Panzer Battles Updates

[Simulacra53]

Customer service is great.

That’s why I almost feel guilty making this remark.

The free of charge Gold update for PzC is most unique in a business environment where charging money for an “updated” version is the best case scenario, dropping support completely even more likely.

But the friendly service goes beyond this as I personally experienced as a customer.
JTS / WDS are exemplary..

Still the theme of John having limited time for these games is a reoccurring one.

Of course not being privy to the deal between JTS and WDS it is difficult to gauge the situation other than at face value and that might lead to the wrong conclusion.

Aware this is now more or less OT and should not detract from the good news about the (free) Panzer Battles updates.

[Strela]

As it’s been bought up here, i’ll be a little more specific so people understand why some of the ‘division’ of responsibility is apparent.

John Tiller is primarily focused on government work. If he didn’t have that, there would be no consumer titles. Being a niche publisher in a niche genre, there is just not enough standalone money to support a consumer only publisher.

John’s availability fluctuates based upon those government contracts. The baseline is that John is predominantly on that full-time and any fixes for these commercial titles have to be laid out and scheduled.

WDS grew out of a desire to both speed up the rate of publishing games and reduce some of the dependence on John Tiller for programming in particular. We were lucky to have Berto from the John Tiller Campaign Series (now published by Matrix) join us. The Campaign Series is his major focus (like 80%), but we get 20% of his time. WDS had taken over responsibility for all of the ‘new’ Panzer Battles series and that is where all our new found programming effort went. You can see that impact start from mid 2016 with new features showing up in the new PzB Demo and retrofitted into Kursk and Normandy.

Berto has a personal love of the ACW and we also took over responsibility for that source code from 2017. Both of these series (PzB and ACW), have changed pretty dramatically since that time.

As far as Panzer Campaigns (PzC), John Tiller offered us the source code to apply many of the fixes and updates you’re seeing in PzB. Our problem is that our programmer is already fully loaded up and this would be a ‘bridge too far’ at this point of time. This is not to say we won’t bring some changes across in the future, but we are maxed out currently.

We decided to make a bigger priority to roll out the Gold updates and make the games appealing to both existing users, but very importantly new players. Adding more content and updating the graphics has helped to re-energise interest and get people talking about these titles again. With the newly released Japan ‘45 and a number of upcoming titles, the series is still alive and kicking and we will try and do incremental upgrades as we go.

Finally, the John Tiller catalogue is huge and we do want to make certain all are at least reviewed for potential ‘Gold upgrades’ as there is life in every title still if we put the effort in.

So JTS and WDS work very closely together to maximise our resources, but there is a split between programming responsibilities currently.

I hope that helps clarify a few things.

David

[Simulacra53]

Thanks David for the clarification.

Again, no offense intended.

[Strela]

Thanks David for the clarification.

Again, no offense intended.

And none taken!

I just thought this was an appropriate opportunity to explain why some of the dependencies are the way they are.

I always find its better to manage expectations with some context. It answers a lot of later questions...

David

[Strela]

...a couple of other little things I've noticed. There's no favicon anymore, it's just the generic windows one

I can also confirm this, it is a minor detail but it's still there. As can be seen here.

I need to talk to Berto on this. I decided to update all the iconology and this has in the main worked. We thought the current problem with Favicons not changing was due to old icon caching in Windows and would self correct.

That doesn't appear to be the case and I proved it happens on new machines as I did a clean install on a brand new laptop recently.

It's weird as some programs have updated their icons perfectly and others not.

David

We have worked out what the issue is here and corrected it. It has impacted a number of the game exes and editors. We will let you know the best way to get these replacement builds soon.

David