SMP on Stracciatella

So maybe v1.13 isn’t quite dead after all. There is some discussion going on about SMP which is short for Stable Modding Platform. While 1.13 features everything anyone has ever come up with (including the kitchen sink) SMP is supposed to be a more serious attempt to make JA2 moddable.

Although the idea of developing a SMP has been around for quite a while now, it hasn’t really kicked off yet. But at least there is some activity in the public forums and I hope the same is true for the private ones. One thing that caught my attention is the plan to use the Stracciatella project as a foundation to base SMP upon.

Compared to v1.13, Stracciatella has evolved in parallel but largely unnoticed. The average Joe might have never heard of it because it doesn’t feature any fancy modifications like 1.13. Quite contrary, it preserves the vanilla game-play and brings cross-platform support and tons of bug fixes and code refactoring. This makes Stracciatella a perfect starting point for SMP.

Because seriously — where else would you begin with SMP? V1.13 is totally screwed up. Because it sucks so much, there is a demand for another stable modding platform in the first place. Which leaves Vanilla JA2 and Stracciatella of which the latter performs considerably well. Because it is portable. Has fixed lots of bugs. Uses SDL. Replaced those weird assembly blitters. Etc. etc.

The only thing to take into account is Visual Studio’s lack of support for C99 which could give our Windows developers a hard time with Stracciatella. But don’t let that stop you. Frankly, I don’t see SMP getting started anytime soon but I really wish people start caring. Please, take it seriously this time and don’t turn it into v1.13 – 2.0.

v1.13 is dead, or isn’t it?

Where is the progress? Is there any progress? Little things have changed since the last major release in April. Sure, there is the usual fixing a bug here, tweaking something there. But apart from that both the forums and the repository log aren’t featuring any serious improvements to be in the pipeline.

The discussion about a milestone is now called “Stable Modding Platform” and there even is a dedicated official forum in the 1.13 section over at Bear’s Pit. “Finally”, one might think, but if you take a deeper look you’ll notice how vacant it is. Some half-baked ideas, a call out to all the programmers to join, that’s it. The feature request forum however is busy as always…

“We don’t have enough coders”, they say. “And those who are still active do what they like to do – not what should be done”, they say. Seems that by definition things that should be done never actually get done if anything is done at all. “We can’t force the coders to do anything. We are thankful that they spend their precious spare time contributing something at all”, they say.

They are right. Of course they can’t force anyone into anything. Of course the coders prefer feeding sweeties to the community instead of investing less glorious code into the long run. This describes pretty much how additions find their way into 1.13. Make something the community can see – let it be a bloated new inventory or some hilarious description boxes, anything will do – and they’ll love it. Love you.

You know what? The community sucks.

The community successfully prevents any real improvements. That’s how they got educated. There has never been a leader who drives 1.13 into one particular direction. A decider who separates reasonable ideas from all the bullshit. A visionary who knows the value of a moddable platform. There were people who constantly voiced their opinion. Who didn’t remain mute about the evolution of 1.13. But they were unheard over all the yelling by the masses which demanded that 1.13 produces yet another pointless feature. This is how we got to what we have today.

Because no one was inspirational enough to make the community accept less glittering advancements. If that had been the case I’m sure there would have been coders who’d have enjoyed implementing those things in question.

I tend to doubt that the 1.13 project can regain the fire of the early days before it lost all its potential at some point. Maybe it’s okay to call 1.13 officially failed.

v1.13 Wildfire 6.06 Beta released

For quite some time now many people used to hack their 1.13 installation and throw in WF6 maps to have some kind of Wildfire experience on top of 1.13 gameplay. Now there is something even better – the new beta of the WF6 mod for 1.13.

This isn’t exactly a direct port but rather the best of WF modified to match 1.13. From the FAQ:

- There are some new special LBE items included and an entirely new weapon class is available through Bobby Ray..
- Several mercs from Wildfire replace less popular mercs from the classic version.
- In some maps you might find sandbag barriers on roof tops, serving as cover for enemy soldiers (or for you, of course).
- Balime extended to 4 sectors.
- Estoni extended to include the junkyard.
- Meduna was made big. yeah, really big. so big in fact, that there are 3 seperate blocks to train militia in.
- Added the city of Palmas, which includes 3 sectors.

There is a German version available as well.

For details and download links visit this thread at BP’s.

Interview with the v1.13 Team

In case you missed the relaunch of JA Galaxy you really should take a look at the new site. While this is great there is one thing especially interesting namely an interview with the core members of the v1.13 team.

The ten guys developing your favorite JA2 modification answer eleven questions sharing a little insight into who they are, what they are contributing to the project and what they are looking forward to when it comes to the future of v1.13.

Give it a read!

What’s coming next?

With the New Inventory being released with 2085 and JA2 1.13 hitting some kind of a milestone, one might ask what else is down the road to keep us excited when playing v1.13.

While the 2085 release primarily focused on bug fixing and incorporating the New Inventory system, this time there is quite a lot of new stuff going on lately. If you check Bear’s Pit you’ll notice a couple of things that are worked on in public. So let’s have a look at these.

The most impressive feature in the pipeline surely is the multiplayer modification. Don’t quote me on this, but IIRC the multiplayer extension will be the key enhancement for the next big release. This project is in beta currently, so chances are pretty good that we are going to see something final in the not-too-distant future. Development builds are randomly available which means you already have the chance to try it out.  This is promising a whole lot of fun.

