FC: Southern Storm - v.2.1.4.8217 Public Beta Now Available

[MaximKI]

Hello everyone,

There's a new public beta update installer available at the following download link: HERE

On Steam, you can switch to it by going to Flashpoint Campaigns: Southern Storm in your Steam Library, right-clicking on it, choosing Properties -> Betas -> then choosing the latest beta branch from the drop-down list and allowing Steam to update your game. If it updates correctly, you should see the latest beta version listed as your version in-game in the bottom left corner of the main menu.

What’s New in Version 2.1.4.8217:

This update includes a number of scenario updates fixing unintended organic transport issues where some units lacked sufficient transport to move at greater than walking speed.

What’s New in Version 2.1.4.8216:

This update includes a number of scenario update files that didn't make it into the previous version.

What’s New in Version 2.1.4.8215:

Content Updates
NEW – Content Generation Documentation. We have released three new FMs that explain how to make scenarios (FM04-Scenario Design), add in Battle Plans (FM05-Battle Planning), and how to build campaigns (FM06-Campaign Design).

Updated – We have updated FM01 Game Operations for all of the latest new features and tweaks for 2.1.4.

Updated—We have also updated two of the Operational Area Guides (OAGs). OAG CWSS010 SITREP Southern Storm and OAG CWSS-02 Force Review are updated to the latest 2.1.4 level.

Data Fix. The national data file “CW 80s United States.xls” has been updated. A correction has been made for a specific US cavalry vehicle, US577 (H/J series formations), regarding passenger carrying capacity. This impacted the scenarios Finale, Steel Rain, The Long Night, Tutorials 1, 2, and 3, and CZ-SN4 Going for Gold.
Standalone scenarios “Lesson of War,” “An Autobahn Too Far,” and “Brothers in Arms” contained West-German panzer grenadier units that lacked sufficient organic transport to load all passengers at once and move. This was due to blanket data change, and these two scenarios have been adjusted so that the affected units are mobile again. We fixed a similar problem for some of the Czech forces in other scenarios as well.

The pathfinding ‘weights file’ that minimizes overstacking has been updated.

Finally, the Canadian Campaign has had some play adjustments from the original author based on feedback from users.

What’s New in Version 2.1.4.8214:

Content Updates

NEW! - We are releasing the standalone “GM Giraud” scenario featuring French versus Soviet forces on the Epinal map. Joao Lima is the author.

NEW or UPDATED! - User Manuals. Big thank you to Mr. John Osborne for his help on these!
• FM FCCW-01 Game Operations.pdf is up to date again
• FM FCCW-03 Tutorial Operations.pdf is up to date
• FM FCCW-04 Scenario Design.pdf is new
• FM FCCW-05 Battle Planning.pdf is new
• FM FCCW-06 Campaign Design.pdf is new

Feature Changes and Fixes

• Sensor ranges show more detail in the Subunit Inspector. Separate ranges for detect, classify and identify are shown. “Detect” means that you know something is there, “classify” means that you think it is a group of vehicles, likely tanks, and “identify” means that you know they are T80s and can shoot direct-fire weapons at them.
• Data Fix. The national data file “CW 80s United States.xls” has been updated. A correction has been made for a specific US cavalry vehicle, US577 (H/J series formations), regarding passenger carrying capacity. This impacted the scenarios Finale, Steel Rain, The Long Night, Tutorials 1, 2, and 3, and CZ-SN4 Going for Gold.
• Standalone scenarios “Lesson of War” and “Brothers in Arms” contained West-German panzer grenadier units which lacked sufficient organic transport to load all passengers at once and move. This was due to blanket data change, and these two scenarios have been adjusted so that the affected units are mobile again.
• Tournament Play. We have found and fixed some minor scoring bugs.
• The pathfinding ‘weights file’ that minimizes overstacking has been updated.
• We fixed the rendering of unit counters where gray mobility, steps, and orders indicator colors were bleeding through from inactive units to subsequent active units. They show in white again as they should.
• If you use the F5 hotkey to show and hide the core information panels, the Radio Log will not also open and close. It has its own hotkey, F7, and now works independently of the main group of panels.
• Campaigns Games. Units that ended a scenario in a spotted state started the next scenario in that same state. They now start unspotted.
• Battle Planning. Resupply missions could be given to forces in the battle planner but the label used was “Reorganize” which was confusing. This has been changed to “Resupply” instead.

