Copied with permission from the Command Ops Discord.
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SITREP Sat 7 Nov 26
Hi all,
It’s been a busy week. I’ve finally finished fixing the map offset issue that I’ve been working on for the past month. This issue manifested when I was debugging the new attack code. But it’s been around for some time. Essentially, what is happening is that if a force is attacking in line formation the left and right sub attacks would select their FUP and objective locations incorrectly. In some cases this would see the left sub attack cross over the center line and aim for an objective on the right hand side and vice versa for the right sub attack. The tricky thing with this is that it didn’t always happen.
It took me a lot of recording and plotting of routes to get a case that was repeatable and then a lot of analysis to realise that the problem was actually in the geometry we were using. A little bit of history here might serve for context. Back in 1995 and 1996 when we started programming CmdOps, there weren’t any good public math libraries we could access. So we wrote our own.
Well we hired a young graduate, Stephen ‘Sos’ French, who was good in math to program the math library. He did a great job developing the integer-based math library. It had to be integer based to ensure networked machines stayed in sync. Floats and doubles are handled slightly differently from one CPU to the next. So you can’t rely on them for syncing games. He also used a bitwise math to speed up processing.
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