Paradise Island ten years ago.

[Coconut Kid]

Email from "Bob McNamara" 05/17/02 :

Hi All,
 
Sorry for not getting back to you sooner, but I got sidetracked by my other project, which put me a bit behind on this one. As a result, the patch files will be forthcoming sometime later today/tonight. I'm writing the documentation now, and we're trying to finish work on two enhancements (Spring-Break riots and hover-help building identifiers for rubble) this afternoon.
 
In the meantime, here's a list of everyone who's agreed to participate:
 
CafeDave [can't participate till Tuesday]
cafedave@strategyplanet.com
 
Cam[eron Hills]
c.hills@bigpond.com
 
Coffeebean
cafetropicobean@yahoo.co.uk
 
Eddy [The Dreams of Egyptian Fantasy]
egyptia@ptdprolog.net
 
Junta_Joe [can only contribute a few hours, & only this weekend]
iamzeke@earthlink.net
 
Jim the Bald [CoconutKid]
parment1@gjct.net [parment1@frontier.net]
 
MadamPresident
tropicotest@yahoo.com
 
MrP [Mark Philpott]
tropicofan@yahoo.co.uk
 
Railnut
Railnutjim@icqmail.com
 
The Chairman
robbo@strategyplanet.com
 
Timmy the Tyrant [Michael Zink]
oceanic_37@yahoo.com
 
 
The only person I asked but never heard back from is El Malo.
 
Some of the changes we've made will need your expert judgment, so thank you all again for volunteering to help.
 
Bob
 
<><><><><><><><><><><><><>
Bob McNamara
BreakAway Games, Ltd.
10600 York Rd.
Suite 204
Hunt Valley, MD 21030 <<snip>>

[Coconut Kid]

Email from "Bob McNamara" 05/17/02 :

Hi Folks,
 
Well, here it is. One zip file with the main patch components, and another with the documentation.
 
The doc contains a list of the changes, plus notes (where the intent might not be obvious) regarding what info I'm looking for.
 
You all know what you're best at, so I won't assign anything to anyone in particular. If you want to discuss amongst yourselves how you'd like to divvy up the testing, that's fine with me; just keep me apprised. I do hope, though, that everyone will try to look at most of everything. Obviously, if one person verifies that the correct new text is appearing for something, not everyone else needs to double-check it, but two pairs of eyes are always better than one. And there are a few issues that in the end will require a consensus of opinion, so the more the merrier there.
 
I also ask that you send me some comments every couple of days instead of holding everything back for one magnum opus late next week. The faster we can address the problems you find, the sooner we can test and mark them off.
 
Though I want to keep this beta-test out of the public eye, I'd like to have a free exchange of thoughts and ideas, so I'd like your comments to go out to everyone in the group (unless you have something private to tell me, of course). That will encourage feedback without my having to constantly forward every single email to every other tester in order to elicit their response.
 
I want to be signed off on the patch by Friday of next week, the 24th. If we can get it wrapped up before then -- and I think we can, barring some massive, unforeseen problem -- that'll be great.
 
I'll be checking my email periodically tomorrow, but will be out of town (out of the state actually) all Sunday.
 
I hope you like what you see -- and I hope I haven't forgotten to mention anything!
 
Bob

[Coconut Kid]

MrP worked on Spring Break Tourists.

Timmy = what are "market place meals" supplied when there is no Market Place?

The original code was using the same variable for counting meals provided and visitors, under the assumption that the two would never co-exist. Well, they do in the ranch, hence the problem. It should be fixed in the next EXE.

That is an interesting answer. Consider the Restaurants and who are the Ranch visitors?

[Coconut Kid]

From Railnut Jim 05/19/02:

Hello All,

I chose some easy stuff to verify. Here are my results.

Ranch bug: When I built a ranch, it immediately showed two meals provided through the marketplace even though I had no marketplace and the ranch had no workers. This later changed to zero. There were never any meals actually provided because I bulldozed the ranch.

