TonyE

No crash after more than an hour of play from autosave.0107.hp0 but I did just use a Nimrod one-shot-one-kill to take out some fish. Great fun to play though! Time to call it a night <g>.

Thank you Eric, if having updated databases wasn't so important to me, I would easily prioritize the launcher above this change. Crossing my fingers that Brad can chime in this weekend.

Thanks Rene for the explanation. Eric, Brad, what are your thoughts? (and anyone else)

Jean, if you do Retry to debug, does it happen to give you additional information like a call stack?

Divefreak has requested an increase to the number of runway sizes in the DB structure and perhaps more importantly to actually include them in the import/export process so that they flow from the PE to the commondb.res and back. This is not a trivial change in terms of level of effort but it is a similar pattern to what we have done in the last couple of months with increasing the number of country names and aircraft types. Level of programming effort for the PE <-> commondb.res changes: ~20 hours Level of programming effort to modify the game logic to understand and use more runway sizes: TBD (research will take ~1 hour) To put the programming commitment into perspective, until November or so I was managing about 15 minutes of HC programming time per week. There was an additional hour or so of support, forum time and such. I've found/made more time since Ralf re-emerged and sparked interest in collaborative improvements to the game. Still, my average is 3-4 hours per week of HC programming time. Other things 20-30 hours could do: Solidify a design for expanding annexes to nearly unlimited entries. This wouldn't be the coding to make it work, just the design work for the structures and conversion approach to maintain compatibility. Get a first release of the new HC Launcher out to anyone interested in testing. Meaningful progress on the map interface for a web-based remote viewer (so the map component rather than making said component integrate much or at all with the game) So DB authors, where do you prioritize increasing the number of runway sizes? It has certainly been on the wishlist for a long time but I don't have a good feel for what is most important to you.

As to the rest, yes, the USNI re-makes are very up to date and use the latest game functionality so unless a player has a particularly fond memory of the original USNI scenarios rather than the re-makes, I for one would suggest playing the re-make.

There is somewhat more nuance than that. A BattleSet is composed of: 1. The BattleSet specific information like the map, description, weather starting locations, sonar conditions, etc.; 2. Database of Platforms except for commondb BattleSets which share a database between multiple BattleSets; 3. Scenarios. So USNI.RES has its own database embedded in that file, a different database from HDSA.RES. Back then there was much more manual creation of the BattleSets so occasionally there is some data out of place. But what to take from it is that both USNI and HDSA are legacy BattleSets filled with gremlins but between them potentially different gremlins. In addition to gremlins is that the current game structures are different than when that original USNI BattleSet was created so there is code to convert from the old to new structures and sometimes that code is wrong and sometimes it unleashes gremlins that were previously caged by one-off workarounds.

My knee-jerk reaction is "that is absurd, the file hasn't changed for 20 years or more." On the other hand, it is an easy enough thing to try. Tony, can you zip and send your USNI.RES and USNI.RSR files to Jean? Let me know if you need any help. Your thought does reinforce a thought that has been bouncing around the back of my head in that there is a reasonable probability that the memory corruption originates from data conversions applied to that ancient BattleSet, not just legacy but ancient <g>. In theory I could compare many of the structures in that BattleSet to try to spot data conversion errors while loading the USNI.RES file.

Thanks all, keep it up. I won't be able to test again for 3-7 days so anything you can continue to refine is appreciated!

The Wednesday chat concluded about 50 minutes ago. There was great discussion, primarily about warfare and those political bits that lead to warfare. Looking forward to seeing you on Friday!

Thank you Don. What security software do you use?

I did send it there. Once I saw your follow up this morning I sent it from a different account, a gmail account. Have you received either copy of the e-mail? The subject line is: "Harpoon Classic temporary license"

e-mail sent and the installer was tested successfully locally here on a clean Windows 10 x64 20H2 virtual machine.

My first suggestion will be to stop trying to get that purchase to work. I'll be e-mailing you a link to an installer with a temporary license for you to validate you want to buy a copy.

Hello Harpooners! What: Multimedia Harpoon Chat (video, screen share, audio, text) When: Monday January 16, 2023 @ 2:00 PM Central US time. Where: HarpGamer server on Discord has been established, follow the invite link https://discord.gg/ZmrFAZXbyw

Hi ohstop, what is the most recent version of Harpoon Classic that you own? Harpoon Ultimate Commander's Edition Harpoon Commander's Edition Harpoon Classic Gold Harpoon Classic 2002 aka HC2002 Harpoon (Classic) 97 Harpoon for Windows aka Winharp The ideal computer to run Harpoon Classic is a brand new Windows 10 x64 computer with the fastest single core performance you can get. You don't need fancy video or any more than 8GB of RAM.

Yes, I keep trying to fix it and failing. I'll fix it properly one of these days. The game stores all four corners of the windows and should really only store the upper-left corner then adjust the size of the window based on content and screen magnification level (DPI scaling).

The Matrix Game Holiday sale runs through Jan 9, grab your copy(ies) now Larry Bond's Harpoon - Ultimate Edition - Game - Matrix Games

Wishful thinking? Write a new HC Launcher that helps the user run scenarios from HarpGamer and encourage Social interaction. Establish Launcher UI framework Choose and implement autoupdate mechanism Implement IRC bot to comment on game and scenario loading Implement OAuth2 authentication with the HG forums here 2021-01-09 First success Oauth2 PKCE authentication of HC Launcher! Add permissions system to encourage the user to share information with the community and HG Interact with the Invision forum (HarpGamer) API to pull lists of Scenarios, Databases, BattleSets, ... Make the magic happen so the user can select a scenario on HG and the launcher automatically grabs any dependencies (game version, database, ExportDLLs, Mods, ...), configures the game, and launches the scenario without the tedium we face today. Help the user understand resources used by the launcher and what information it exchanges.

In addition to multiple runs using autoplay in both 2020.009 and 2020,017, I was not able to crash the GE during a manual play of the game from the USNI 5 0040 saved game. I'm attaching my saved game from when all of the Red bases were destroyed for the heck of it. I made sure to do some air group splitting during that manual play, no issues. USNI5_RedBasesDestroyed.zip

A user from the Great White North, recently returned to the game is experiencing memory corruption in the original USNI BattleSet, Scenario 5.0. He has experienced this both in 2020.009 and 2020.017. Some saved games are attached. I have tested extensively using AutoTest and have not replicated either issue (game exiting with heap corruption error [USNI5.zip] nor game exiting without any warning [NoErrorCrash.zip]). Right after the USNI5.zip saves a Slava is sunk but does not trigger a crash for me. The user has mentioned doing a lot of air group splitting and joining while playing. I view that as a valuable hint as very few players exercise that functionality and it is an area of the game prone to bugs. The latest hint is that the crash may occur when an air group is landing, perhaps an hour of play after the USNI5.zip saves when loading from the saves. Any help narrowing down these crashes is greatly appreciated! USNI5.zip NoErrorCrash.zip

Merry Christmas, thanks to a blizzard yesterday, a white one here in Minneapolis!

Windows 10 Enterprise, that suggests you can handle unzipping a file instead of running an installer. It also makes me want to troubleshoot. To get you going quickly, here is a zip file with the changed files to get you from 2015.027 to 2020.017 that you can just unzip in the right place on the desktop machine. https://harpgamer.com/temp/HC2015.027to2020.017.zip With the Win 10 Enterprise, are you joined to a domain or otherwise have group policies applied that may prevent the installers from running? This is the first report of the installer heading off into oblivion.