look at Bertrand Meyer's book "Object Oriented Software Construction : Second Edition". It is written by the creator of Eiffel but he does a really good analisys of the pro's and con's of various design philosophies, languages and designing with Object Orientation in mind. Believe me it's an excellent book and will really help you in wrapping your head around a big project such as game design and implementation. For various languages in general each has it's pro's and con's and I would suggest doing a search for some basic comparisons between your languages of choice to get a better idea. Here are a few links I dug up: http://www.s-direktnet.de/homepages/neumann/lang_cmp.en.htm http://archive.eiffel.com/doc/manuals/technology/oo_comparison/page.html http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0130142697/104-4001230-1490300?vi=glance I would also take a look at books like Marc Saltzman's book found here: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1566869048/qid=1039498130/sr=1-2/ref=sr_1_2/104-4001230-1490300?v=glance&s=books It's a pretty good book that won't really tell you how to design a game but has some feedback from some of the best game designers, artists etc. which I used to help me get started about thinking about how to do game design right the first time out. Again I would spend some time researching each language and going through the pro's and con's. Keep in mind things like IDE cost, executable speed, available libraries and examples, multiplatform capabilities, how good and easy to use each debugger is etc. I'm obviously biased and swear by Eiffel and if you are interested there is a free download of a basic version of their IDE found at: http://www.eiffel.com I would also check out the newsgroup at: comp.lang.eiffel Again whatever language you decide to use I would suggest starting small and taking it from there. The first serious game I programmed was a Tetris clone, I then followed that with a very basic map editor that would take a bitmap, convert it into sprites and then use a point and click method to create maps etc. Take a look at some of the examples I have at my open source project area at: http://eiffelzone.sourceforge.net As you will see the programming eventually went from slightly messy to a little more organized as I went along! The AI was tricky indeed but I got some good advice early on to use Fuzzy Logic and a very good framework on how to do it in general. Once the basics are done, the trick is to really have patience in this area and sit and watch what the AI does and fix each stupid move one after the other until eventually you have something that is worth playing In total I spent just over 2 years designing and coding. In the end it's about 20,000 lines of code give or take a thousand Hope this helps and good luck! Hubert

Try the direct link instead and hopefully it will work for you ftp://ftp.battlefront.com/pub/demos/stratcom/SC_Demo_Setup.exe Hubert

Great job! Hubert

Thanks and I will! Hubert

That's a strange one, if possible could you send me a turn where it will repeat this type of drop to the main menu and I'll see if I can track it down. Email support@furysoftware.com Hubert

Oops! My mistake... think of it as the Allies using er... a longer and perhaps safer? journey to the Suez Hubert

So is there a winter war now? Cvm</font>

Glad to see it worked out! Hubert