Dev Update 9/10/2024

MP saves. That's been the bane of my existence (besides trolls) for the past few weeks. Made significant progress yesterday and was able to send the 33MB saved game across the wire during setup. A long time ago Mitra created a way to do MP saves. It was a hack, but it did work if you set it up correctly. Everyone can thank him that we're even doing this as it was never part of the original plans. I had to ask the rest of the team how it even worked. He created an ini file that had the name of a saved game. So the scenario loads, everyone picks their officer, then the same saved game is loaded by everyone at startup. The issue is that you have to get the saved game to everyone and they have to have the scenario and setup the ini file correctly. I've taken that and changed it a little. Now if you save MP games, it creates a saved game in the NetServ folder. That's the folder we use to launch MP. On setup that folder is sent to every player. So we included the saved game (if it exists) as part of that exchange. My test was that I saved the MP game. The restartMP.sav was created in the NetServ folder. I left the game, copied that folder. I then selected the copy as the scenario for the next game, and it worked! To those that do not care about the details... MP saved games will be a new folder under the documents/sowx64/scenarios folder. You cannot use the NetServ folder name, as that's the staging area. As far as the MP error we the 'too much data' etc. errors from the Steam network library. I think we have those beaten as well. Looking at the long initial MP game launch now. We have a few other improvements coming along nicely. Not sure of an exact date yet, but hopefully soon.