PBEM++

We have not made any specific changes at this time. The Matrix PBEM++ servers have a timeout of 120 seconds, and version 2.1.3 of the game had a timeout of 30 seconds. This was increased to 120 seconds in 2.1.4 Beta 1. This alone may fix the intermittent “We have a failure to communicate” error messages.
If there is an Internet problem upstream of the game, such as a mangled HTTP packet, then the game will be notified and will show an error message, e.g., error HTTP 400, but that is all. We hope to make this part of the code more fault-tolerant in time, but we have not done so yet.

If there is a problem of some sort, it will reveal the web service logging screen and allow the player to interact with it. See attachment for details:

FPC What's New-3Apr24.pdf

(1.63 MiB) Downloaded 24 times

If you can see this Logging tab, please go to it and save the log as a text file and send it to us care of Robert.Crandall@ontargetsimulations.com.
Before you send it you might want to find and remove your plain text password from near the top. It is harmless to send it, but it would be a good practice just on general terms not to. We will, of course, respect the passwords we receive.

This log file is a verbose transcript of the background web service dialog and is pure gold for debugging. In particular, it will help us understand what is a problem in our code versus the webservice code versus the Internet transport layer itself. Gold!

What’s New in Version 2.1.4.8064:

New Feature - Tournament Play

This did not require many visible changes to the game, but we have now put in the plumbing to support Matrix Tournament Play through the PBEM++ server. The main visible change is that there is a new column showing a “T” for tournament in the Game in Progress list. This is a big help for understanding which paired game is which. The Message area below also now contains hardwired tournament information as appropriate.

We look forward to seeing tournaments of Flashpoint Campaigns begin.

For additional detail you can see the latest WhatsNew here:

FPC What's New-25Feb24.pdf

(1.92 MiB) Downloaded 57 times

New Feature - Unit Log Redesign

As the game unfolds, a series of messages are recorded to the unit logs with a time stamp, a “tag” or type of log entry, and then the text of the entry.

What's New

• All messages are now Tagged (instead of just some of them as before)
• Tags are now filterable (see below)
• Unit names are highlighted to make them easier to find and hotlink to the Dashboard
• Locations are given a subtle highlight (just bold, no color) and are hot linked to flash on the map
• The log is searchable – see the top right corner
• Highlight colors may be specified by tag type so that specific tags can be emphasized or de-emphasized (see below)

There is a new filter icon (a yellow funnel icon) next to the “Tags” column header. Right-click on it, or anywhere else on the log, to pop up the filtering menu.

For convenience, the Tags column can be set to show only the dominant primary tag for a log entry, or to show all tags.

Filtering. The log can be filtered by Tag types. To see just the messages that involve bullets flying, use the “Shots Only” combat filter. For further customization, use the “Custom Filter Settings” popout to uncheck the Tag types you don't want to see, and then set the filter to “Custom Filter.” You will not see messages you don't care about.

Highlight Settings. The highlight settings are a way to make the tags you want to stand out using different colors. Use with care! It's all too easy to set everything to have a highlight color and become dazzled by the beautiful but unreadable Christmas tree-like effect that results.

This new system is used everywhere we show the unit logs – this log, the unit dashboard, the counter-battery screen, and the TOC Ops Unit Logs report.

If this dialog has the Windows focus, then it can be closed by tapping the Escape key.

Major Bug Fixes and Enhancements

The following items are new bug fixes or feature additions and refinements in this update.

