Saturday morning, 1.30.2 was released.

The full ReadMe is below.

================================
WWIIOL - Battleground Europe
================================
Version 1.31.2.255 (6-26-09)

Infantry:
- Fixed moving with binos bug

UI/HUD:
- Added code to save the minimap scale over HUD resets
- Fixed "engine dead" readout

There were some issues that stemmed mainly from the new authentication server and the background processes we had to upgrade as part of the "invisible" side of the online game service. The patch itself was good overall with only a couple of issues we should have solved quickly. There *are* a bunch of things that could go south on you when we make a major change like this, depending on many variables, and since we can't know what your individual situation is specifically, we have a "blanket" process that should cover basically everyone. Read on for what to do :-

Sorry for the wait, boys and girls, but this is a big one! New planes, improved training and Chinese keymaps, all this and more awaits you after the jump! A condensed version with some of the major points can be read here.

Game servers are now up and running, and after 16 hours straight on this the live crew is grabbing some sleep. There is probability of some issues cropping up on our brand new backend systems but we have debugged them as much as we can for now.

1.30 is now in open testing, and we need your help! A crucial part of making sure that 1.30 goes live as smoothly as possible is getting as much testing and feedback as possible from the player base. Bugs reports can be logged in the testing forums, but we'd also like your thoughts and opinions on what you've seen so far.

The latest version of Battleground Europe is now ready for pre-release testing. We appreciate your assistance in helping to review the final builds of our release candidate. This test is available to all of our premium subscribers and will run every day until release . Please be sure to check for the latest installations of the test client. Also please read the read me file, stickied in this thread, prior to testing and participate in any focus tests that are posted. Thank you again for participating in our test.

Well we know everyone is eagerly awaiting the open beta release of v1.30, because that marks the final stage before it goes live to the game. We're behind schedule, there's no denying that ... but we have redone so much stuff during this dev. cycle and added so many things the game couldn't do before.

We know you've been waiting a long time for word on what's up with 1.30. It's been a long road, but it's almost ready to go into open testing.  We're gunning for the 9th of March as that day. Devs, coders, artists....everyone has their noses pressed to the grindstone to get it ready.

We released version 1.29.3 of Battleground Europe today.  You will automatically be upversioned when your login, or you may download the patch or full install from our Downloads page.

This is a minor patch that resolves a bug that prevented squads from recruiting players with the new 10-character game names.

(You may have noticed the lack of 1.29.2 for PC.  That version was a Mac-only patch to fix an issue with the cursor).

1.29.1 is ready for release. This update consists mostly of minor fixes reported by the players and is expected to be the final release for the 1.29 version of Battleground Europe. Please see the Read Me below for the details.
================================
WWIIOL - Battleground Europe
================================
Version 1.29.1.255 (12-17-08)

1.29 is set to go live today. There is certainly a lot in this patch and we hope you'll enjoy the new planes and new features. We've graduated all of our current players from training but you might want to take a look at it sometime by selecting the TRAINING tab on the BRIGADE screen. For 1.30 we're going to spend a lot of effort expanding this area and your feedback is greatly appreciated.

Amongst all of the new things in 1.29, including a new Spitfire and 109, there are some important changes to the game we would like to highlight.  The new Training system has a major impact on the way new players are introduced to the game (but existing players can try it as well).  The Quick Help system also helps describe the user interface for new players.  The changes to default keymaps is a 'Must Know' for existing players, as are the new No Joystick keymaps and the changes to where your game preferences are saved. 

Well the day has arrived! We will be bringing the servers down at 12:00 noon (1800GMT) to patch the host and get your downloads in gear. This will be a big downtime because we have to reconfigure all the server side mods we performed to allow for the reversed campaign map and the decoupled RDP process. Resetting to a new campaign would be a lot easier, but we don't want to kill this one as so many players are having a great time with it, so it will continue after we bring the servers back up and the new patch is now the live game.

As everyone knows the long-awaited update to Battleground Europe has been in open testing for several weeks and with the help of the player community, the testing was nearing completion- until today. The number of test "tickets" for the production team to work on prior to final release of v1.29 is approaching zero but one issue has been a constant concern in the past weeks- performance.

