Contributions needed

Code

• A good AI coder is needed to improve German fighter control (Tame Boar and Himmelbett).
  • Other parts of the existing AI also need improvement, notably German fighter production and the generation of bomber routes.
• A system that uses the change history of the data files to generate data for upconvert.py when entities (eg. targets) are added would be useful.
• A better weather model would be nice, maybe one producing winds as well which could then input into navigation.
• Moon rise/set times should be modelled, so that the moon only has an effect while above the horizon. However, the motion of the moon is a mathematician's nightmare.

Art

• The navaid icons could stand to be improved; at the moment they're only useful if you already know what they are (they're not readily discoverable).
• An icon may be needed for Window.

Text

• The target flavour text in dat/intel is incomplete and needs filling out.
• Some of the other flavour texts in dat/texts are a little too brief and could stand to be extended.
• Beware of the column limit! Text boxes don't auto-wrap!

Playtesting

• Overall difficulty balance: a competent player should be able to match the actual historical results. A skilled player should be able to do quite a bit better (since, unlike in real life, when you apply experience from last time you played, you're fighting the same war rather than the last war).
• Balance between mechanics: no individual mechanic should be broken. For instance, minelaying shouldn't be pointless, but nor should it be so valuable that spending six years doing nothing but lay mines is a good strategy. (Not even if it historically would have been a good strategy; maybe it would, but it's boring!)
• Balance between entities: while obviously some bombers (for example) are better than others, entities shouldn't 'dominate' their contemporaries. There should be circumstances when it's better to use Blenheims, and circumstances when it's better to use Wellingtons; times when raiding Bremen is a great idea and times when smashing Kiel is the clear winner; ways in which the Bf109G is troublesome and ways in which Do217Js are a nuisance. Any entity which is dominated isn't adding anything to the game; alternatively, any entity which dominates others is making the tactical puzzles less interesting. The restriction to contemporaries is important; for instance, it's entirely reasonable for Lancasters to always be better than Wellingtons, because you don't even get Lancasters until 1942 - though even then, if you have 500 Wellingtons ready for action, there are often reasons to use them rather than (or perhaps in addition to) 12 Lancasters.
• Roleplayability: do strategies produce results appropriate to their real-world viability? Is caring about non-modelled factors compatible with performing well enough to survive? Does the game allow, or even encourage, the player to imagine that they really are Bomber Harris? Do the bald facts of the game provide a scaffolding onto which the player can build narratives?
• Playtesters should consider sending their save files along with their comments, since these now contain an event log from which statistics can be computed.

Interface

• The current interface isn't all that discoverable. As a stereotypical UN*X developer, I'm not very good at user interfaces for non-technical end-users; plus, some of the interface elements were designed around what was easy to implement, rather than what would make a good UI.
  • Tooltips might be a nice way to help with that, but could be tricky to bolt onto libatg. (Perhaps use a status bar as per Spiffy?)
• There should be some front-end GUI for browsing game statistics (including graphs). This could be a separate program, but it would be nice if it were done inside the game. (At the moment you have to manually run Python scripts on the save file)

Packaging

• If you are a packager for a Linux distribution, please consider packaging Harris.