[We the People] Development "diary"

More news on maps: I have finished TAC Central America Large and TAC East Coast Large.
We're nearly there, Mr. Zorg! :)

If time allows it, I'll try to create an extra new map based on Huge map size.

Priority 1:
  1. Americas Gigantic - @ignasito - @ Mr. ZorG - In progress
  2. Americas Gigantic - random @ignasito - @ Mr. ZorG - In progress
  3. Americas Huge - @ignasito @ Mr. ZorG - DONE
  4. Americas Huge - random @ignasito - @ Mr. ZorG - DONE
  5. The New World Gigantic @Mr. ZorG - DONE
  6. Two Continents Gigantic @Mr. ZorG - DONE
  7. Amerayca Gigantic @Mr. ZorG - DONE
Priority 2:
  1. Colonial America Large @ArchdukeLiet - DONE
  2. New England Huge @ArchdukeLiet - DONE
  3. North America Large @ArchdukeLiet - DONE
  4. Northwest Passage @ArchdukeLiet - DONE
  5. South America @ArchdukeLiet - DONE
  6. West Indies Huge @ArchdukeLiet - DONE
  7. Western Hemisphere Huge @ArchdukeLiet - DONE
  8. Western Hemisphere Standard @ArchdukeLiet - DONE
Priority 3:

  1. TAC Central America Large @ArchdukeLiet - DONE
  2. TAC East Coast Large @ArchdukeLiet - DONE
New maps:
  1. Undiscovered World Gigantic @ArchdukeLiet - DONE
 
Update of the current status:
We have to postpone the beta for Release 4.0 (read here)
Everything else will just cause stress and frustration in the team.
 
Well, today we have completed one more task - all maps are optimized for the future release.
ArchdukeLiet - we did it :thumbsup:

Priority 1:
  1. Americas Gigantic - @ignasito - @Mr. ZorG - DONE
  2. Americas Gigantic - random @ignasito - @Mr. ZorG - DONE
  3. Americas Huge - @ignasito @Mr. ZorG - DONE
  4. Americas Huge - random @ignasito - @Mr. ZorG - DONE
  5. The New World Gigantic @Mr. ZorG - DONE
  6. Two Continents Gigantic @Mr. ZorG - DONE
  7. Amerayca Gigantic @Mr. ZorG - DONE
Priority 2:
  1. Colonial America Large @ArchdukeLiet - DONE
  2. New England Huge @ArchdukeLiet - DONE
  3. North America Large @ArchdukeLiet - DONE
  4. Northwest Passage @ArchdukeLiet - DONE
  5. South America @ArchdukeLiet - DONE
  6. West Indies Huge @ArchdukeLiet - DONE
  7. Western Hemisphere Huge @ArchdukeLiet - DONE
  8. Western Hemisphere Standard @ArchdukeLiet - DONE
Priority 3:

  1. TAC Central America Large @ArchdukeLiet - DONE
  2. TAC East Coast Large @ArchdukeLiet - DONE
New maps:
  1. Undiscovered World Gigantic @ArchdukeLiet - DONE
and now I can start translating...
 
Awesome job, and take all the time you need to get it done. The fact that you are even talking about timelines for release, however vague, is great!

I do have one question regarding the maps. Are the custom maps also going to update upon new game creation (to include rivers and all the other new goodies), or is this just going to work on the pre-existing maps? Just curious because I've been dying to play with rivers on the custom maps.
 
Unfortunately the modder on the mapscript is not available at this moment. That means that with the (beta) launch of WTP 4.0 generating a random map will not include all new features, such as large rivers and ocean streams.

Because of that I manually updated a new random generated gigantic map to include all new features. Also I am working on a new random generated huge map. In addition the existing ‘Amerayca’ and ‘Two Continents’ maps were updated for WTP 4.0. This allows players to enjoy WTP on fictional maps nonetheless.
 
During the past week I was able to finalise a new randomised and adjusted map: Uncharted Lands Huge.

Priority 1:
  1. Americas Gigantic - @ignasito - @Mr. ZorG - DONE
  2. Americas Gigantic - random @ignasito - @Mr. ZorG - DONE
  3. Americas Huge - @ignasito @Mr. ZorG - DONE
  4. Americas Huge - random @ignasito - @Mr. ZorG - DONE
  5. The New World Gigantic @Mr. ZorG - DONE
  6. Two Continents Gigantic @Mr. ZorG - DONE
  7. Amerayca Gigantic @Mr. ZorG - DONE
Priority 2:
  1. Colonial America Large @ArchdukeLiet - DONE
  2. New England Huge @ArchdukeLiet - DONE
  3. North America Large @ArchdukeLiet - DONE
  4. Northwest Passage @ArchdukeLiet - DONE
  5. South America @ArchdukeLiet - DONE
  6. West Indies Huge @ArchdukeLiet - DONE
  7. Western Hemisphere Huge @ArchdukeLiet - DONE
  8. Western Hemisphere Standard @ArchdukeLiet - DONE
Priority 3:
  1. TAC Central America Large @ArchdukeLiet - DONE
  2. TAC East Coast Large @ArchdukeLiet - DONE
New maps:
  1. Undiscovered World Gigantic @ArchdukeLiet - DONE
  2. Uncharted Lands Huge @ArchdukeLiet - DONE
 
