Game Development Status 6/15/05

Monthly total ~17 hours; yearly total ~154 hours.

I had a good trip to Dallas over the weekend to visit with Chris and work on the game. We officially froze the code for Origins 2005 Tuesday evening (I had a few things to cleanup). I am calling this version "Beta-5 and AI Tech Preview-1." The AI is not ready for prime time, but there's enough working to show significant progress from last year. Chris spent a number of hours updating the PBEM code so it would work again...it was broken in a couple of places due to changes we made earlier this year for the AI.

The AI plays all the way through in the Opening Moves and Assault of VII Corps scenarios. The player can save files at any time, and the game will successfully load any saved file and continue.

In the meantime, I have moved on to identify and fix bugs.

• units remain selected after moving them in Setup
• error messages in multi-unit artillery feu plotting validation now work
• the AI Debug Dialog now displays the name of the file when the game is loaded from a file

I continue to lurk on ConsimWorld in the Clash of Arms and La Bat forums. I've not heard anything from Ed or Charlie about Eylau at Origins; I anticipate that we will not be in the dealer's room this year. If so, Chris and I will set up in the War Room if space is available, or perhaps in Open Gaming. I'm going to bring my paper copy of Eylau, so we can play a game or two by hand during the con -- I need to get more into the mindset of how to play La Bat Regs XXII.

The La Bat forum is abuzz with commentary on the upcoming Regs XXX, the new version of the La Bat. I've noticed some comments recently about Ricochet fire: whether it should or shouldn't be in the regs, whether its effect is too great or not, what a pain it is to keep track of the shot paths and evaluate all the resulting feu attacks. We don't have ricochet in PC Eylau, but IIRC we had always intended to do so. I took some time this morning and sketched out some design notes on this. Looks like it would take about 8-12 hours to implement and test. I've moved this to the top of my list of "big" items that I will work on between now and Origins.

As I understand it, we are going to be signing up people for the Beta program at the con. We'll have a few CDs to hand out, as well as instructions on how to get to the Beta test site.