SBT bug: I got the notice of impending trouble every September, even when I had no tourists on the islands.

Political tab bug: I didn't see the problems that Eddy had. But I did notice in U.S. Relations the third paragraph, the one about staffing problems at the embassy, there was no ending period. I think this was the same under Russia Relations after I changed the embassy's setting.

Election denial results: Again, not the same as Eddy's problem. I noticed that where it said, "The people's expectations were moderate..." the m was an n.

>From the documentation list:

Crashes
1.1 I cheated the date forward to lose a game. The switch to the rowboat was fine.
1.2 I played around with two scenarios with clouds on. I turned clouds off and on a few times while playing. In the second run, I had random events set to max and had one storm. No crashes.
1.3 I bulldozed a marina while it's boat (I assume that's the squarish, hydro-foil looking one) was away. I didn't see the boat again and had no crashes.
1.4 I tried the sequence of buttons several times while playing. I even placed the fountains and tried again. I had no crashes.

Buildings
2.1 The number of readers now apppears for the newspaper. I didn't try any of the other media outlets.
2.2 The Tennis Court does indeed appear as a Sporting Event site now.
2.3 I bulldozed a ranch and the cows and calves all disappeared immediately when the ranch did.
2.8 The hover-help text worked on the rubble from bulldozed and storm destroyed buildings. It continued to work even after I saved and reloaded the game.

Units
3.2 My laborers had no trouble building on top of rubble. Not even when I rebuilt a dock that was destroyed by a storm.

Storms
4.2 I have never played with random events so I don't have anything to guage by, but the storm I had while testing did not do so much damage as to be insurmountable. I had many buildings left standing with varying degrees of damage. Without the patch many of them would have probably been destroyed too. That may have been game ending. The quick purge of so many nasty little a shacks was actually kind of nice.

Miscellaneous
5.2 TPI buildings hover-help text does appear in the Preferred Attractions tab now.
5.3 The missing skills text is there now too.
5.4 The script for the win event in Mt. Sucio now matches the breifing. Until I get better at this game, I can only assume it works. The spelling of Caribbean is also fixed in the game.
5.5 I didn't find any hotspot in the circle window while playing around with Sucio or EcoTrop.
5.6 The missing period is there now in EcoTrop. I did however notice other typos. I'll go through the scripts later to find them all again.

That's all from me, for now. Hope you're all having as much fun with this as I am.

Railnut
Jim

[Coconut Kid]

Reply from Bob (snips) 05/22/02:

... tourist rating dropped to 30 with no [SBT] riot ever happening, and I was then caught in the September cycle

This cycle should be gone now.

Had a few bodies around and the seemed to all disappear at once, as if purged, maybe 6 months after they died. [One wife became pregnant while husband was lying dead.]

I don't think this is important enough to warrant investigation now.

As even a moderate storm seems to destroy almost every farm and market, you can quickly face a food crisis. Tropicans then seem to rely solely on personal reserves.

Actually, using the new, lower %s, a farm has only about a 16% chance of being destroyed in a category 3 storm, 34% in a cat. 4, and 70% in a cat. 5. Of course, the survivors will probably be damaged.   I've found it worthwhile to build fishing wharves after losing farms, because they start producing food much sooner than the rebuilt farms.

In the 3 months after the storms I still saw new visitors going into the Clinic, Restaurant, but not the Church, so I am not sure what period the 'need period' is. Does the patch mean folks will still visit sites, just not ‘need’ to visit them?

It's [Units will not go into the non-critical needs mode (entertainment. religion or health care) after a storm] for a month. So if you saw them going into those places more than a month after the storm, it shouldn't be a problem.

Difficult to tell if the unit’s sense of environmental quality, housing, etc. was increased, although after 3 messy storms none of the qualities went down, so I guess the modifiers balance out the negative effects of the storm in these areas, for a period of time.

Exactly right. We only wanted to negate the impact of losing food, medicine, etc. for a time.

