Toaw 3.4 Call for Scenarios.

Please send me an email if you are interested in updating one of your scenarios in TOAW III or have a new scenario you'd like included.

RalphTrickey (at) OperationalWarfare.com

Thanks,
Ralph

I had to kill a feature today. I had added code (I don't remember if it was 3.2, or 3.4) to allow for you to hold the <CTRL> key and use the ScrollWheel in order to switch to and from 3D view.

Microsoft decided that if using a touch screen, pinching would do a CTRL-ScrollWheel, so touch became less useful.

If anyone actually want's that feature, I can maybe add it in as Shift-ScrollWheel instead or something else.

Ralph

I didn't mind the occasional SPAM, and about 10% of the comments showed that they actually skimmed the site, so I was letting them through, but it just got ridiculous. I must have been posted on some site somewhere.

I'll try for a max turn-around of 24 hours for any comment. I'm only going to filter out the obnoxious SPAM, anything off-topic is OK.

 I'll be putting out a new Beta release later today with the new PC and dev environment. We'll see how it goes, and problems the Beta testers see. After all the findable bugs are fixed, I may take a couple of days to see if I can get the touch experience better. The left button select, right button move works well with a mouse, and it's usable via touch, but not as nice as it could be.

Ralph

Still here,still working away. I had some issues, but everything should be cleared up now, so I'm ready for the final sprint to get everything finished, packaged, etc.

Here's my new development environment.

8Gb Quad core laptop running Windows 7 64-bit.

Visual Studio 2010 for development and release builds.

I'm using a productivity tool called CodeRush from DevExpress.

I'm using TFS for my source code control and bug tracking.

My backups are being done right now wilh Microsoft 'Live Mesh' I'm backing up TFS, I'm also backing up my development directory, and several other directories. These backups are going both to three other machines on my home netowrk, and also up to 'the cloud.' Live mesh gives you a free 5 Gigabyte account which has been enough. I also pull off DVDs about once a month. The TFS backups are daily, and the backups of my development directory are near real-time.

I'm also doing daily backups to a second drive attached to the system.

Ralph

Here's my current development environment.

4Gb Dual core laptop running Windows 7 64-bit. I plan to upgrade to a quad core later this year.

Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 for devleopment, but release builds are still done with VS2008.

I'm using a productivity tool called CodeRush from DevExpress.

I'm using TFS for my source code control and bug tracking. I used Visual SourceSafe before that, and SVN for a short time. I'm using TFS at work, and it also does bug tracking, so I'm happier with it.

My backups are being done right now wilh Microsoft 'Live Mesh' I'm backing up TFS, I'm also backing up my development directory, and several other directories. These backups are going both to three other machines on my home netowrk, and also up to 'the cloud.' Live mesh gives you a free 5 Gigabyte account which has been enough. I also pull off DVDs about once a month. The TFS backups are daily, and the backups of my development directory are near real-time.

Here's one reason I swithced over to TFS. I can now do reports like this instead of keeping noted in 'readme' files. I can also like match each one of these changes to the files and lines of code which I changed in order to fix them.

Before, i didn't really have this link. I know that 119 fixed these three items, but I couldn't tell which files were changed for that fix, except in general. It means that I'm hoping it's less likely for me to forget to make a change, and to make it easier to be able to fixure out what I changed when I make a mistake. I feel like it's saving me time over reading and editing files to keep track of this stuff.

Release State       Reason Title
119       Resolved Fixed     Lockups in unit screen
119       Resolved Fixed     Allow you to turn off PNG files support
119       Resolved Fixed     Editor/unit report/deployment closes unit dialog

If anyone is setinng up their own TFS system, there are a couple of things to know.

You're going to have to learn a bit of SQL Server in order to put the data files in a reasonable location (NOT C:\Program files which is the default).

You're going to have to set up a scheduled task to do backups.

If you've got a lot of binary files, keep the binary files in a separate 'Collection'. I've got one collection for all the graphics, and a separate one for the daily code. I do this so that I can do reasonable sized backups on a regular basis.

Nobody cares except for the three hate mails that I'm going to get, but I'm switching from SVN to Basic TFS.

I store copies of all the source code, tracing back to when I got access to the code, that's called SCCS, SCM, and probably some other acronyms. That means that I can see exactly what changes I've made to the code over time.

SVN is a fine product, but for some reason I kept getting errors about needing to execute the cleanup command, and got frustrated by what I needed to do to fix the issues I was having. I was also having some display issues linked to using 64-bit windows.

By switching to TFS basic, I also get to add and attach bugs to specific code changes, something that isn't possible with SVN by itself, and which will help me down the road when I want to know why I did something. I know that I can get bugzilla or other products to get the same functionality, but this is also what I'm using at my day job, so it makes my life a bit easier.

Ralph

The  boardgamer in me likes this view. I don't think I'd play a monster scenario like this, but...

I'm adding in adjusting Contrast and Brightness for the graphics since I know that some people like more contrast than others, and it's a simple addition after I got through researching it.

Here's a possible view that Damezzi worked up. Look at the numbers on the units, they are cleaner than 3.2, although it may not show in this picture. The Huge (Close in) view should also be sharper with the engine changes.

I've still got some strange things happening, but I'm going to do a round of combat engine changes first, then get back to the graphics. All the problems are on my end. Damezzi has done a fantastic job.