TonyE

What should have happened is that if Blue met minimum victory before Red and the game clock ran out, there should have been an end of game dialog that proclaimed Blue the winner since they met their minimum VC first. You are correct though, a logic change was to evaluate Total Victory conditions for a side that doesn't have Minimum Victory Conditions. There is no facility to declare total victory if there are no Total Victory conditions.

Fixed in 2021.010. It was a bug I wrote on December 10th.

Doubled size of formation zones, ships travel out to their new positions properly. The only hiccup is that the group did not resume its original speed of 19kts, rather stayed at the reduced 13 kts the GE imposed when reforming. Then halved size of formation zones, ships came back to their new positions properly. Same hiccup as expanding formation zone sizes.

Run this by me again please. Which victory conditions have been met? [side & level] Do you have a test scenario and save you can provide for me to reproduce? Thanks Don

They need to be acquired separately.

"Postulate: unit->xOff, unit->yOff are supposed to hold the desired unit offsets in distance units (DUs) from the group center as specified in the Formation Editor. " Postulate was wrong. The desired offset is stored in formation editor events. That also explains why there are so blinking many formation events to process! Ships are sprinting and drifting again; now without getting lost! The next test may be to resize the formation zones and see if the ships in formation bother to try to get to the new relative positions in the formation.

Last night I made great progress on positioning! My Spruances were no longer abandaoning the formation for more peaceful waters. Then again they aren't sprint/drifting anymore so some more work to go. This does help the scaling somewhat as well but isn't the whole answer there.

Postulate: unit->xOff, unit->yOff are supposed to hold the desired unit offsets in distance units (DUs) from the group center as specified in the Formation Editor. As I look into this issue, the postulate above is something I will prove or disprove. The unit structure has unit->rings, unit->sectors to define which sectors of the formation a unit is meant to occupy. I suspect that unit->xOff and unit->yOff store the actual position specified in the formation editor. This allows ships and submarines to occupy a particular position in the main body of the formation for instance but would also be used to show the units in the formation editor, even outside of the main body of the formation.

aviator, I'm excited to see your progress and more importantly for me, to hear your gripes about ASW in the game as you progress. We know that air dropping torpedoes is quite a challenge. That is partly mediated by Don Thomas's toolkit ExportDLL. However, it is reasonable to expect to hand off even more of the micro-management to ExportDLLs or the core game.

We covered such meaty topics as: "how do we get those lazy kids to undertake a trade in the shipyards" WestPac/China - energy is everything and in the discussion particularly aerial refuelling is critical versus last meeting exploring the strategic weakness that is the flow of energy into China. Victory Condition game improvements Lack of platform editor re-write progress Byron's articles Julian's papers Byron talked about how Harpoon is frankly useless at suggesting a real life outcome of a tactical engagement. That expanded to what it will do is teach lessons such as don't radiate in many situations, logistics is king in WestPac, stealth and stealth-denial is important.

The only decent excuse I'm coming up with on my own is that with the formation editor active in the Group window, you are setting desired formation positions while the Unit window is showing actual unit positions and that difference could be jarring?

From looking at the code last night, this appears intentional to hide the units from the Unit map. That said, it is 'fixed' in 2021.010 in that the units for the formation editor group will remain visible in the Unit window.

It was another enjoyable session. If people are shy, need a different communications platform, different day/time, I'm all ears!

I ran a couple of statistics for the Harpoon code changes, the lazGUI and shared ExportDLL code changes aren't included in the counts. The victory condition work added 810 lines of code and removed 367 lines of code. Those changes affected 32 source code files.

Thanks all, see you again next time. Bring your friends!

In the GE when you change zoom levels with the formation editor open, the units often don't draw in the correct locations, something is amiss with the scaling. They can also be drawn in the wrong location when first entering the Formation Editor

In the GE, when the formation editor button is pressed, the units for that group disappear from the Unit window. The units should remain visible in the Unit window.

Okay, done and uploaded as 2021.009 and an updated lazGUI ExportDLL for the ExportDLL pieces. You will see some victory messages in the MessageLog window and different ones in the ge.log file.

Chat starts in 3.5 hours, come join us, ask your questions, debate your point, lurk, whatever suits your fancy.

Updated to version 23 to handle Victory Condition achievement notification in HC 2021.009+

Progress. Added tracking of individual Victory Condition time achieved and exposed to ExportDLL as part of the Globals structure in ScenLoad. Most of the Globals structure is still opaque to the ExportDLLs, will build out the THCGlobals typedef over time.

Thank you Byron for reaching out to Patrick.

Update: My tests are working as expected though they are nowhere near comprehensive. Next: Refactoring the data structures used to track the VC completion. Right now it is a combination of a three dimensional array (time each victory level was reached for each side against each other side), one dimensional array (sides that only have total victory conditions), and a couple of individual variables (first side to hit min_vic, time of first min_vic and first side to hit tot_vic and time of the first tot_vic). Modifying the saved game structure to store what needs to persist across sessions. This will also include a converter for existing saves. The new logic cannot be properly seeded from an existing saved game so the best approach will be to abandon existing saved games but we'll load them and populate what we can on victory achievement. Possibly modifying the scenario file structure as a result of changing the VictoryConditions structure. The VictoryConditions structure change would likely be adding a GameTime field that is populated when that particular VC is met and a target side that indicates the 'enemy' side for the VC. Currently VCs are strictly Red v Blue and Blue v Red so when I'm mucking in structures I like to expand that. Exposing the data to ExportDLLs which at a minimum means updating the interface version. The current victory status should come through in new globals and if the VictoryConditions structure changes, updates to match them. I just checked and the globals are not exposed to the ExportDLL interface yet so that may be a piece of this too.

Update: I am down a deep rabbit hole on VCs at this point and want to document a bit before chasing the rabbit some more. Changes Made: Victory conditions are checked every two game minutes. Previously it was one side per two minutes so every four minutes both sides were checked. This is also a stepping stone toward checking victory conditions for more than two sides. The code checks both minimum and total victory conditions and records the time each level is met for each side. You can now achieve the total victory conditions before minimum victory conditions, HOWEVER you will not be granted total victory until both the minimum and total victory conditions have been met. If a side has no minimum victory conditions defined, only total victory conditions will be examined for that side. In short, you will be able to be granted total victory if your side has only total victory conditions defined.

Thank you much, the consistency in approach really helps!