2.12 progress

Owe you an update.

We are close, but some great beta testing has found some critical issues. We don't like releasing anything that diminishes the attention to detail we strive for, so we are on pause with the release until we chase these bugs down.

Sorry for the delay but the BDG has a philosophy that every release has to be a step forward, no compromises.

And it has really shown the value of getting new people on board testing the sim in new ways and finding the faults.

Cheers to the volunteers Creepycrawl and Tigermoth!

And of course, not helped by our Bugsquasher in Chief, Buddye, who fell off a blinking ladder and broke his coding finger.

Hein

Douglas Bader went to war with no legs and he's complaining about a broken finger???

Well don't just stand there, get one up!

Ah, that's rather metaphorical, the injuries are a bit more substantial...

Buddye,

Hope you will soon be back on the Active List.

Best wishes for a rapid recovery, Buddye!

Very sorry to read this, hope Buddye recovers soon.

HeinKill,

Any updates on 2.12 release and working through the bugs? I can't go back to CLOD after playing 2.11 so am excited for 2.12! I follow your postings and appreciate your insights/reviews. Thanks to you and all of the BDG for the time machine!

Jake

Hmm. I'm not aware there's any embargo on this, and can't think of
why there should be: we have been very fortunate that Osram has been able
to find time out of his now very busy life to lend a hand tracking down
problems which have proven, as we suspected, to be connected with the
extra load we've been placing on the graphics renderer with all the new
ground objects we've been churning out. The initial reworking that he has
provided has been so far very successful, and is in intensive beta; however
we still see some problem which may be due to a second separate cause,
so, while things are much improved, they are still not as good as we
like to see for a release, and Osram is currently running down this second
problem as his time permits. How long this will take will be contingent on
how easy it turns out to expose the cause of the second bug, and as a
spectator in all this, I can't say how long this will take. Debug builds
are being constructed and exercised, and things are continuing apace.
I can say that this second bug has been considerably less frequent than
the other prior to the first fix, so in some sense you can say that we
are most of the way there...

PV1,

I thank you for the update. Again, my thanks to the entire team (beta testers included) and the great work they've done with BOBII.

Jake

There are a few major devs/publishers who could learn a thing or two from such Quality Control

Update from Bader on the A2A forums:

"Good news is that we have been battling with some obscure crashes for some time. Osram has done some excellent diagnostics and found that we have been hitting an internal animation number limit, of 8000 animations (there are so many more things going on visually in BoBII now than even a couple of patches ago with all the objects and effects in big battles).

This now seems to be fixed, so we are now in final test stage. This looked like a couple of weeks a while back but with testing you never can say. So it's no good to commit just yet."

I am feeling very good about BOBII version 2.12 and I have for the last week. I hope we do not hit any more road blocks to out finish line.

Looking forward to it, whenever it is ready.

A pre-Christmas release will be a good deal more welcome than some the stuff I have traditionally received.

Looking forward to the release. Thanks for the hard work!

Me too.

Its beginning to look a lot like Xmas.

So many times in the past (two years ago?) the enemy planes in BOBII seem to come out of now where (just could not be seen until so very close). I don't care to argue or do comparisons but has there been any change to that?

No, I have "not" made a change as the game visual range is about right , IMHO.

Try a experiment on BOBII 2.11. In IA Dog Fight Random Advantage default settings. When your A/C inside view can be seen hit "pause".

Can you see the enemy A/C ( 12 109's) as small black dots at 12 oclock? I can see the 109's on my PC. The distance is a bit over 4 miles which is about correct.

From Stephen Bungay's, The Most Dangerous Enemy.

"In perfect conditions a single aircraft can be picked up at a range of about two miles; in haze it is less. A large formation can be seen from far further away, perhaps four miles. An aircraft approaching head-on is harder to acquire visually because it is smaller and offers no relative movement."

Last time I remember (two years ago) that the online play had achieved but was still very beta and did not seem to pick up much interest. What is the current situation?

Multiplayer beta testing is ongoing. I haven't heard much
about people other than the beta testers trying it out.
Perhaps the setup is a bit daunting. It's all laid out
in the 2.10 manual. I don't follow the testing closely,
though, as I'm more than occupied with my own corner of
things.

I looked on the two boxes I have for this game and neither says anything about 777 Studios yet I have it in my mind that there is a connection. Is there?

No connection with 777.

It's A2A Simulations, formerly Shockwave, for BoB2.

BoB1 was Rowan Software, distributed by Empire Games.

We have completed the BOBII version 2.12 self installer and we are doing final test.

Thanks for the update!

Sweet

Huzzah!

GREAT NEWS!!

I've just ordered BoBII:WoV - can I simply install the 2.12 patch or do I need to put other stuff in first (or previous patches)?

TiA

PS - yes, I know it's not released yet, but I will wait until it is before I install.

Yes, you can just dump 2.12 on top of any prev version.

The only thing to be aware of is that if you have a campaign in progress, and you update to a new version, the campaign can become unstable... So it is best to finish it before updating.

I'm just in the middle of testing the install version now...nothing scary found yet...(unless you count the fact I just shot down a 109 in the Black Thursday pm historical mission, and promptly got jumped by 2 of his buddies....that scared the beelzebub out of me! Couldn't shake them! Took it down to the treetops, one of them stalled in, the other one hammered me, too low to parachute, machine out of control...dead. Apart from that, nothing scary!)

Cross fingers other testers dont find any show stoppers!

H

ps once again I am reminded that the AI in this sim is AWESOME!

Thanks

Sounds exciting.

I've never been big on dogfighting and AA stuff, which is mostly why I rarely touch stuff like this, and RoF (even though I have a huge amount of planes and kit for it), but who knows, maybe I'll feel more confortable flying in this and then actually learn something other than ground pounding.
It's the sky scanning that buggers my neck & eyes (with TrackIR) - I read this one has an excellent padlock view function, so maybe I will finally end up using that, too.

Yep I've never used TrackIR myself, so I always use padlock in sims.

BOB2 has easy padlock options you can just map to your joystick

Padlock nearest enemy
Padlock next enemy
Padlock the nearest enemy targeting me

Cheers

H