Persistant Battle of Britain Campaign Dev Log

New code added to automatically reset the map to July 10th historical conditions if and when one side or the other achieves full victory. There's another piece of info in the Battle Report that will indicate how many times the RAF and Luftwaffe have won the battle.

The mission is now one and truly 'hands off'. You can tweak the initialization files to whatever scenario you like.

Added in 5 new targets and 2 new bomber missions

Paddington (Thanks ATAG_Freya!)
Shoreditch (Thanks ATAG_Freya!)
Chelmsford Fuel Depot
Slough Fuel Depot
Salisbury Fuel Depot

Bomber missions added in to Guildford and Shoreditch
Several other bomber missions updated.

Also added the British counterpart to Sim-Goring: Sim-London Times!

The RAF Battle Report now also includes a little blurb regarding the current state of the British morale.

(EDIT: I've actually had an idea just now to make the Red briefing a virtual 'front page' of the Times which would include various articles about the goings on in the war. Could even do the same for the Blue side. I'm not sure that the code would be too difficult but the sheer volume of writing involved to create enough content would probably be too much to get done before July 10th. I'll think about it and probably add that to the mission as a 2.0 version or, God help me, add it to the next map I decide to create)

A few bugs discovered this morning with the recent additions. All should be fixed.

The following targets are the last remaining targets to be built for the map:

Factories: Farnborough, Rochester, Tunbridge Wells, Reading
Civilian: Croydon, Portsmouth, Redhill, Southend
Fuel: Kenley Sector Depot, Biggin Hill Sector Depot, Tangmere Sector Depot
Refineries: 4 more of these placed around the map (not sure where yet)

Also made some tweaks to the way fuel reserves and fuel depots work so that Red can't just let things sit at light damage. Fuel will now 'leak' from damaged depots and won't stop leaking until fully repaired. A fully functioning refinery system plus regular fuel convoys will offset this, so the Luftwaffe must think tactically.

Added in the remaining merchant convoys. 7 possible convoys now that will occur at random and go to different ports on the map.

Made some tweaks to the radar a bit. You may have to wait a bit longer for a raid to show up under coverage now. Should still have enough time to scramble and intercept incoming attackers though.

Tweaked the Blue safe pilot ratio slightly. Hopefully that'll help Blue a bit.

Mission time now reduced to 4 hour restarts. We'll see how that works.

Found and fixed a bug that was preventing the Battersea, Greenwich, and Chelmsford targets from taking damage properly.

Updated the Uxbridge Chain Home control tower to correctly reflect changes made to the individual towers Luton, Pinetree, and Angel.

Built the last three fuel depot targets: Aldershot, Ashford, and Redhill.

4 more fuel refineries to go
4 more aircraft factories to go
A few more civilian targets to go (maybe 2 or 3)

...and it'll be pretty much ready to go but for the tweaking.

All remaining refinery targets complete!

I hope you are getting some sleep!!!

Fixed a bug with end of battle turnover - battle should now end properly on Sept 17th.

Completed the remaining factories! All targets complete.

Remaining work:

Add last targets to the map
Create bomber raids for the new targets
Add a few little surprise code bits to keep things interesting.

Great work!
Is there on the server tool for checking the remaining time of the mission, as Atag And what about the duration of one day in the mission, when it will start of July 10th? How long will be one war day in hours?

The way to check the time remaining in the mission is to:

a) Connect to a radar control tower using Tab 4 menus
b) Request the weather and date info from the tower
c) The tower will inform you what hour the day's operations will end
d) Compare the operations end time to the current time using your dashboard clock in the cockpit

We don't have a
We'll hopefully have a full server manual prepared for players soon.

The duration of the mission is 4 hours each 'day'. I will be creating other 'versions' of the battle for different time zones (6 of them) so that each timezone can play it's own battle of britain and not have to worry that players across the globe are destroying their targets without them being able to fight back or vice versa.

The timezones will be based around a starting time of 9:00pm Eastern (Toronto time) with the first campaign mission starting at 9:00pm Eastern July 10th.

I'll need to monitor the system to make sure that Steam restarts etc don't put the sequence out of whack, but it's been mostly good. Players can help by sending me a message if there's an issue with the map currently up. There will be a way to tell if the map currently running is your timezone or not.

We'll probably have the following 'zones':

Eastern North America
Western North America
Australia / East Asia
Russia / Central Asia
Eastern Europe
Western Europe

This is very interesting. Will players is different timezones follow similar strategies or will their strategies diverge significantly? This could be the subject of a virtual social experiment - anyone feel a thesis coming on!

Wolverine, I take my hat off to you - the effort you have put into this "project" is above and beyond. In navy speak "BRAVO ZULU" (translation is WELL DONE)

|450|Devil wrote:This is very interesting. Will players is different timezones follow similar strategies or will their strategies diverge significantly? This could be the subject of a virtual social experiment - anyone feel a thesis coming on!