Well the Open Beta has been going well, we've finished most of the core rewrites and fixed the vast majority of the stuff that anything as major as this kind of update/code evolution tends to break. We still have a number of tasks to complete and are getting close to "clean up" phase. Read more about what's in 1.29 in the Game Patches and Updates section.

Some people love the smell of napalm in the morning. I do too but not as much as I love this time in a dev cycle where we begin to see that we are closing more bugs than we are creating, when we see that our features are almost complete and where we turn to our community to show them what we’ve got and ask them for their feedback on how to make it even better. It’s that time for 1.29 and next week we’ll be opening the doors to the test server and inviting you all to drop in for a look. This time however our focus has been a little different than it has in the past.

When Campaign #46 went live, we slipped in a little feature. I'd coded these a long time ago but never enabled them because I didn't get a chance to test them. While I was waiting on the scoring processing for today's campaign reset I decided to run my little test battery. Chat shortcuts are 5 letter codes you can type into a chat message that the server will swap out for meaningful information. Each starts with a '$' symbol followed by a four character "subtitution name"

    $orig
    $targ
       Are replaced with the name of your mission's origin or target respectively.
    $lead
       Is replaced with the callsign of your mission's current leader.
    $unit
       Is replaced with the short form of your current brigade, e.g. 1.Division/1.Brigade
    $miss
       Is replaced with your "mission" name, which is the same as $unit/$miss... E.g. 1.Division/1.Brigade/KFS1

Ok boys and girls, it's time for a quick word about current (v1.29) production tasks. We're hard at it as usual, and since this is such a large development cycle with the Chinese (client/host localization) requirements creating a huge amount of work we otherwise wouldn't be involved in (translating everything and creating that client compliancy is enormous just by itself!) but things are humming along, if humming means tearing your hair out. 8]

Gophur's been away for a bit, so this production update will not include his news or participation. We've been working away on the wide range of goals we have for 1.29 and beyond. Some discrete things are finished or nearly so, and other new systems are also nearing completion, while core infrastructure changes, such as those underway for our future render solution and also gamewolrd instancing, remain significant and complicated tasks for which there are few incremental achievements to share with you at this time.

On Monday we changed a setting on the servers that will now allow the number of AOs to drop to 2 per-side instead of staying at 3. There have been a lot of erroneous claims as to why this was done, so I'd like to clarify what we changed and why... 

In April of this year, at the start of Campaign #44, we changed the way Attack Objective (AO) numbers are calculated. We pay very close scrutiny to population trends, and what we were seeing was that when too many AOs were placed people became bored and stayed online for much, much shorter periods of time. We kept the previous rule that if the number was less than 3, we would call it 3 anyway.

Most of you haven't heard of it but a lot of you are probably already using it: Wiretap. This is an experimental service we are developing that exposes dynamic game world data via the web -- like town ownerships, recent captures, even the TOE sheets!

The data isn't intended to be viewed directly, although the site does have some tools like the live captures feed; it's there for our artful community members who have always found ways to extract game data from the gazette, CS&R or even Doc's posts in the forums!

During our 7th anniversary celebration week in June of 2008, a special offer to all subscribers was created. Anyone with an active premium subscription on any day from June 5th through June 24th are elegible for a new in-game decal to be displayed on avatars and vehicles.

This host update was scheduled for release tomorrow (7/8/08), however we applied it early following an unscheduled outage:

In the earliest of days we had a mere four radios and a very few channels to tune them to. Almost all of them were country specific at the very start. If you wanted to plan and co-ordinate, though, you invariably had to use a numbered channel. At one point, there were some 70 out of the 99 possible numbered channels designated by various players for various different purposes.

The long intermission is over and campaign #45 has begun at last - complete with the Differentiated Ground Brigades we trialed in the last half of the intermission. We used the server down/up as an opportunity to roll out a number of minor fixes before starting the campaign.

You guys have been pretty good sports putting up with the intermission all week and it looks like were ready to reward your patience. Those of you keeping score probably figured that 1.28 was long over and we were moving on to 1.29. Well, so did we, but…

At 10 AM US Central Time (3 PM UCT) on Saturday morning, our Authentication server will be down for maintenance.  This means you will not be able to login to the Game, the Forums or your Account pages.

