TonyE

The BattleSet itself is late 80s, very early 90s. Looking at scenario orders of the scenarios in the BattleSet, they seem to follow a chronological order. Scenario 11.0 talks about 1990s USA military budget cuts and the appearance of the CVN Charles de Gaulle. de Gaulle was launched in 1994 while she wasn't commissioned until 2001, in the world of the game I would guestimate a 1997 commissioning. CVN Carl Vinson was 2 years from launch until commissioning in the 1980s for reference. So should we look at a date of your choice in the range of June 1997 to Dec 1999? I'd prefer a date where the US CVN has some Tomcats but I haven't cross-referenced those dates.

Would anyone like to volunteer to recreate the [Original IOPG] scenario "12.0 ...and then there were two"? This would need to be tested and ready to go by mid-December 2024 at the latest. Parameters: 1. Similar groups, units, victory conditions to the original scenario. 2. Use EC2003 IOPG or Custom BattleSet. 2. Use HCDB or HCDB2 (HCDB2 would need a custom BattleSet from the BS Builder to make distribution reasonable). 3. Adjust design for increased realism (would Kuzenetsov really carry that many planes in that timeframe, similar for Nimitz, ...) 4. Add two submarines per side

2024.006 posted. My fear is that submarines will fire missiles at targets that aren't localized but I bet you can validate that isn't true @donaldseadog.

HCE - 2024.006 - 2024-09-04 =========================== - Chg:33611 GE Let AI submarine groups fire missiles against player ships again. AI should be able to fire missiles at 3/4 max range now instead instead of a range similar to their torpedo range. (thanks Enrique) https://harpgamer.com/harpforum/topic/33611-ia-submarines-dont-launch-anti-ship-missiles/

I couldn't resist giving it a try, looks promising. I should be able to get the build out in the next 24 hours for you to poke holes in it (or a bunch of ships).

So digging a little more, submarine groups do have almost entirely different AI than surface groups, hence the different behavior for the group with the tag along ship. Way back on Dec 29,2001 code was checked in sub_ai.c that should have limited submarines to the attack range of torpedoes carried by the sub when the code looked for valid weapons. This replaced the previous code that could use Guns, Missiles, Torpedoes. For 2024.006 I've switched it back to that more permissive set of weaponry so that you guys can give it a whirl. Still submarines should be limited to firing at 75% of the max range.

Demo version 2024.005 has been uploaded

HCE - 2024.005 - 2024-08-27 =========================== - Chg:00000 GE Tinkering with listviews to try to get rid of masked out item. This affected the game when run with WINE. (thanks DAQ)

Thank you for the writeup. That performance is disappointing. I'll have a look, eventually...

Forgot to post that I confirmed this behavior based on the files provided. There is very suspect code in Effect1.c ProcessSplitGroupEvent that starts with a comment /* group does not exist anymore *or* only has one platform left */ and another chunk later in the same procedure that deals with the new group sinking. It would be super helpful to have a save just before the weapons hit that sink the ship so I can step through the code to see how the event is mis-assigned.

HCE - 2024.004 - 2024-08-08 =========================== - Chg:33561 GE Make sure to notify ExportDLLs of ActGroupPtr changes. Five places were added that were previously missed. (thanks donaldseadog) https://harpgamer.com/harpforum/topic/33561-actgroupptr-not-firing-when-airgroup-is-split-to-form-a-new-group-which-takes-active-status-in-game/ - Chg:00000 GE A group is now considered 'showing' as long as any unit in the group is showing. Previously the group 'showing' determination only used the first unit in the group. (thanks donaldseadog) - Chg:33554 GE When splitting less than all of the planes in a plane unit from a formation patrol, the remaining plane(s) in the formation patrol were having their formation event deleted which left the aircraft orphaned to eventually run out of fuel and crash. At least one case (donaldseadog's Patrol-good.hpq) should be fixed. (thanks donaldseadog) https://harpgamer.com/harpforum/topic/33554-base-air-patrols-loosing-their-base/ - Chg:00000 GE Fixed a few more spots where moving > 127 aircraft in a unit resulted in an integer overflow (limit is really 255)

Quite the challenge on this one, even with the reproduceable case. 2ish hours into debugging and finally see that when processing the SplitGroup event Effect1.c MovePlanesToNewGroup is called. One of the early lines of that procedure deletes all of the air patrol events for the donating aircraft unit. That's a wrong action to take in this case since we are only moving half of the planes in the unit to a new group. Since I'm sure it will bite us later, the procedure also removes all formation events for the unit. My first suspicion is that we can leave the air patrol and formation events in place unless we are moving all planes in the unit to the new group.

Thanks guys, I would not at all be surprised if the corruption is either in the save game or load save process. I would be surprised if it is autosave specific.

Thank you for all of this effort, it is truly the hard part of improving the game. Changing the often < 5 lines of misbehaving code is the easy part!

Wasn't just air groups, any group split. Nice find! HCE - 2024.004 - 2024-07-## =========================== - Chg:33561 GE Make sure to notify ExportDLLs of ActGroupPtr changes. Five places were added that were previously missed. (thanks donaldseadog) https://harpgamer.com/harpforum/topic/33561-actgroupptr-not-firing-when-airgroup-is-split-to-form-a-new-group-which-takes-active-status-in-game/

HCE - 2024.003 - 2024-07-10 =========================== - Chg:00000 GE Very beginnings of adding unit type SATELLITE which equates to unit and group type of 'P'. Probably should have used 'O' for orbital. 's' and 'S' were already taken. (thanks WalterE) - Chg:32081 GE Added more code to prevent selecting an invalid formation patrol area. (thanks donaldseadog and others) https://harpgamer.com/harpforum/topic/32081-game-freezes-if-bad-patrol-sector-made-in-group-formation-editor/ - Chg:00000 GE Finally, after decades, removed two race conditions in the FindRandomPatrol function where once in a while the game would get stuck in an infinite loop hoping that a random number would match a set of formation zones and sectors.

Fix coded for 2024.003

I have a fix that I'm so far testing successfully. Have I mentioned how much I hate the ancient user interface code?!? I'm finally fixing a forever old piece of formation-keeping code that has logic that would occasionally infinitely loop. It is the code that when a formation patrol is assigned to multiple rings and/or sectors must decide which individual formation spot to go to at that time so not a common use-case but happened to hit when I was testing the crash fix and I finally am conquering.

formedit.c FramePatrolRegion tries to figure out what ring is selected and in this crash case it identifies a ring one beyond what the UI shows which leads to the experienced nastiness. No fix yet.

Confirmed here in 2024.002. Thanks for the older issue reference, that helped me skip right to the function in play, MoveAndSetPosition in formedit.c. It is not a regression from the previous fix, rather a new case with the same end result. I don't have a fix yet but have a strategy to further debug via a bunch of logging statements. Debugging isn't super straightforward since if I set breakpoints that is going to result in more windows messages which will prevent the code from acting naturally so it is a case here of log, recreate issue, review logs, tweak code, repeat...

For the SE you are looking for an executable called Wscenedt32.exe.

Agh, sorry for the delay, I have posted up the collection at

Harpoon 3 Platform Workbooks View File Excel spreadsheets used to help in platform editing tasks in combination with H4 Paper Rules Annex data. Sonar Calculator Platform Workbook Fuel Calculator Sensor Performance These workbooks use macros. They were last maintained by VCDH/Dale Hillier. Submitter TonyE Submitted 05/29/2024 Category Tools/Docs  

That would be novel. You could start with your fancy tools to look at THCReloadEvent/RELOAD_EVENT type of Harpoon Events.