Moving towards launching the WTP 4.0 beta end of February, I have finalised another new randomised and adjusted map: Unknown Continents Enormous.

We had a discussion in the development team and concluded that there is quite a steep increase in map size from Huge (5800 tiles) to Gigantic (23220 tiles). Because of this, we aim to introduce an intermediate map size later on. This map size will be called Enormous with a size of 11645 tiles. This map size allows for the same amount of players as on gigantic, but other European powers can be expected to be met earlier on. Of course this can be adjusted when selecting Custom Scenario when starting your game.
As we - at this moment - could not yet update the map generator, I created a fictional map for WTP 4.0, Unknown Continents.

Priority 1:

  1. Americas Gigantic - @ignasito - @Mr. ZorG - DONE
  2. Americas Gigantic - random @ignasito - @Mr. ZorG - DONE
  3. Americas Huge - @ignasito @Mr. ZorG - DONE
  4. Americas Huge - random @ignasito - @Mr. ZorG - DONE
  5. The New World Gigantic @Mr. ZorG - DONE
  6. Two Continents Gigantic @Mr. ZorG - DONE
  7. Amerayca Gigantic @Mr. ZorG - DONE
Priority 2:
  1. Colonial America Large @ArchdukeLiet - DONE
  2. New England Huge @ArchdukeLiet - DONE
  3. North America Large @ArchdukeLiet - DONE
  4. Northwest Passage @ArchdukeLiet - DONE
  5. South America @ArchdukeLiet - DONE
  6. West Indies Huge @ArchdukeLiet - DONE
  7. Western Hemisphere Huge @ArchdukeLiet - DONE
  8. Western Hemisphere Standard @ArchdukeLiet - DONE
Priority 3:
  1. TAC Central America Large @ArchdukeLiet - DONE
  2. TAC East Coast Large @ArchdukeLiet - DONE
New maps:
  1. Undiscovered World Gigantic @ArchdukeLiet - DONE
  2. Uncharted Lands Huge @ArchdukeLiet - DONE
  3. Unknown Continents Enormous @ArchdukeLiet - DONE
 
A new intermediate mapsize is a great idea. While I enjoy the historical accuracy of the gigantic map, the logistical challange (and load time) are simply too much. On the other hand, colonies larger than states on huge maps makes little sense. Looking forward to playing a historical enormous map. Thank you for your effort.
 
We had sadly noticed that multi-threading - although it inceases performance - had caused serious OOS issues in MP games .
Thus those and also other OOS issues are currently being analyzed and fixed to make the mod MP friendly again. :thumbsup:

----------

Since the mod was basically unplayable in MP WTP 4.0 beta has been postponed until MP is more stable again.
Also some other bugs recently introduced by changes e.g. to Founding Fathers are currently also being fixed.

SP games already works nicely but e.g. improvements for texts and translations also are still ongoing.
I would even claim that there is no single major bug like e.g. a CTD known at the moment - just minor stuff.

From time to time there is still a minor improvement done like e.g. display of Mouse-Over texts being corrected.
But it has really been a while since a notable new bug has been reported - other than the Founding Father bug mentioned above.

Currently there are about 100+ players anyways that already grabbed "New Hope" from our GIT and play it.
So we are actually already quite certain that it is stable and nicely playable in SP since a lot of testing is already happening.

----------

Summary:


There is currently no ETA for the beta release since the MP OOS issues would result in too many frustrated players.
It is hard to estimate how long it takes to fix those but once those are resolved there is no more reason to hold back public WTP 4.0 beta.

A small scale beta is already happening since many players already grabbed the branch from our GIT repository.
But those are just about 100+ players and before we go large with probably 2000+ players we still want to fix MP.
 
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People have had problems installing the mod correctly, which results in various issues, including, but not limited to failure to run. It's getting worse as from now on dll files needs to be added too. This is a side effect of using TBB as a tool to manage spreading the AI workload across multiple CPU cores. Still we benefit from using TBB as presumably Intel knows a lot more about how to efficiently spread workload across CPU cores than we ever will. TBB does work on AMD even through it's released by Intel.