We expect this to take less than 2 hours and all services should be available again at 12 Noon US Central Time (5 PM UCT).

We plan to release 1.30.2 upon completion of the Authentication server maintenance.  Thus, we anticipate that the game will be unavailable for a short time, potentially less than 30 minutes, but that during this period the Forums and Account pages should be accessible.

Of course, "No plan survives contact with the enemy" so it is possible the delays will be longer than expected but we will make every effort to ensure that they are shorter.

Thank you for your patience.

Well we finally got the live game servers up right on the nose of the 2 hour reset window that we set for ourselves earlier today (yay we don't suck!) and after all the database -> in-game values were validated ... Campaign 53 started off with rapid and eager action.

Congratulations go out to the Allied forces and their High Command in Battleground Europe for their hard fought victory earlier today. Congratulations also go out to the Axis forces for their part in one of the most exciting campaigns we have ever witnessed in the games history. This campaign had everything from teetering on the edge of defeat, to a turnaround victory, the loss of Antwerp and Brussels at least twice going both ways ... epic air and naval battles over and in the Antwerp channel between the mainland and the Zeeland islands at the mouth of the channel and the North Sea. Breakouts and counter attacks and counter counter attack breakouts.

Version 1.30.1 is now available! Players can get this automatically by logging in or downloading it from our Downloads page.
This patch should resolves several installation issues related to removing the old versions of PlayGATE.
See the Read Me below for more information.

We're doing a quick and short maintenance down and up of the game servers at 8:00am Friday morning (CST time) which will be 2:00pm GMT. It's just a database clean up and restart to fix any lingering issues with strat updates and so forth being out of sync. It should be a very, very short downtime, as it's little more than a stop, take offline, run a rebuild ... reboot and start up again sequence.

Ok well it's been a couple of days break for everyone, intermission madness and all ... hope you all used the break for something fun and useful, but it's going to be CAMPAIGN TIME ONCE AGAIN. Time to get your war on for another round! Campaign 52 will begin on Tuesday the 14th of April. We'll start the process in the morning bringing the servers down, and should be up again around lunchtime.

On late Saturday night/early Sunday morning Axis forces were victorious in conquering the last towns required to end Campaign 51, having relanded on the channel coast in France some days previous after their hugely successful cross channel capture of the British bases in England last week.

Servers are up after a rather large reset of both the game servers and all the databases, which also got their routine periodic maintenance while we had the opportunity during the reset downtime of the main game servers. While I'm here, congratulations also to the Axis forces for invading England during the freetime on Sunday following the closing of Campaign 50. This Intermission Event will be a channel based event. It will run for 2 days, so the next campaign (no.51) will begin on the afternoon of Wednesday the 25th of February. 

Today marked the start of Campaign 50 in Battleground Europe. Some might say this is a historic occasion for the game, but to us it's just another moment in a long line of moments stretching back to our very beginning (which was a little rocky lets be honest) and off into our longer term future. We're certainly glad so many of you have come along for the ride and we hope you will stick around to see all the places we're going to take the game to, from this point on. There's no doubt the game is better now than at any point in it's past, and we're still here evolving it more and more with each new development cycle.

Well unless a miracle happens it looks like the Axis fortunes for this campaign are almost cooked. While anything is possible in this world of yours, I just thought that I would give you a heads up what we're probably going to do based on the way things look right now. Current CRS planning would be to reset to INTERMISSION tommorrow morning (Wednesday the 3rd of December in Texas) early on, and plan on starting Campaign #50 on Friday the 5th of December so that Friday night and the weekend are set to be ablaze with the sounds of WAR.

We have reset the servers this afternoon to close out Campaign #48, which the Allied forces have won even though the campaign news from the World @ War Gazette front page hasn't picked up this news yet. What happened was that the percentage ownership of the game world that drives the victory headline was not invoked because the Allies this time won the campaign by denying the Axis all supply and movement of reinforcing divisions and brigades back into the map ... turning the remaining gameworld into technically what the code sees as a surrounded pocket. Not exactly what we intended when we designed it but well done for figuring it out!

