IL2DCE: A dynamic campaign engine for IL-2 Sturmovik: Cliffs of Dover

[41Sqn_Banks]

It's time for a friday update

First the good news. The current build runs quiet well in dedicated server environment. There are some workarounds required (Aircraft selection by mission menu, Autopilot after take-off) because of bugs in the game engine. Hopefully the upcoming patch will fix them.

The bad news is that I'm not happy with the overall structure and design of the software (well actually there is none). I don't like the rather static generation of the missions. There is a lot of dead code from the single player mode. Adding new features like radar detection to the current code would be very complicated and ugly. In addition the lack of documentation and the not defined development process makes it hard for interested developers to help the project. So this is not going to work ...

I invested the last week to refine the development process, I started defining the requirements and though about a new design of the whole software. A week ago I was close to drop the single player option completely, but my new design has a convenient solution for it. However I must admit, it's not the top priority and will be added at a later stage.

The next steps are: Finish to define the requirements, describe the design and start implementing the basic features. Of course this means that there won't be a release in the next weeks.

Draft documents:
http://code.google.com/p/il2dce/wiki..._Specification
http://code.google.com/p/il2dce/wiki...gn_Description

If you have some ideas that you'd like to see implement and want to help and take part, please write a "user story" that contains the view of of a user, what he wants and expects and enjoys, much like Osprey did in the post above. I will read it and thinks that I like will be added to the requirements.