1. New User Interface: Bring the selected type of counter (HQ, transports, air defense, etc.) to the top of each stack to make them easier to find. Previously, we did this only for HQ units, but we have extended it now to numerous other unit types as well.
2. New User Interface: Tooltips have been added to numerous buttons and also to all of the chain of command tree views. Now, a player can run their mouse over the list of names in any tree view, e.g., the Spotlight, and instantly see the composition of the unit.
3. Campaign Games: Version 2.1.3 of the game would sometimes lose track of which side of a campaign game the player really controlled if the player was on the Warsaw Pact side. CZ Campaign and Panzer Leader now play properly again.
4. Campaign Games: a problem with occasional missing setup areas in campaign scenarios has been fixed.
5. Unit Over Stacking: In some scenarios there could be over stacking of units, especially at chokepoints such as newly discovered minefields. The game does a better job now of spreading out the units in such cases.
6. Timing of Arrival of Reinforcements: Scenario authors schedule the arrival time of reinforcements as ‘minutes from the start of the game’. Given that player turn lengths vary so much, the chance of the reinforcements arriving at an inconvenient time - just after the player has issued orders and turn resolution has started
– is likely, with reinforcements sitting out the rest of the turn in the arrival hex where they might be subject to enemy attack. The new rule is that reinforcements will be pushed or pulled in time to arrive just as a player orders phase is about to begin. Arrival times can be pulled forward if they are scheduled to arrive within the first 10% of the next command cycle, otherwise, they will be pushed back to the following orders phase. This is part of the friction of war. For example, if the command cycle is 45 minutes and the reinforcements are scheduled to arrive in 4 minutes or less, they will arrive early. Otherwise, they will arrive in 45 minutes less than a few seconds.
7. Amphibious units moving in all water hexes could not be spotted: Although amphibious units have a low profile when in the water, that water also does not offer any cover or concealment. We increased their visual and thermal signatures should they are more likely to be spotted.
8. Helicopters no longer fly so aggressively over known enemy units: In particular, when flying home to resupply, helicopters will attempt to avoid flying over known enemy locations. They also avoid spending as much time hovering over ridge lines.

Minor Fixes and Improvements

1. User Interface: Show a unit’s total ammo inventory at a glance in the Staff page of the Dashboard to save time.
2. Alerts for Ground Recon units outside Supply Range: If Recon units have no particular Command Range by design but do have a Resupply Range of twice what their command range would otherwise be. This meant that if they were too far away they could not Rest and Resupply. Now the Dashboard alerts the player up top and gives detail in the Staff report.
3. Quality of Life: The ability to mute all sound effects while preserving volume settings. We added a Disable All SFX checkbox to the User Preferences dialog. This new checkbox works like the existing Ctrl-Q (blanket Quiet Sound FX) but does not force the player to zero out and, therefore, lose the three respective volume levels. The state of Ctrl-Q is now saved to the flashpoint.ini file and used for the next game. This makes it easier to set and keep the various relative volume controls and toggle them on and off as a group more easily.
4. PBEM VCR Replay: Animations were not always showing in VCR replay of PBEM games. This was fixed.
5. Campaign Improvement: The campaign Recovery Report that appears between scenarios in a campaign is now printable.
6. Quality of Life: The "Escape" key now closes these additional dialogs if they have the user focus:
• Dashboard,
• SU Inspector,
• Radio Log,
• SOP Manager, and
• Off Map Assets.
The dialog must have a Windows focus for the Escape keypress to work. For example, If the Dashboard is up but the player has clicked on the main map, then the map has the focus and not the Dashboard. An Escape keypress in this case will be ignored.
7. PBEM++ server timeouts were defaulted to 30 seconds, but Matrix uses 120 seconds. We now use 120 seconds to avoid spurious time out errors in PBEM++ games.
8. Improved PDF Printing: The problem was with images, and specifically, with cached images. Printed reports should work better now.
9. Battle Planning: In battle planning during scenario creation, the mission described as “Reorganization” is now labeled as “Resupply”. In either case, it both resupplies and restores readiness to the units involved. Only the label has changed.
10. User Interface: Here and there in the popup hints we had yellow text written to a yellow background. This did not work well and has been corrected.

[ndeco]

Awesome , thanks!!!

[IronManBeta]

We hope you enjoy it! We continue to work on it and incorporate as much feedback as possible.

Have fun, Rob C

[Shadrach]

Love the new log, looks great
And thanks for the QoL enhancements

Just really wish you'd fix the scaling of the arrows in the Spotlight. I understand it depends on some 3rd-party library you use, but it really does make the Spotlight very hard to use with a mouse - I have to focus the dialog and use the arrow keys to navigate since the buttons are *tiny*.

Clipboard_03-07-2024_01.jpg (20.56 KiB) Viewed 1647 times

I wrote about this here as well:
https://www.matrixgames.com/forums/view ... 4#p5129584

[CapnDarwin]

We have a bug-tracking entry for it, but no solution currently to fix it as the UI item is not under our control. Once we figure out a way to correct this we will get it in the game.

