Question: Battle dates: year, month, day, hour?

[DRG]

It is possible to have more battles than days in a month in a campaign but I would also say it would be very VERY rare that anyone would actually do that.

The simplest solution would be to tell people it won't work if they build a campaign with more than 30 battles a month.... I doubt anyone will complain and for campaigns that do have multiple battles in a month then the first one would be 1..etc etc for "dating" purposes.

SOMEONE will always find a way to push the game beyond the limits then say it's broken. Most though have more reasonable expectations

[ErikCumps]

Originally Posted by scorpio_rocks

It is possible to generate a campaign lasting 1 month with 200 battles in it...

Oh, I see.

Well, if 200 battles a month makes sense to you, who am I to argue with that.

But, to be honest, this is not what warcab was designed to support. With 200 battles in one month,
battle dates lose their meaning both for battle disambiguation and for unit chronology.

Some significant additional development would be needed to move warcab away from battle dates
(for winSPWW2 only) in a maintainable and robust way.

Erik

[ErikCumps]

Originally Posted by DRG

It is possible to have more battles than days in a month in a campaign but I would also say it would be very VERY rare that anyone would actually do that.

The simplest solution would be to tell people it won't work if they build a campaign with more than 30 battles a month.... I doubt anyone will complain and for campaigns that do have multiple battles in a month then the first one would be 1..etc etc for "dating" purposes.

SOMEONE will always find a way to push the game beyond the limits then say it's broken. Most though have more reasonable expectations

DRG, thanks, I find your suggestion quite sensible!

This is indeed what I was considering: an automatic battle date day 'assignment',
based on the day of the previous battle in the same month. As long as there are
no more battles in a month than days in that month, warcab does not risk running
out of days to assign...

I suppose it shouldn't be too hard to introduce this in warcab...

The other thing that needs looking into is the battle disambiguation.

This is what is known about each battle:

• a battle start year and month
• a battle location string
• the battle mission strings of the player and the opponent
• the OOB ID of the opponent

I am hoping that the combination of these elements would be enough to uniquely
identify any of less than 30 battles in a month. Of course, there is no 100% guarantee,
but if the odds are good warcab could indeed only require additional input from the user
when it detects a (then unlikely) battle ambiguity...

So, the question is, is the above a reasonable assumption to make?

Erik

BTW: sorry for all the naive (or stupid/silly/...) questions. I do not have any background
with winSPWW2, so I am not at all aware of what it can do and how it is usually done...

Erik

[DRG]

When a campaign game is saved in mid turn the turn is recorded along with both nations and the month and year as well as the battle location and the mission type

Does the program know when it starts recording a campaign this campaign is set up to run X number of Battles between Month Y and month Z ?

[ErikCumps]

Originally Posted by DRG

When a campaign game is saved in mid turn the turn is recorded along with both nations and the month and year as well as the battle location and the mission type

Does the program know when it starts recording a campaign this campaign is set up to run X number of Battles between Month Y and month Z ?

DRG, I have to thank you again!

Your question has put me on a different line of thinking about the problem and I may have found an elegant solution.

Let me explain.

Note: all of this is based on the assumption that the data extracted from the savegame is correct.
But everything that warcab 'knows' about a savegame has been discovered by trial and error and
experimentation and not all of the data is currently understood. None of this has ever been officialy
declared to be correct.


This is some of the campaign-related information known by warcab from section 37 of the savegame:

offset	size	type	description

0x0075	1	UINT1	Campaign battles fought
...
0x00E8	2	UINT2	Campaign max battles
0x00EA	2	UINT2	Campaign start date month
0x00EC	2	UINT2	Campaign start date year (-1900)
0x00EE	2	UINT2	Campaign end date month
0x00F0	2	UINT2	Campaign end date year (-1900)

So, when a savegame is to be added to a campaign: if it can be more-or-less verified first that,
indeed, the savegame belongs to the campaign, than I believe the 'Campaign battles fought' can
be used as an indication of the relative position of the battle in the campaign, neatly avoiding
the problem of figuring out where the battle belongs on the timeline based on the incomplete
battle date, or on the behavior of the user.

Note: again, based on the assumption that this data is correctly interpreted from the savegame.

To be reasonably certain that a savegame belongs to a campaign, I think it will suffice to verify that:

• the player's OOB ID matches
• the count of core formations matches
• the count of core units matches
• the campaign start year/month matches
• the campaign end year/month matches
• the campaign max battles matches

Of course, this verification will not prevent mixing savegames from two different but otherwise identical
campaigns, but would it be unreasonable to require of the user to keep track of which savegames belong
to which campaigns and to avoid mixing them in warcab?

I will consider this idea a bit more, but it certainly looks promising and in terms of work quite feasible.

Erik

[KAreil]

I feel stupid for asking...but what is the "War Cabinet tool" you are talking about and what does it do?

[DRG]

Look here

http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/showthread.php?t=52169

[ErikCumps]

Originally Posted by KAreil

I feel stupid for asking...but what is the "War Cabinet tool" you are talking about and what does it do?

No problem.

Warcab is a tool to record and track battles in an SPWaW campaign, or to
record and track turns in standalone battles from scenarios. It is inspired by
Campaign Watcher.

And I am currently working on adding support for winSPWW2 to warcab.

For more information, I'd like to refer you to this thread, starting from post #6.

Erik