Hmph. A very grumpy Herr Burt is ready to surface again. But I don't promise to smile. I see there have been a couple of questions directed towards me and I'm sorry that I didn't reply. I've been franticaly trying to salvage the DOE server and haven't even checked the forums for a couple of days.
On Sunday and Monday the server began spitting out a horrid stream of error messages and blue screens of death. I truly feared the whole house of cards was coming undone. It seems that several things in the way the code works have changed in the patch between now and when I ran 4Power, and thus concepts I thought I had proven suddenly needed workarounds. (In a moment of pure evil, the programmers arranged for these concepts to still work in skirmish mode so I didn't catch the changes early. Bastards!) In addition, you wouldn't *believe* how much damage a space character can do to your shiplist when what you really needed was a tab character, or how hard it is to discover that this is your problem. Shipedit is a great tool, but the interface makes it far too easy to accidentally use the space bar to clear fields.
The good news is, I think I have everything working again and I should still be able to start on Friday. I am eternally grateful to my girlfriend, who decided it would be fun to help out by doing all the web work for me. (This is saving me several days of effort at a critical time.)
The bad news is:
1) People are going to have to put up with 11th hour releases of maps, VC's, and downloads. Perhaps on Thursday. Perhaps even <gasp> early on Friday. (At least you'll only have to download once!)
2) Much as I hate it, it appears that you *will* be able to launch a single fighter from your drogue bay. Since I had this beaten in the past and *still* have it beaten within the current skirmish game, I am a little upset. However this does have some precedent in SFB, and I usually find that a lone fighter is about as useful as <insert French joke here> so I'm not going to stress over it anymore. Besides, my sledgehammer is getting chipped and I'm running out of monitors.
3) The Gorn will say they love the Federation, the Romulans will say they hate the Federation, and events performed by the Federation will be reported in the news as having been done by the Federation. However, the Federation hexes may be filled with tht old "don't ask don't tell" color instead of their natural blue. I swear I used to be able to stick donor ships into the shiplist anyplace I pleased, so long as all their fields were filled out properly. Now, however, all ships *must* appear as a solid block with their relevant race, and (as in the past) all donor ships must appear in the list before their recipient copy. This means that the Federation (who come first in the list) are now the only race in the game to whom you can't give PF's in the D2. (You can still give them PF's in skirmish mode). This is kind of a neat 'feature', since the Federation is the only empire never to have built a PF. However it makes for a serious pain in the backside when you are using the PF engine to model your drogues. (sigh).
Anyways, I appear to be well-poised for recovery, so dont fret.
Happy Warmongering!
-Herr Burt
Topic: DOE: The breath of life (Read 1227 times)