Chief Engineer's Report: 9.09.05

        Well the site's finally public, and after completely rewriting some of the patches twice (VB to C# to C++) everything is in working condition. As such, I think it's time to write the first IDMR report (okay, I was going to this a month ago, oops). I'm going to be a little less formal in these reports, and they won't come out very often, but they will outline basically everything that's currently in the shop, and items that have been released. Now that school has started up again, I won't have the luxury of being able to work for several hours straight. Work is going to be slow for a while, until my coursework balances out and the tools I'm working on come together. There's a few technical issues I have to work around, but other than that everything else is fine.

        The IDMR's our chance to have a lot of fun with our platforms (sorry, no Army for now), creating ships to fly against those that don't come with the game, tweaking it so we can fly craft we normally don't, fixing things that we can, etc. The IDMR will be working with the Tactical Office in the near future and I hope that mission builders will take advantage of the opportunities presented. My first priority is to devlop what you require. If there is something that needs to be taken care of (like the S-Foils patch, or ISD Laser fix), let me know so I can provide it. I'm pretty sure I took care of the necessities, so I'm not too worried about that right now.

        Next comes the craft. I for one refuse to create craft with many solar panels, give it a ball cockpit, and declare it a new TIE. It's been done, it's old, and most of the "TIE"s aren't that great anyway. What I will do however, is port or create craft that actually exist in the SW universe and other games, so that something like the Skipray Blastboat isn't restricted to just XWA. You tell me what craft you want, and popular choices can be developed. Actual guidelines and such will be hammered out later. This is where we need good support for this to work. I can crank out craft left and right, but it won't do any good if nobody cares. Right now I'm hoping the "on-demand" system will hold, but we'll see what the future has in store.

        Aside from patches, there is currently one utility the IDMR offers, the GE PilotViewer. Eventually I'll learn how to put it in a nice Windows format instead of the command prompt (There is another pilotfile program in the works, which the IDMR will adopt when completed). I'm currently working on another for mission designers (see below). I'm making my .NET copy first before making the releasable version, and if I'm lucky I'll have figured out WinApp programming before then. Once again, if there's anything you think need to be made, I'll see what I can do.

And now maybe some real content...
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Releases: (all programs have built-in uninstall features, but can also be done by hand)

-Nothing in the past month

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Updates:

- 7/26 - GE PilotViewer - No longer checks total score in XvT (which includes scores from reflying and failures) but instead adds up mission scores

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R&D:

-(All) Utility - Mission Converter (TIE -> XvT, TIE -> XWA, XvT -> XWA). Make missions once and then "upgrade" them to all three, just don't expect to be able to "dumb down" XWA missions.
-(TIE95) Utility - IDMR tool for editing text files for patch development.
-(All) Patch - Whatever ships are requested for development.

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So there you have it, the IDMR actually does do work. Hopefully there'll be a lot more work in the near future ;-)

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