[MaximKI]

A new public beta is live now! See OP for details.

[IronManBeta]

This update has a few changes:
- the broken table of contents in three of the user guides have been fixed.
- four of the HTML formatting files have been updated slightly
- some bad weather files have been fixed.
- three Tournament Game scoring fixes
- a couple of very minor bug fixes.

There were few problems in the last beta but we did want to fix the Tournament Play issues and we have. This build, with luck, will be the one that is made official in due course.

Thanks everyone and enjoy, Rob Crandall, President OTS

[CharlesV]

I downloaded v2 on 25 April. Playing the Big Red One campaign I've noted that Stingers have curious differences between scenarios when ordered to Rest & Resupply as follows:
Tall Order and Iron Rangers - start with 75% supply, can be ordered to 90% in 4 minutes (at 100% readiness)
Percutio - start with 75% supply, can be ordered to 85% in 3 minutes
Death March - cannot be ordered above 75%
Only trouble is that although as the turn progresses the higher supply is reported when the next orders phase arrives the order hasn't been obeyed!! Perhaps the troops involved ought to be disciplined?
Charles

[CapnDarwin]

Sounds like a bug for Rob and William to look at. I JIRA that. Do you have saved games or screenshots showing the behavior? They help with the debugging. Thanks.

[SgtZdog]

I downloaded v2 on 25 April. Playing the Big Red One campaign I've noted that Stingers have curious differences between scenarios when ordered to Rest & Resupply as follows:
Tall Order and Iron Rangers - start with 75% supply, can be ordered to 90% in 4 minutes (at 100% readiness)
Percutio - start with 75% supply, can be ordered to 85% in 3 minutes
Death March - cannot be ordered above 75%
Only trouble is that although as the turn progresses the higher supply is reported when the next orders phase arrives the order hasn't been obeyed!! Perhaps the troops involved ought to be disciplined?
Charles

This is an artifact of the fact that we round down on a per ammo type basis. So those max values that you are doing an R&R to is the max supply level your units have. Then, at the end of the R&R the stingers, which only have 4 rounds max, will round down to 3 rounds, which is 75%.

[CharlesV]

Here are 2 screen shots.

Stinger 1.jpg (780.14 KiB) Viewed 759 times

Stinger 2.jpg (796.3 KiB) Viewed 759 times

[SgtZdog]

Here are 2 screen shots.

Yup, the unit resupplies to 90%, but then 90% of 4 stinger missiles rounding down to a whole number is 3/4 missiles, which means the dashboard will show 75% ammo. You won't be able to reach 90% in actuality because you can't have that last 15% (which would be 0.6 of a missile).

[qsmiron]

OMG, you do a fantastic job

[CharlesV]

Kevin - why is the option offered if it achieves nothing? I've had Stingers destroyed whilst wasting time to reload!
Charles

[CapnDarwin]

@Kevin, I'm not sure why we are limiting the resupply after the start of the battle (different issue the team needs to discuss), but if the max is 3 rounds, we need to show the right percentage for the max count and release the unit back to combat operations. If we can get a save game, maybe Tom can review these issues and report back.

[qsmiron]

"New User Interface: Tooltips have been added to numerous buttons and also to all of the chain of command tree views. Now, a player can run their mouse over the list of names in any tree view, e.g., the Spotlight, and instantly see the composition of the unit."

In my opinion, this is a function for lazy people, we have such information at hand almost everywhere. Because I use the layout known from the predecessor (photo), the pop-up window duplicates the information.
In addition, it interferes with window navigation (this is my subjective opinion).
Can you enable or disable such a tip in the preferences settings?
Personally, I wouldn't like to use it

Zrzut ekranu 2024-05-07 204552.png (731.41 KiB) Viewed 664 times

[MaximKI]

A new public beta is live now! See OP for details.

[MaximKI]

A new public beta is live now! See OP for details.

[Shadrach]

Don't look like a beta to me

Link is wrong, should be:
https://ftp.matrixgames.com/pub/Flashpo ... 4.8216.zip

[Nelsonxu3320]

Keep up the great work! When will the map making manual be ready?