Wolverine, I take my hat off to you - the effort you have put into this "project" is above and beyond. In navy speak "BRAVO ZULU" (translation is WELL DONE)

Thanks Dev. It's been a lot of fun learning how to do this stuff as I go. I've had tons of help from everyone and it shows.

Just make sure that you guys don't abandon us in our timezone. We need the help!

Tonight I updated the mission script to load all targets, including all report and repair options.

Once we have the final bomber missions completed and scripted in, I'll finish the Luftwaffe Bomber Operations Manual for the Blue team to be able to review the various bomber missions.

I might have a few other code tricks to add before the campaign starts, but as I've said before those are secret (shh!).

Made a small tweak to the radar.

Increased Obelisk's radius so that it can be accessed from more airfields for the Luftwaffe side.

Added new 'voice' responses.

"Clear, you have no contact with the enemy": Now if there are no contacts to report, you'll hear this. Small difference (you got a text response before) but now you don't need to worry about missing the report.

"Let me know when ready": When the ground controller is ready to receive another request for vectoring, you'll get this audio and a small message to let you know. Should take the guess work out of hitting tab 4 over and over in order to know when you can use it.

Only 10 days to go!

I will be making some changes to Sim-Goering soon that will change his opinion of the war effort. Instead of being overjoyed with a terrible ratio, he will more adequately express his displeasure with poor pilot return ratios. Keep him unhappy for too long and eventually Sim-Hitler will get involved. The goal is to give the Blue side better feedback on the pilot loss ratio condition for losing the war.

Also, there may be some changes in the way raids are sent over. Once it's in place and tested I'll post more.

Secret code revealed!

New system uploaded to the server. Blue must now recon a target before they can launch an AI raid to it.

There's nothing fancy about recon'ing the target: just fly over it. Smaller targets are harder to fly over directly so you may need to get lower to get it right. If you get it, it should be obvious.

Reconn'd targets will be available in Raid selection the following day.

I think once Sim-Goering is fixed, I'm going to sign off on the features for this mission. It's already getting hard to keep track of all the bits and pieces...

Wolverine wrote:Blue must now recon a target before they can launch an AI raid to it.

Nice! Does this completely hide the option from the Blue menu, or will it still appear as a locked menu option?

StiC wrote:

Wolverine wrote:Blue must now recon a target before they can launch an AI raid to it.

Nice! Does this completely hide the option from the Blue menu, or will it still appear as a locked menu option?

It doesn't hide the option, or even hide the number of targets per sector. But each target shows up in the menu as "TARGET RECON REQUIRED" unless it's been reconn'd and then it'll show up as the target name; "Dover Docks" etc.

It's not a particularly sophisticated system, but it works. Seeing as most pilots know the targets by now, it may even be moot. However, during testing I had to get a little lower to Dover Docks to trigger it and got nailed by flak and had to bail so there might be a particular skill to this that could be fun to fine tune. Recon flights will certainly count against the safe returns ratio.

Wolverine wrote: But each target shows up in the menu as "TARGET RECON REQUIRED" unless it's been reconn'd and then it'll show up as the target name; "Dover Docks" etc.

Still awesome though. Anything that adds to the fog of war.

StiC wrote:

Wolverine wrote: But each target shows up in the menu as "TARGET RECON REQUIRED" unless it's been reconn'd and then it'll show up as the target name; "Dover Docks" etc.

Still awesome though. Anything that adds to the fog of war.

Once a target is reconn'd it'll remain a valid raid target for the rest of the campaign. So it's really a one time thing. It does encourage a certain 'phase' of the war though, where recon flights are more regular. Should help vary the gameplay a bit, which I was getting a bit worried about. Endless 9-18 ai bomber raids might have gotten tedious, but at least now we need to decide if we respond to a recon flight or not.

Timezone specific map instances have been added in. There are now 6 distinct 'worlds' being played through rotation, which one is running is identifiable through the briefing screen.

The timing will be a little off to start. I'll reset things at 5:00pm today to run the Western Europe map which should roll over to the Eastern NA map at 9pm, then the Western NA map at 1pm, etc.

Wolverine wrote:

Blue must now recon a target before they can launch an AI raid to it.

I like it, as far as the different time zones go, I would assume that in my (our) case it would be necessary to recon after 9pm as this would allow the targets overflown to show up on the map in play in our time zone...correct?

Also...we had entertained the thought of just fighter sweeps across the channel, this now will change to armed reconnaissance missions.

A nice addition!

ATAG_Dice wrote:

Wolverine wrote:

Blue must now recon a target before they can launch an AI raid to it.

I like it, as far as the different time zones go, I would assume that in my (our) case it would be necessary to recon after 9pm as this would allow the targets overflown to show up on the map in play in our time zone...correct?

Yes, any recon done for your timezone must be completed during the mission that is being run in your timezone. The missions are completely separate from each other in all respects.