When will be the next release?

[Hertzila]

Only 8 soldiers are on duty at a time. The others are sleeping, taking a shower or in hospital etc., far away from their combat equipment. So they are *ordered* not to participate in the combat and hide instead.

Am I right at expecting this limit to raise to 15/18 (the space of the largest dropship, without/with UGVs) when the engine supports it?
The explanation is actually believeable too, though usually in such a situation everybody would be sent to fight, despite how unprepared.

[Marte]

Only 8 soldiers are on duty at a time. The others are sleeping, taking a shower or in hospital etc., far away from their combat equipment. So they are *ordered* not to participate in the combat and hide instead.

we can give this information to player ? maybe on faq here on forum ?

[Duke]

Feel free to make it a FAQ forum entry if you expect the people to find and read it there
IIRC there's also a FAQ in our wiki...

However, that explanation is not part of the official story(yet). It's merely a quick suggestion from a stupid coder(TM).

[Destructavator]

On a related note, what is actually holding us back from breaking the eight-unit limit at this point?  Is it the code?  Or the (lack of proper) GUI?  Or both?

[Duke]

As we already have more than 8 actors on the alien and civ teams, there shouuld be no prob with the general code. Afaik it's mostly a GUI thing (and some GUI-related code maybe).
AND a matter of game balance of course.

[BTAxis]

Discussion moved to GUI design; split and moved to the Artwork subforum.

[geever]

As we already have more than 8 actors on the alien and civ teams, there shouuld be no prob with the general code. Afaik it's mostly a GUI thing (and some GUI-related code maybe).
AND a matter of game balance of course.

It's not just the gui but code as well. At least on campaign side.

-geever

[Duke]

Do you think it will be much work or difficult to overcome this limit ?

As least this tells me that we should have the ability to test with *9* soldiers asap.

[geever]

Do you think it will be much work or difficult to overcome this limit ?

As least this tells me that we should have the ability to test with *9* soldiers asap.

We can try this in 2.4 but we should not include any new features in 2.3 IMHO. The release is delayed quite much already and I'm also not aware all the problems it can cause so can't predict the amount of work with it.

-geever

[Edi]

We can try this in 2.4 but we should not include any new features in 2.3 IMHO. The release is delayed quite much already and I'm also not aware all the problems it can cause so can't predict the amount of work with it.

-geever

I'm no coder, but I've got some experience testing stuff and I agree that it should be left to the 2.4 development version. There's no telling how many things such a change could break and in what ways, so it's better to get a working stable release out now and only then start fiddling with things.

With Shrapnel/Illwinter we had to recall one patch for Dominions 3 in testing phase because it broke the entire game (CTD on startup, no workaround) and there was another patch that had something changed where it caused a CTD whenever you did a specific completely legal action, so it had to be emergency patched right afterward.

For comparison, the suggested change of upping the limits of soldiers is somewhere in between the two Dominions examples in terms of how much it changes, if I'm reading all the references by the coders right.

[Duke]

I wasn't talking about releasing 8+ actors as a 2.3 feature. I was merely talking about creating the ability to test it and figure out which parts of the code need to be changed.
Some places may be easy and can be changed now, others not. But even if a change looks touchy, we might consider to carefully change it now because there is a lot of testing before the release of 2.3

Also, I don't know how long we'll have to wait until those 6 articles arrive and 2.3 is released...

[BTAxis]

Maybe make a new branch for it if need be?

[Duke]

If it seems to be too touchy maybe.
But that would give away the benefit of having it tested thoroughly.

I'd suggest to make the 'opener' (ie. the 9th button) a diff file for devs, and test only the resulting changes (ie. overcoming the hardcoded limit) in trunk for a while.

[Kildor]

Let`s wait merging save_break branch? And after that (and bughunting) we can make two thing: create branch 2_3_stable, and start play with trunk?

[geever]

Let`s wait merging save_break branch? And after that (and bughunting) we can make two thing: create branch 2_3_stable, and start play with trunk?

I agree.
Also we @all should focus on stabilizing now IMHO.

-geever