Wishes Granted, Lives Changed, Missions Accomplished, Just another night at CMHQ!

[Guest Madmatt]

Hehee, well Mr. Beman is going to be one happy camper!

A little earlier Fionn opened his big fat mouth and....errr ummm, No! I mean in what was a totally planned and orchestrated move, CMHQ has a new Bonus Points Awards program! Our first awardee of these (he was the first to answer a posed question!) asked to see a very specific kind of Picture posted (see Xmas Wish Thread), well guess what!?! WE DID IT!!!! BOY did we do it!

Also new tonight is the first in a new series of Artillery Hints scrolling (IE users only ) across the New Features Section.

Plus the re-post of Steve's message all about Combat Missions release plans!

See it all at:

combathq.thegamers.net

Madmatt out!

[This message has been edited by Madmatt (edited 12-17-99).]

[Guest Lokesa]

Hey guys, if anyone missed Steve's message I would recomend following the link and reading it.

thx Matt

[Guest phoenix]

Matt, may I suggest trashing the scrolling hints entirely? I mean it's really annoying to read ANY scrolling text in the first place, and as you point out, it doesn't even work for Netscape. Why bother? Just have a simple link to a "hints" area. Much easier to deal with.

Scrolling text is one of the curses of web page design. IMHO that is.

[This message has been edited by phoenix (edited 12-18-99).]

[Guest Pham]

Ditto on scrolling hints. I'm using Opera and can't see any of the MS intensive stuff.

[Guest MajorH]

>Plus the re-post of Steve's message all

>about Combat Missions release plans!

Where exactly is that message? I checked the suggested link and could not find an obvious path to a message about release plans.

>first in a new series of Artillery Hints

>scrolling (IE users only

I use the latest version of IE. On my Mac G3 the scrolling stuff zips by too fast to read. The lines are just a moving green blur.

------------------

Best regards, Major H

majorh1@aol.com

[Major Tom]

I can't even seem to get on the website! Now I will never know what might have been possibly cryptically said!

[Mattias]

This is what he said:

Hi all. I won't give a detailed status report, but will let you in on some things.

It is now the end of the second week in December. We have roughly one more week before the Holidays. Charles and I are planning on doing the unthinkable and actually taking time off to enjoy them Yeah, I know, we are terrible people This has made a Jan 1 Gold Date undesirable. [note, we never had such a date, just a point of reference!!!!] Here is why...

For about two weeks (or three?) we have been in Feature Freeze. This is a hugely important milestone as it signals the beginning of the end of the last phase of development. During this stage nothing radical is going into the game which involves ground up work. Tweaks, necessary improvements (like changing how artillery TRPs work), and bug fixing are all we are concerned with from now on. There is also the manual, which although largely done requires a decent chunk of Charles' time to flesh out and correct. Obviously he has been busy coding up until now.

One of the downsides of such a huge and full featured game is that it is huge and full featured This means that there are a WHOLE LOT of little things that need to be played with and tweaked. It is amazing how much impact a single variable can have on a game, and we need to make sure that they are all fine and dandy with the 1.0 release or there will be a lot of (justifiable) grumbling.

For example. I am currently testing the bounds of the DYO setup options. This is going to be used more than the eidtor IMHO, so it is VERY important that we bang on this sucker hard. Although it has been pounded on and is (as of today) bug free (not to mention a blast to play!), the ramifications of the setup parameters haven't been checked out well enough yet. This is not the way a game should be shipped.

To illustrate my point, I found that as the attacker I could purchase WAY too many "Support" units. These are largely defensive type units, and are largely useless for the attacker. Yet there I was, with a small battle setup being able to purchase 20 HMG42s or 10 Pak40s (for example). This is not only unrealistic, but from a game play standpoint... stupid My suggested change will take Charles only a few minutes to do, then another round of testing, tweak, and repeat if necessary. End result will be something that everybody is going to be thrilled about, instead of annoyed or even pissed off.

These are the types of things we are concerned about right now. As the old saying goes, the Devil is in the Detail. The game is basically done, but not polished enough. Sometimes that last 1% of work can make the other 99% shine or look like crap. Obviously we need things to shine

Everybody is busting their butts to get this done ASAP, but nobody wants it to go out before it is totally ready. A special thanks goes out to our scenario designers and testers. They have largely completed their tasks and are working with tenacity to finish testing and tweaking the remaining scenarios. You guys are going to be singing their praises for sure. The stuff they have come up with is top notch.

So where does that leave us? With a lot of little things still left to do. Major stuff is all done (except for TCP/IP) as far as the game goes, but the last bit of the development cycle that we are in now must be done correctly or much of the hard work we have done over the last two years will be sidelined by relatively silly problems. We will give you another update after the Holidays and let you know where things stand. Until then, we have our noses (what's left of them!) firmly to the grindstone!

Thanks!

Steve

[Guest Madmatt]

The link to Steve's message is in body text of Friday's news update, timestamp: 18:50...

In regards to the scrolling text:

Opera users represent less than 1% (lowest total of ANY browser) of the CMHQ site visitors, so I really can't see changing on those grounds alone. To be honest, looking at the number of hits that represent Opera users, I could make the point Pham, that you may be the ONLY one using it.

As I have indicated before IE Mac users are also a very small percentage of our site viewership, currently less than 3%.

I have made some significant changes to the scroll text behavior and will continue to do so, as I hope I can get it work on the Macs. It will NEVER work on Netscape however but I feel having the text static on the sceen is an acceptable alternative.

The Quick Tactics and Did you Know taglines having their own section is interesting but does not fit into the general concept of the site layout.

However, just this morning I was thinking about adding a sub-section to the Archives area which would have ALL the old DYK's and QT's so people who missed them on the first time around could catch them again, and these 'expired' taglines would NOT scroll.

I am hoping that all of these efforts combined will make things better.

combathq.thegamers.net

Madmatt out and thanks again for the comments!

[This message has been edited by Madmatt (edited 12-18-99).]

[Guest Captain Foobar]

<BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>Scrolling text is one of the curses of web page design<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

I like the scrolling text , madmatt! Keep up the good work, man!

[Guest Madmatt]

Yeah, me too! but then I am a little subjective!

Madmatt out!

[Bullethead]

Madmatt said:

<BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>However, just this morning I was thinking about adding a sub-section to the Archives area which would have ALL the old DYK's and QT's so people who missed them on the first time around could catch them again, and these 'expired' taglines would NOT scroll.<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

I think this is a good idea. That would make it effectively the same as the "hints" section Pheonix suggested .

I use IE so can read scrolling text. I must admit, however, that I'd rather just have it sitting still, at least for long sentences or messages of more than 1 sentence. If you miss a piece of it, it's a pain having to wait for the whole thing to come around again, as opposed to being able to see the whole thing at once.

BTW, I'm glad you turned off the scrolling in the Heroes' Corner. Some of the smaller lines were going by too fast for me to read .

But all these are very, very minor nits IMHO. I'm quite grateful for all the info at CMHQ, no matter how it's presented. All the DYKs have been worth the wait to read several times . Keep up the good work.

-Bullethead