Secret project is in testing now. A few lucky friends are struggling through its multitude of shortcomings and giving me feedback.

While secret project gets looked over I got time to go back to Campaigns in Blue Max. Pilot information is now being added to the game interface when appropriate.

The end of each game turn is when the survival of the pilot is assessed as well. I have been looking at the Blue Max and Canvas Eagles rules to try and work out how pilots survive games. So far this is my thinking:

  • If a pilot gets a ‘pilot killed’ or ‘plane explodes’ chit they are dead.
  • If a pilot’s plane gets shot down otherwise they have a 25% chance of returning to duty (50% chance of landing safely, then 50% chance of escaping no-man’s-land to the correct side).
  • If a pilot retires to their own side of the board they will return to duty.
  • If a pilot retires to the enemy side of the board they 25% chance of returning to duty.
  • If a pilot retires to the top or bottom of the board they 50% chance of returning to duty.
  • Pilots that do not return to duty are assumed to be out of the war for the duration, either dead, incapacitated or captured.
  • If a pilot is shot down but returns to play, the pilot(s) who shot them down still get the credit for the ‘kill’.

Thoughts?

Elsewhere on the site I plan to retire the forums in their current form.  The functionality is not up to scratch and it is getting hit by spammers, so for now it is doing more harm than good. One day I may have enough spare time to integrate a fully featured forum.

I am also aware that there are some issues with the ingame chat. Its not very obvious when there is a new message in a game when the chat is closed. I have a couple ideas about how to address this, but any feedback would be welcome. Also the live server kills chat messages containing any single quote characters, my development server does not have that problem. Debugging this is going to fun with a capital sarcasm.