Hello guys, and welcome to a much-delayed report on the progress of the mod. As I have been saying for far too long, we are close to release. I know that the constant delays are trying on not only the team, but our followers as well. This release has been plagued with problems, both real-life and coding wise, and has been a logistical nightmare coding wise.
To kick it off, half-way through the development on this next patch we switched our event coding system to something much more effective. Our original design left no room for translations, and required a cap on the description lengths on events. The new system allows for future possible translation, and for unlimited length in descriptions.
The second problem was an update of the entire event system, which again took future delays. The original release had several conflicting text databases, so many tech descriptinos and names would conflict with the old AoD files and cause confusion for the program itself, randomly labeling tech files between AoD and 1964. This has been corrected. In addition to this, all tech files should now have proper components (albeit not all are named yet), and have proper years between the 1960 and 1970 year-sets.
Another problem was real-life on my end. The way I originally had the mod set-up (and a show of leadership inexperience on my part) was that all code was sent to me to implement. Not only was this inefficient, but the centralization of everything on my computer was a very poor choice and very risky. This was most apparent when my primary hard-drive crashed not too long ago, taking my OS and some (thankfully) only some mod files with it. I was fortunate enough to have backed up my mod files only weeks previously. The data I lost was replaceable, and I have almost finished recoding all the data I lost.
To correct that, I have migrated our operations to a centralized server system, which will allow any member of our team to access and mod the files regardless of timezone, which in return allows for a more effective mod team - I no longer have to manually process the files. The risk of losing all the files in a hard-drive crash are now gone as well. I am hoping that this new system will allow me to shift some of the management to other people and allow our team to see the collective results of their efforts.
If the previous seemed like a daunting set of problems, the next set of information is the good stuff. We have hundreds of events now added into the game, and testing them to make sure they fire right has been another time consuming task. We are doing our best to make sure that our next release is enjoyable to play, and these events should help give some direction to the nations of the world.
While we did not know it at the time, a member of our team (Dáin) is an event coding genius. Only over the past few months have we realized how awesome his event abilities are. Whereas Vincent and Laurence can pump out graphics like an artist on caffeine (which might be the case), he has managed to spit out events faster than we can comprehend. I cannot wait till you guys get to experience this first-hand.
Unfortunately, there will be no pretty graphics in this news update. For that, you will have to just hold on for a tad bit longer while we get our system properly organized and setup.
Until next time...
Feuersturm,
Team '64