I have added error messages at startup for 3 different install issues.
  1. Installed mod in My Documents
  2. Failure to compile the dll file
  3. Dll dependencies (like tbb.dll) not found
1: installing in My Documents has a bug in the exe where depending on the windows username some files might not be read in the mod. This doesn't occur if Mods in the game fonder is used instead and now the mod will provide a warning at startup if the wrong location is used. This is a problem for all mods, including BTS mods. Some BTS files can't be modded at all unless it's in the game folder. Presumably it's the same for Colonization, but so far no mod has modded those files.

2+3: those two are more tricky to deal with. The game is unable to tell those two apart because since our dll file requires tbb.dll, if that file is not found, our dll file won't get loaded and the game reverts back to using the vanilla dll file. This means the code is unable to tell those two apart. Not telling those two apart isn't a major issue through.

What is more of an issue is that failing to load our dll file means we can't use the dll file to post an error if this happens. Instead I found a place in python, which runs whenever python is initialized. The issue is that it's limited what can be seen from python at this point. The correct solution would be to add some "is vanilla" functionality to the dll, which python can ask, but since we can't mod vanilla, all I have to work with is what is available in vanilla. After pondering a bit about that one I realized vanilla has 100 widget types and we currently have 121. This means all I have to do is ask if there are precisely 100 widget types and if so, then python will know our dll file didn't load. It's a bit of a hack, but sometimes you have to do whatever you can based on the options you have available. It works.

Another issue with using python to detect errors is if the user has disabled displaying python error, then the new error message won't get displayed. Even worse, not showing errors is the default, through our dll file changes this setting. However if the computer has never run our dll file, odds are that it won't show. Can't think of anything to do about that. At least it will make a popup, which says "Failed Initializing Python" so at least there is some sort of error display.

I updated install instructions.txt to tell how to install now and lists the known error messages and what to do about them.

Now we are one step closer to a release. A release is no good if the people downloading the mod can't get it to work.
 
I'll just wait until release. I've tried multiple times to get this to work and it continues to tell me MSVCR100.dll is missing. I don't know enough to figure out how to fix that, so I'm giving up. I can be patient. Hopefully the actual release will work as easily as the previous ones and this same issue won't occur.
 
I'll just wait until release. I've tried multiple times to get this to work and it continues to tell me MSVCR100.dll is missing. I don't know enough to figure out how to fix that, so I'm giving up. I can be patient. Hopefully the actual release will work as easily as the previous ones and this same issue won't occur.
That's the second time today I hear about this problem and I haven't had people having this problem before. The issue is that you need Microsoft Visual C++ 2010 Service Pack 1 Redistributable Package to run anything compiled with visual C++ 2010. The 32 bit version is needed because rather than using what your CPU needs, you need the one matching the application in question and ages ago somebody picked 32 bit for fastdep.exe.

This isn't even a new thing. Fastdep.exe was the de facto standard for compiling mods when I started modding so it has been in use for likely more than a decade. No idea why it is starting to act up now.
 
It worked! Thank you! March Madness AND New Hope tonight. Woohoo!
 
3 days ago I received a report of buying used ships from the king causes network games to go out of sync. Indeed it does and it turns out that it has two bugs, one in asking for a random ship and another one for actually buying it. I just committed a fix for both those bugs so it should work now.

This has however made me realize that there might be other similar OOS bugs in diplomacy so now I have decided to read through the entire file to check each function call for OOS issues. This will likely push back the release for a bit, but given the effort put into network stability and the fact that it seems to be used quite a bit, releasing with this as a known issue seems wrong.
 
I can no longer understand that. How many network games are actually played in relation to single games? 1 in 1000? Or even 1 in 10.000 played games? Or is the relationship even worse? But for that, again every single player has to wait and wait and wait? I can no longer understand that. I think it's nice that the mod is being developed further, but as a developer, can't you understand that as a player you want something from it too? After all, it's been years since the last release.
I think I'm not the only one who hopes every day that the new changes will be released at some point. And it's a bit of torture when it keeps being postponed. In addition, more bugs that have remained undiscovered until now will surely be discovered after the release.
I think it's great that you are developing the mod further and I'm grateful for the work, time and patience you put into it as a developer, but please also think of the people who want to play your mod at some point. Personally, I prefer a mod with errors that are then corrected than waiting forever. As a fan of the mod, that's not very nice at the moment.

Sorry for saying something, as such I'm just trying to read along as I don't have the skills to contribute. That's why I'm more of a silent reader here so as not to disturb you. But as I said before, as a player you wait for a release every day and I was just too disappointed and that's why I wrote something.
 
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