I have found (games saved) that strikes lasted 13-15 months, although ...  All workers still turned up for work, sometimes a year into the strike.

The event doesn't keep them from going to work. It just (or is supposed to, anyway) keep new ships and planes from arriving. Remember, it's not the workers who are on strike. So, does El Presidente provide them with job security, or lay them off?

Marine strikes seem to have no actual effect.

They keep new ships from arriving, but currently don't affect ships already on the map. It's this lingering of ships on the map that's creating the impression of no effect. I'll look into it some more.

[Coconut Kid]

Reply from Bob 05/22/02:

Docks being destroyed in storm? [Leave One]

I'm hesitant to do that, because using only one dock would guarantee that it'd never be destroyed. Seems like too pat a ploy. However, I might be able to spare the dock if the aid money plus the player's bank account would be insufficient to build another one. Let me investigate that.

I should have sent this to all of you earlier. You can tell what category a storm is by how much aid money it generates:

CATEGORY   pre-1980   1980+
1          $1,250     $3,750
2          $2,500     $7,500
3          $5,000     $15,000
4          $10,000    $30,000
5          $20,000    $60,000

Some of you may remember that I said several times online that the category #s would not exceed a total of 10; that's how we limited the total destructiveness of storms in a game. Unfortunately we found that in reality it wasn't working quite like that. It was canceling storms once the total had *exceeded* 10, which meant that the actual total was at times as high as 14. This too has been fixed and will go in the next version of the documentation.

I commented: "It's a real trap if a storm hits while you happen to be in the red."  Bob replied, "Yes, I hope so too." --- So - part of the "challenge" of natural disaster events is being prepared for them.

[Coconut Kid]

Reply from Bob 05/22/02:

Hey, what the ____ are my laborers doing! [Their work pattern has changed.]

We haven't changed anything other than the priority to clear rubble when they detect a 'blocked cell' that contains rubble. [as follows]

They look at construction priority for buildings, but at proximity for rubble (i.e., they clear rubble only when they're near it unless they have nothing else to do). I think it may be that when you have lots of rubble and many unbuilt buildings, they lose focus a bit. It helps to prioritize construction so they concentrate on one or a few buildings at a time.

I interpret this to mean that they look in the 25 tile zones (per distance from Construction Office) for building projects and for tiles with the "rubble" content. Removing the 'rubble' and planting vegetation or paving a road have similar priorities. Before the storms were added to the game, rubble appeared only as part of the 'bulldoze' operation and was cleared as a part of it. It received a new priority since it appears in a new way.

[Coconut Kid]

Reply from Bob 05/23/02:

I think crops are growing faster now, I never made this much profit on corn alone. Did the grass growth [for Ranches] affect it in any way?

The growth rate of grass does not affect the growth rate of crops. The two activities are controlled by different variables. Each cell has a grazing value and a crop state value. If a crop is present, it rules and the crop state value is used (ignoring the grazing value). Otherwise, the grazing value is used (ignoring the crop state).

I intrepret this to mean that grass growing rate applies to the entire map and not just the tiles within the "invisible fence" of Ranches. We can gain a clue from the "Effects Operators" which are a part of the scripting part of the Editor. There are eight "rate" operators:

• CloudRate -- adjusts the rainfall from the amount established by the base map set-up
• ImmigrationRate -- adjusts the number from the base program as modified by the Immigration Office, etc.
• ReforestationRate -- adjusts the speed of growth of trees from from that established by the base map set-up as modifed by the Hordiculture Station, etc.
• MiningRate -- adjusts how fast Miners produce
• FarmingRate -- adjusts how fast Farmers produce
• FishingRate -- adjusts how fast Fishermen produce
• LoggingRate -- adjusts how fast Loggers produce
• FactoryRate -- adjusts how fast Factory Workers produce

So the developers gave us the ability make trees grow faster or slower, but they kept that ability for crops and grass to themselves.