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…

Ok you nasty pilot type kahniggets (just kidding) .. we're staging a little barking contest on the Open Beta Test server today. It's a chance to wring out the flight model changes in some friendly hair pulling and hysterionics.

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!

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.

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.