Heads' up to scenario authors, the scenario file format changes again in 2017.008 (not released yet) which means scenarios made with the 2017.008 or newer SE will not work in builds of the GE older than 2017.008 and won't be editable in SE builds older than 2017.008.

 

The changes so far are internal and invisible to the scenario author and player. In other words there is no compelling reason for you to move to the new SE right out of the gate. Eventually there will be but by that time I'll probably have changed the scenario format again.

 

To quickly summarize what does change is that each unit, group, scenario, saved game, and plane record (aircraft on the ground) will be tagged with a unique identifier. ExportDLLs can then act upon those unique identifiers to associate external data to the entities. In the case of a aircraft, perhaps someone write an ExportDLL that tracks flight hours. The ExportDLL can track flight hours against those unique identifiers (since a single unit of planes or planerecs may change over the course of a scenario).

 

From a 'Big Brother' angle, the unique Ids on scenarios and saved games could allow one to track saved games back to the scenarios they originated from and track multiple generations of the scenario itself.

 

At some point I hope and expect to add the unique identifiers to the database objects since that is extremely valuable when writing add-ons.

Release Notes so far... Don't get too excited about formation rings, I have no near-term plans to make them available in the GE and SE but they are in the data structures now.

 

HCE - 2017.008 - 2017-##-##

===========================

- Chg:0000 GE Starting to add UUIDs to game structures so that ExportDLLs can

marry external data to the internal data.

+ScenarioGroup

+Group

+ScenarioUnit

+Unit

+PlaneRec (planes on ground)

In the ScenarioGroup and Group structures, increased the

maximum number of formation zones to 256 and increased

how large they can go (previous limit was 255nm, new is

32768nm)

In the ScenarioGroup and Group structures, widened the

id field from 4 to 8 characters so that someday there

can be a greater number of groups in the game. The

ScenarioGroup id field is unused at present.

Incremented saved game version to 0x34803216.

Incremented Scenario version to 4.

Incremented DLL interface version to 20.

- Chg:0000 SE Starting to add UUIDs to game structures

(see GE section for details)

This means scenarios created with this SE cannot be played

by earlier versions/builds of the GE nor edited with earlier

SE versions/builds.