The servers had a bit of a rocky start with 1.29 but after one last outage today we now have the servers stabilized and most of the host issues resolved. These changes are now live:

Well quite a few bangs actually. Some of the opening battles were amazing affairs. The river region around the Andenne to Huy stretch was reeling and rocking to the sounds of guns and bombs. When night fell the sight was a breathtaking one to behold. Anyhoo, with the start of this campaign, we tweaked a few things as part of the on-going evolution of the game to try and produce the best battles we possibly can, for you to be a part of.

It's campaign start day! Yup, that day we all wait for eagerly. When we get to break our F5 keys and finally get in to stand around stamping our feet waiting for the lock to come off and then charge! We'll be bringing the servers down to do all the reset operations we have to do ... at 11:30am this morning (Wed Oct 29th) then we'll bring them back up ASAP- probably about an hour.

Congratulations to the British and French forces for their victory in Campaign 47! Looks like the Allied players have answered the Axis 2 in a row with 2 in a row of their own. I guess that makes Campaign 48 to come ... the payback campaign! We'll be resetting the servers today for intermission, with the v1.29 Open Beta currently in full swing we won't be doing anything special for the campaign break this time. Maybe this is your chance to have a squiz at the Open Beta for the upcoming v1.29 release now that you won't be in hard core campagin mode for a couple of days.

Well that was a stunning turn around. After one of the longest campaigns ever fought (2nd longest on record) the Allies came out of the blocks at a thousand miles an hour and blitzed their way into Germany like a Saturn V rocket mounted on a flat top rail car. While not the shortest campaign ever, it is the second shortest since the "campaign era" of the game began and shows how dynamic and unpredictable the game can be. Congratulations to the Allied forces !

The German armed forces of Battleground Europe have won Campaign number 45. At 88 days long, Campaign 45 slides into second place on the "longest campaigns in the games history" list, just pipping Campaign 13 (87 days) at the post for this position. Congratulations to the Axis players for their hard fought victory, and kudos to the Allied players who took the fight up to their opponents in the hard fought fashion they are known for. It was a fun and interesting campaign!

We will be resetting the game servers for the start of Campaign 46 on Thursday the 25th of September.  That's tomorrow folks! This means that we roll into the office and begin organizing all the scripts and file uploads that are required to run all the backend stuff and database configurations that make the game work dynamically thoughout the campaign as it evolves. This can take up to 2 hours or so, then we will take the game servers offline to reset all values for the start of the campaign. When the server clusters first come back online, we will close the gameworld while we do the online testing and validation to ensure all is configured as it should be, which is a fairly complex series of checks we have to run, since the game is actually a pretty complex beast by the standards of other MMOG's.

All game server processes have been running continuously since July 7th (56 days). In order to allow us to capture some data from the processes and to apply some minor host updates, we will be bringing the live servers down for 10-20 minutes at 11am CDT on Tuesday September 2nd 2008. The host update includes several minor tweaks such as changes to resupply truck ranges and rates, and some minor tweaks to chat.

I thought I'd let you guys into a quick view behind the scenes about the what and how of the beta process, since it's probably not exactly as many imagine. Having witnessed a rather long open beta phase with the upcoming release of v1.30 some of you might be wondering about this kind of thing.

[THIS WAS AN APRIL FOOL'S JOKE- ED]We'd like to let you our player base in on some of the happenings behind the doors here at Cornered Rat Software. We've been working diligently on the Unity 1.5 upgrade and some new content for several months and are now ready to let you get a sneak peek of it in action.

Earlier this week CRS Senior Producer, Dana 'GOPHUR' Baldwin provided some insight to the long-awaited Unity engine upgrade that we've been working on for several years. The Unity engine is our own proprietary MMO game engine that covers a number of systems such as physics, ballistics, networking and graphics to name a few. The upgrade to these systems is more than simply adding new visuals effects, it's the way all these systems interact and what they deliver. For those of you expecting performance gains in 1.29, you will have to wait for the calendar to turn over.

Something that goes round the office and forums every now and again is the issue of enemy infantry inside a depot or barracks. There are a huge range of opinions about it from "a factor of all out war" to "cheating". I tend to side with those who say "if the game allows it" on this one, right up until it's my turn to get shot ;)

The topic has come up a few times in the office recently and I tried looking at it from a casual player perspective. It is something that happens from time to time to all of us. I've gone AFK and returned to find myself "camping" inside a (now) enemy spawnable.