Debugging update - August 2nd

[NormKoger]

I spent Wednesday playing the campaign game, which is why I wasn't very active on the forum during the day. Tomorrow will probably be similar. There is still a bug in the campaign game, but it's getting a smaller and smaller box to crawl around in. Programmers out there will recognize the term "rogue pointer": capable of manifesting itself in a number of ways, not showing up at all on some systems, and looking like a dozen separate problems on others even though it's really just one tiny bit of flaky code. I have it isolated to a small area in one cpp module, and expect to exterminate the critter sometime tomorrow.

Along the way, a couple of other minor issues have been dealt with, and I couldn't help tinkering with a couple of suggestions. One thing I suspect will be appreciated by a lot of players is the replacement of the "time to 1x" logic when avoiding collisions with a short term "throttle" of 5x. The throttle is also applied whenever a notification appears. When activated, the throttle lasts for 30 seconds. So you can have your time set at 20x, it will drop to 5x after a notification (or some other classes of events), and will return to 20x after 30 seconds.

[mbv]

The game speed fix will be much appreciated. Are you making any headway on the vanishing ship/division/task force problems ??

[KGB]

The game speed fix will be much appreciated. Are you making any headway on the vanishing ship/division/task force problems ??
Yes, please, and please take a look into the graphical issues too.

[Dogbert]

Norm,

Is there any chance of getting the tabbing crash fixed at some point? I know it's probably a low priority, but it is pretty annoying to lose the game every time I tab out or lock the windows session (when running in windowed mode).
Unfortunately, years of having to do it at work has conditioned me to always lock my windows account whenever I leave it, hehe.

[Strev]

Norm hi,

What a great game, have spent far too much time playing this.

Some issues that have occurred during my first campaign include-

Disappearing ships - usually when evading off the map edge.

Double battles - if the campaign generates 2 battles simultaneously then all the ships from both battle sites appear on one map then both sets of survivors end up back on the campaign map in one place, usually the most inconvenient.

Skin shedding - on set up some ships appear to shed their skin and leave an image of themselves behind.

Minefields - Don't appear to do anything on the battle map, I had a Japanese group of 4 cruisers sail past the entrance to Port Arthur (500 yds out) without anyone going glug.

Coastal Artillery - see previous message, none of the coastal batteries fired at all. Do you have to order them to fire somehow?

Not enough fog of war - both sides report their positions so it makes it really easy as the Japanese to hunt down the Vladivostock cruisers.

The F3 key tells the Russian player where the Japanese merchantmen are.

Hope you can fix these because I really enjoy this game.

[Daniel Sturgis]

I spent Wednesday playing the campaign game, which is why I wasn't very active on the forum during the day. Tomorrow will probably be similar. There is still a bug in the campaign game, but it's getting a smaller and smaller box to crawl around in. Programmers out there will recognize the term "rogue pointer": capable of manifesting itself in a number of ways, not showing up at all on some systems, and looking like a dozen separate problems on others even though it's really just one tiny bit of flaky code. I have it isolated to a small area in one cpp module, and expect to exterminate the critter sometime tomorrow.

Along the way, a couple of other minor issues have been dealt with, and I couldn't help tinkering with a couple of suggestions. One thing I suspect will be appreciated by a lot of players is the replacement of the "time to 1x" logic when avoiding collisions with a short term "throttle" of 5x. The throttle is also applied whenever a notification appears. When activated, the throttle lasts for 30 seconds. So you can have your time set at 20x, it will drop to 5x after a notification (or some other classes of events), and will return to 20x after 30 seconds.

All good news. Many thanks!