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Friday February 21, 2014 Development Update – The Importance of Planning Ahead
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Afternoon gentlemen!
Sorry, I was traveling back home last weekend, had to skip out on the update.
This Friday, my usual practice of selecting something to show on Friday morning proved very near-sighted. My plan to show the Bf.109 as it is in the engine came to a screeching halt.
As DCS WWII is part of the general DCS development environment, a bug introduced on Thursday made the entire environment look off. Very off. Everything is black and shiny.
I have screenshots and I’m still not sure what’s worse, to show them or not to show them.
This is pretty normal for a development environment, that’s what keeps it less tedious and gets the developers chuckling, but I’m not sure if publicly showing silly bugs, especially someone else’s bugs, is really appropriate.
Basically, imagine the entire game world covered with black lacquer, and you’ll get the rough idea of what everything has looked like for the past two days.
Perhaps, the best solution is to keep these for now, then do a non-Friday update early next week once the bug is fixed, where we can show what the bug looked like, and what it looks like with the bug fixed and the cockpit systems working.
Other than that, the work is progressing. The two-man team making the Bf.109 are ticking off their tasks. The systems programmer is currently finishing up the FuG 16ZY implementation, and the aerodynamics programmer is doing the MW 50.
The best bit of news for this week is that the web programmer our team is sharing with a lot of other development tasks has finally jumped back onto our web interface, the work that had lay dormant for some time. He’s been doing nothing but our stuff since Monday. I’ve made some overly optimistic predictions before, so I won’t today, but the plan is to stay on the task until it’s complete and released to the public.
On the Fw 190D-9 front, we’ve hit a bit of an unexpected barrier. While we have gigabytes of original factory documents on this aircraft, as it turns out, some of the less important systems just don’t have a good enough technical description in any of the sources available to us. It was a lot easier with the P-51 because we had access to a living breathing aircraft and to the men who fly it. With the Dora, we don’t have that luxury.
We have a list of about a dozen questions on things like the circuit breaker panel and the oxygen system and info plates like deviation tables and Baumusterkartes. We need to have one last internal discussion Monday, and then we’ll probably post these publicly. Hopefully someone in the community will have some rare bit of knowledge that we don’t that will allow us to close that final tiny gap in our references.
On a final note, several of our external team members are located in Kiev, Ukraine. I’ve been to that beautiful city many times. Clean, green, always pleasant, wonderful people, great food. One of the few cities in the world I’m always glad to visit, always sad to leave. I was actually looking forward to flying down there for a couple of days this trip, and I’m absolutely crushed by the recent events. It breaks my heart to see the streets I’ve often walked on fire.
I really hope that somehow, some way, the situation will deescalate, things will come down, and people will stop dying in the streets. How incredible to even be writing these words.
Let’s all hope for a speedy resolution to this crisis.
