You may remember in my last Chapter Master post that there has been some discussion amongst fans about hiring a programmer to debug Dukes released source code. It has been confirmed that one such member Journier as of the 2nd of October has done just that and here is the progress they have had so far:

Update 1
Oddities
We cleared up more code today found something called "thatone" random number given to this variable and its checked in a 100 different places... left it where it was for fear for the chaos gods.

Bug fixes

• Fixed a crash related to space hulks.
• Fixed an issue where to find a event, the game generated objects in every system to find the system the event took place in, Made it NOT generate those temporary objects oddly so many of them...
• Fixed an issue with ancient ruins on planets I believe the ones you explore, so that they will work all the time now, apparently there was a chance it wouldn't do anything

Found a lot on the Necron tombs related stuff, this will be a day of work by itself.
Other stuff

Rewrote descriptions for relic rooms. Spiced them up for fun to break the monotony. added some DF reference.
Got a massive headache from cleaning code up and ended the day.
Update #2

Today we went through the Massive Random Event file, and restructured it massively for readability. cut its size down from over 1000 lines to below 300 lines. Separated the random events to their own respective files to easily find and modify their effects instead of inside of a single giant random event file.


Also, never take the shitty luck attribute in game because that effects every random event you could imagine badly. probably the only game I can remember where the bad luck attribute actually probably did something noticeable.

Found the Fucko string... giant dense code thing of death. IDK what it is, left it alone.

Cleaned up the chaos invasion random event, cleaned up the necron event to avoid any crashes in relation to their awakening maybe.

If only you guys knew how many memes are in the code.

Literally we added a single DF meme into the trophy room. Theres memes in this game from the code on up. Literally everywhere...

They were already there.

Update #3

Fixed star generation to give you a range of star numbers to have 65-75, before it was trying 120x to create 70 stars, and if it failed the fewer stars youd have. fixed that.
changed the vehicle system to a more reasonable version, faster, easier to work with and change for future revisions. It doesnt sound like much until you understand that the code base isnt properly spaced out, 1000 lines in some of these files can equal 2000 lines properly spaced a majority of the time...

found something called this in the code

Quote

then old_dudes+=1;

no clue, whats being referenced save it for later.

Update 3.1

Made armors a Moddable file so anyone can change the values once game is installed.

In spite of this don't get your hopes up too soon, Journier is refusing to post updated code at this point and is focusing on bug fixes rather than updates. Rather reasonably he has requested for the community to wait up to 2 months before he does release the code and to keep posting crash logs from Dukes source code.

Quote from: kayosetsu on October 27, 2015, 06:47:08 pm

Any way I can help out with this Journier? Admittedly I don't know very much about programming but I'm working on Chapter Master as a way to learn my own way. But since the code appears to be a big mess of what-the-%&$# I'm having trouble understanding much of it. I have fixed a couple of bugs on my own though (Tried working on the renegade crash bug but at this point I'm stumped). Basically I want to assist with bug fixing.

Since you're working on cleaning up the code I'm hoping that it'll make fixing bugs much less painful for me.

honestly just wait, there's gonna be a massive release coming up in a month or months that will get all the code into a proper debuggable state that is readable If you guys want start posting bug reports on a regular basis, where you were ( what screen) what you were clicking  etc. as detailed as possible.

That way when we get to a section we can refer back to your bug reports to see if there's any silly code. Which we have run through a chunk of it.

There will be a gitlab repository created in the next 2 months. thats the timeline we are aiming for , for you guys.

TLDR : Please give crash logs and where you were in the crash and what you were exactly doing. We need bug reports. good bug reports. please and thanks.

And possibly if you guys really want to help find or put your little butts out there to find decent pixel artists for the game to get away from the IP. Dark warlike images of Interstellar Army Simulator 2015.

Now some in community who have offered to help with the code and have been turned down for now are starting to believe that Journier is keeping it to himself to possibly to monetize the development in a similar way to Duke. Thankfully the more sensible members of the community are realising that too many people working on the project without decent communication and understanding of what is a tangled mess of code is a recipe for disaster so the drama has been halted for now.

To play my own part I'm still hosting backups of Dukes links and files which you can obtain below:

Interstellar Army Simulator 2015: Source Code: Link
Chapter Master 0.6555: Source Code: Link
Original Design Document (former project): Link
Features That Were Planned: Link

Don't know What Chapter Master is? The original review is here.
Just want to play the game? Then Interstellar Army Simulator and the mod and be downloaded here.