Its now April 14th and work still continues daily (if not even 24hrs/day) the get the next theater in release order.
Release Goals
My goal is to get the line of PMC theaters into public distribution as quickly as possible, no I dont want to "rush" them, but I'm talking about dev time of days or maybe week(s) instead of months. This is just to give the users or merely a developers all the theaters to work with, its saddens me that there is no installers for these theaters at the moment (besides the obvious released ones). As said I dont want to just repack the SP4 theaters and release them, some editing or improving has to be done. This mostly comes in the form of improving the CATE conf files for terrain tiling, in which I did quantum leap progress on ODS bin (ODS/Iran), to fix / tweak the campaigns (removed the "CTD" bug after exiting game) and to build somekind of UI in them. There is lot of juggling with the old files to get them in order with the new dir structure and installer, but once done, its so enjoyable to just click the installer for RV, OF and AF versions.
At the moment I feel little bit like dragging feet with Afghanistan. For example I looked the objective linking which was incomplete, this baffled me as I remembered I already completed it, so I went and redid the linking completely which took like two days about. Then all of the sudden I discover some mystical backups which had some
older campaign files, I took a look at them, you know, just for fun... and what the fuck, these are the cam files with the completed linking and Red Dog airbases. You can imagine how pissed I was, heh well stuff happens
Also as the theater L2 file is from freaking 2002 or 2003, I had to redo it with the feature data for my sanity, well of course from some strange reason the road/river tiling is not compatible anymore so I think I need to scrap the bridges and re-link the part where new bridges come. Not totally a big deal but its about one nights good work. Also as the terrain in real life is almost without rivers, who knows there might be some real life issues to consider and perhaps (gulp) leave out most if not all bridges. I have no idea about this bridge business, its easy to leave them all out or have them all in, any other compromise is alot of manual work I think. We'll see, most likely we go with the thousands of bridges normal theater choice.
NSIS Installer
We have made big leaps in the NSIS installer technology many thanks to T_Rex in that department. The next installer will have unique database capability for RV, OF and AF versions, I'm also hoping to get unique user interface for each version but I cannot say anything beyond that since I havent yet done the installer script parts, but taking consideration the DB, the UI code should be no problem.
DataBase
At the side I did the trial tests of the database editing for RV and AF, specificly on Europe for the 1985 Cold War scenarios. The db looks good, works good and NSIS installer for it works good as already stated. Afghanistan theater wont have DB edits but Europe, ODS and Vietnam will so we're all good in that area now. Hopefully we can get the OF side in order also where I opened a specific topic to ask around. At the moment editing AF and RV is doable by me, but I wanted to hand out the OF db work to someone else. Of course if anyone wants to do RV db or even point out that there is already historically loaded aircraft for our theaters, please do so.
User Interface
User Interfaces are now setup pretty ok thanks to Sherlock for making the 128 theater SCF backbone for AF. Couby did good job taking the old ODS UI for OF and hopefully he can continue the same process for other theaters. So far nobody havent come forward offering help to do RV UI which might be quite a task, Khronik had some mentioning that hes interested on it though. I did setup Afghanistan as well as Europe with the basic old UI for campaign buttons and IA/Campmap/PAK screen, it looks acceptable now and we can go with that. However there is no new fancy graphics made so far (except the Iran buttons by Sherlock) but then again, why reinvent the wheel as we have basic graphics done now. Khronik was nice enough to create all theater labels for AF so it looks very nice and unified now.
Utilities
We desperately need a new Terrain Rebuilder and normal fixing tool combined in one. The current SPTInstall is not working for AF only users (no original F4 registry entry) and LxNormalFix is too heavy on 128 theaters. Especially the sptinstall is bottle neck right now as I will not make the installer to ADD something on users windows registry, modifying is ok but adding stuff is not, that is crossing the line. Yeah someone might scratch their head that whats the big deal on modifying users registry when 99.99% of the users dont even know it happened. Well its more like a principle, I always hated in OFP scene when dummies did for small addon with an executable installer which left nasty programs menu on the win and all, I just will not go down that road.
Anyways the problem is that if you only have AF, the installer will fail but if you have original F4 installed it works just ok, also I think with 512mb ram the installer cant even complete, but not sure though and heh yeah 512meg today would be a quite strange configuration, perhaps on some laptops or something(?). The point being; all installers will now fail for AF users until fix is made. We need the new util, bad, really bad. If someone can C/C++ code, please help us!
Summary
I was bored, needed a break so I wrote this situation update
If anyone have any thoughts of the overall theater development process and so on, I'm all ears for questions/suggestions, but remember that this is not specific theater area, we only talk about "we will fix X next" not "how to do setup campaign objective 123 texture in X??" etc.
One more time, next comes Afghanistan and then Europe. From there we go in Nevada I think and finally then Vietnam which is the last big boy on the block (new tiles and database with UI needed, oh my).
After all that stuff, we rotate back to ODS I think, or what I mean is that this "goal" and theater ball rolling thing planning ends there. We'll see in what week/month we are in at that point and how good are we in terms of latest utils, installer, conf files (TCL, CATE) and how are the released theaters accepted.
) and would be a shame to see the place get a RAW DEAL...