Then there is something for the modders out there: prof.dat externalization. Not only is this the task to XMLify yet another binary data but to break all the hard-coded structures in behind. From what you can read in the hot discussed thread the project seems well on track and first results in the shape of a couple of screenshots are already available. This one will be highly appreciated among modders since it has been demanded for a long time already and really adds value to the game when it comes to moddability.

Another big hit for the modders might be the development going by the name “Laptop files section” which describes pretty well what it is all about. There is not a whole lot said about it yet, but externalizing the file items in the laptop will come in handy for the modders. Let’s see how this continues and what creative people will use it for.

The next one aimed at modders is the airport externalization. This one would remove several restrictions for airport maps. Often requested and to some extend finished the undertaking seems quite dead now judged by the forum thread. The code however continues to live in a SVN branch which is kept up-to-date with the trunk continuously. Hopefully, it makes it into the next major update.

The last one in the queue is the Big Maps project, which allows one to create tactical maps of virtually unlimited size. I’m not sure about its progress, though. As far as I understand they have an editor supporting larger maps but only some alphas of the actual game. Definitely an interesting project nonetheless.

What I can see is that finally there are some serious attempts to address at least a few of countless issues modders struggle with. This change in development – if it is one – will increase v1.13’s attractiveness for mods and make it more of the platform it always wanted to be. Carry on, v1.13, we are watching you!

2085 – New version released feat. New Inventory

All waiting is over. Finally, the new JA2 v1.13 version has been released.

Here is an excerpt from the changelog:

- New Inventory
-  A lot of new shortcut
- Items and Weapons
- Full German and Russian translation
- Allowed militia to wear camo
- Enabled music in windowed mode
- New options in ja2.ini
- New options in ja2_options.ini
- Added missing description texts for IMP skill rooftop sniping and camouflage

Installation packages are available for English, German and Russian versions at the v1.13 Wiki.

Congratulations and thank you very much for all your great work, dear 1.13 team!

Own personal rant: Still only stupid installers …

No more installers, please

With the new full release promised to arrive this month I’d like to address the distribution issue. Last time I checked the latest official release (1080) you had basically only two options to get your hands on it. First, downloading the installer program or, second, download via subversion. Since going through the whole SVN hassle is quite annoying the installer clearly would be the preferred way of getting 1.13 onto your machine.

But honestly, the last release’s installer sucked big time. That dumb software trying to be smart annoyed the hell out of me. It would not even install where I wanted it to. Instead, it checked the destination folder for a ja2.exe file assuming you’re that much of an idiot to not even know where to install that thing. This eventually got me firing up notepad and creating an empty file just to satisfy the installer. Besides from that there were also smaller issues but forgive me for not remembering the details. Afair it also created registry entries for un-installing purposes as well as start menu shortcuts without giving you an option to uncheck them or something, but in this case chances are that I don’t remember correctly. I’d like to see a tool that just gives you the damn files and nothing more.

In conclusion what I’d like to ask for is as simple as offering a zip/rar/anything-as-long-as-it-doesn’t-self-extract archive in addition to the installer packages. Please, no more SVN exports.

Windowed mode command line option

When v1.13 introduced windowed mode it came with the SCREEN_MODE_WINDOWED option in the ja2.ini file. There is, however, another way to toggle between windowed and full screen mode.

Appending the /WINDOW switch to the program call overrides that ini option and starts the game in windowed mode. Accordingly, the /FULLSCREEN switch creates a full screen window ignoring what you have set your ini to.

Keep in mind, though, that windowed mode still only works if you have set your desktop environment color depth to 16bpp.

For the sake of completeness, there is a last command line option /NOSOUND which obviously disables the sound. May come in handy when debugging the code or developing a modification.

Compiling horrors

Whenever you download the latest 1.13 sourcecode the "VS-hell" begins. There are solution and project files for VS6, 2003 and 2005 – and yes, two of them are always out of date. But even worse, because of those stupid pre-compiled JA2 headers there are two places the coders will have to update if they include additional headers. And guess what, for any reason they don’t all the time. Now we’re up to 6 different configurations at least. This makes it ridiculously hard for everyone new to the code to get started.

So why don’t you drop support for VS6 and 2003 and just provide the files for VS2005 and 2008? These two newer versions also come as "express editions" for free, so it shouldn’t be a problem for anyone to switch. Moreover, 2005 and 2008 use the same project files which means one solution for 2005 and another one for 2008 but they can share the project files. This eliminates the need of keeping several versions up to date.

Then anyone who’s interested in the project can grab the code and compile it without a hassle and without spending a few hundred bucks on the out-dated VS2003 which the majority of contributors uses. Any problems I missed?

Get rid of savegame encryption

Saving games without encryption wouldn’t hurt anybody since, to my knowledge, there isn’t any savegame editor working with v1.13 anyway.

The benefit, however, would be enabling advanced users to hex their savegames easily. This would eliminate the need to fire up the full-blown debugger just in order to fix a little thingy causing a problem in the game or you’ve changed your mind about. Think for example of IMP creation. There is a tool which handles this but it has flaws, too. Or adjusting game options half-way through. Anything really.

Please do.