Campaign games

[ErikCumps]

Hello all,

You may know the War Cabinet program, for campaign and battle tracking. In the summer
of 2020 I added support for winSPWWW2 and today I am working on adding support for
winSPMBT as well.

While doing so I noticed something strange and I would like to ask a question about it.

It's a fairly technical question, so maybe it is best answered by the creators of the game.

So, on to my question. It is about the campaign games. Not the "Long" or the "Generated"
campaigns, but the campaigns on the campaign list, like "RoundHammer: Normandy 1943".

It should be possible to add and track savegames for battles of these campaigns to a
WarCab campaign dossier, but unfortunately they are not recognized as campaign games.

The question now is why?

Currently WarCab uses the data in the savegame data block #37, to detect if a savegame
is a campaign game or not.

In that data block, there are some values that relate to campaigns:

• Campaign mode flag
• Campaign battles fought
• Campaign max battles
• Campaign start date month
• Campaign start date year (-1900)
• Campaign end date month
• Campaign end date year (-1900)
• ...

This information is used to determine if a savegame belongs to a campaign and, by using
the "Campaign battles fought" value, to give each battle a unique index so that different
battles in the campaign can be sorted in the correct order, even when two or more battles
of the campaign happen in the same month and year.

For "Long" and "Generated" campaigns, these values are filled in like so:

Campaign flag? : 1
Start date : 1936/07
End date : 1945/08
Battles fought : 17 of 60
Decisive victories : 16
Marginal victories : 1
Losses : 0

Battle index : 17

But for the campaigns on the campaign list, only the campaign mode flag is set to 1
and all the other values are still 0, like so:

Campaign flag? : 1
Start date : (empty date)
End date : (empty date)
Battles fought : 0 of 0
Decisive victories : 0
Marginal victories : 0
Losses : 0

Battle index : 65535

Is warcab missing some data from the savegame to allow it to make a correct determination
and detect the savegame as a campaign savegame? Is this information recorded in some
other place, some other data block? What mechanism do winSPWW2 and winSPMBT us
to treat these savegames as part of a campaign?

Please, I don want to appear to be stepping out of line.

In all honesty, I am just asking this question to have a shot at further improving the value
of War Cabinet for these games.

And, to be clear, I am not asking anyone to spill any programming technical details or
other sensitive info of the winSPWW2 or winSPMBT applications here in the forum, sending
me a private message is fine.

Thanks for your consideration,
Erik Cumps