Lowengrin

Good on the ship attacks being resolved. I'm not surprised there are still issues with contested locations. I haven't had time yet to look at that code.

Further tweaks to the placement of columns (particularly ships). IL2DCG350b28.zip

Beta 27 increases the likelihood of shipping strikes. IL2DCG350b27.zip

I think I've discovered the issue. In 3.49 when I was creating a Solomons campaign, I added a little reconnaissance check to make shipping strikes not certainties. So the first mission of any campaign would require both sides to do some scouting and even then they may or may not "find" the enemy (depending on how many reconnaissance assets they have available and whether they were used for recon or not previously). Weather also influenced how fast reconnaissance info would degrade from one mission to the next (as would night). I will post a new beta shortly that makes recons more likely to be successful (but still not a certainty unless the distance from airfield to target is very short and/or reconnaissance assets/mission are very high).

Have you tried increasing the action radius even further remembering that two things must be true in order to spawn anti-shipping attacks. Firstly, the distance between ship spawn point and the attack squadron's base must be less than the action radius. Secondly, the distance from the ship spawn point to the "front line" location must be less than the action radius.

I doubt it will be the "final" version, but I don't anticipate any major changes going forward. Looking at your zoomed in map, where the blue artillery spawn, does that location link with the one across the water? Or are they both the last locations of a road network? And are they suffixed with "_Beach" or "_Beachhead"? I refer you to page 9 of your Create an external DCG campaign-2.pdf if these are beach landing zones. If they are and don't abide by those rules, you may get weird results with statics spawn or not spawning in.

The code for targeting hasn't changed significantly over the years. And neither has the spawning of artillery at the "front line". I think both issues are actually related. Back in 2000 or so when I started writing DCG back in 2001, computers were far less powerful and less objects could be spawn. The game maps were much smaller and the road networks that I created were mostly linear (from West to East). There would be only one "contested" area that would generate two generic lines of guns and that contested area would be the centre of all the fighting. There were no ships (or sea routes). Now road networks have multiple paths across the maps and there are sea lanes and patrol boxes for ships. But the "front line" location is still the focus of player mission (and all AI missions). If ships spawn outside the radius of that location, they will be ignored. And if there are multiple areas being contested on the ground, only the one will spawn generic defences. It's less important now days with much more powerful processors that can handle templates with hundreds of static objects (guns). But the "front line" legacy still remains.

Maybe?

The Custom Mission Selection only works "correctly" when the conditions exist in the mission. For example, if you select "ground attack" but there are not available targets in the action radius (or those targets have been selected by another squadron) then the player squadron will be assigned to some other task. Adding specific targets through the Time Table would require a considerable amount of recoding, because I would have to add exceptions to override the combat radius for every mission type and require additional code for every mission type for the player target assignment AND to restrict other squadrons from that target and even more code to ensure it falls on the specific date or date range. In other words, it would be a nightmare.

I'll review the code again. I'm just perplexed as to why they are jumping into the PRD from the SRD. I'm glad you can workaround it for now, but I'm determine to correct this one.

Made some tweaks to the code regarding SRD and PRD resets. Maybe these will end the problem of jumping from one to the other.... Added Iwo Jima and Okinawa maps as eligible for on-map kamikaze missions and moved the starting date back to October 1944. But I decided not to use the dedicated kamikaze squadrons. Any missions using a Yokosuka MXY-7 Ohka will of course be kamikaze no matter when or where.

On reviewing the code, Kamikaze missions are restricted to IJN/IJA squadrons at off-map airfields or on the Japan map only in 1945. DCG doesn't use squadron name as a determining factor (maybe it did at one point???)

Back to the drawing board.

Beta build 25 corrects an issue with trying to add new squadrons through the squadron editor panel. While testing this fix, I discovered that if every plane explodes on mission start up, it's because there's a been a squadron added to the mission file that doesn't exist in the game.

Sorry for the late answer but it looks like I must have introduced a bug at some point that's messed up the save for selecting a new squadron name. I'll fix that. Unfortunately for your campaign, it messed up the data files and that pushed it on to France.

That is correct.

Okay, I remembered that way back before adding columns was a thing, I wrote a routine that forced every ship AFTER a transport ship to act as an escort to that ship and use the same sea route. Of course, back then, it required the order of ships in the template mission file to be ordered with any carrier task force first and then transports and escorts after. But being able to add ships through the timetable can break that ordering.... So now I've changed it so that if a ship is assigned to the patrol route, it will never be assigned to transport escort duty. Or at least that's what should happen with this build....

Okay, I'll have another look.

They don't appear at all? Not even in the first Japanese sea route location?

Okay, I think I found the bug for ships jumping out of the patrol area and into a sea lane.

Can you do me a favour and post the dcgerror.txt for the first mission of the test campaign? And the .srd and .prd files. Thanks!

Check the latest beta.

This beta should fix the issues around ships not appearing in the patrol zone (.prd) when they are added to a campaign through the time table. This build should also require ship names (and not their "chief" designation for the timetable command to move squadrons onto carriers. As always, appreciate any feedback regarding these changes...particularly if they don't work as expected....

Strange. While the starting location is determined for .srd, it should be totally independent of .prd position. I'll review.