The Steam review takes much, much longer than promised. There is
nothing for us to do but wait.

It may be related to the nature of MilOps and its use of non conventional tech.
But judging from the forums, this seems to be a new and recent problem that more developers suffer from.

Since we're completely in the dark, we will postpone the release date by a week each time (yes it may take several weeks). We're realy sorry for this delay. We 'll keep you updated. Fingers crossed!

Work is now focussed on testing the application and tweaking the content. Besides fixing several bugs, enhancing performance and improving the UI, we also spent time this week on researching and building the French side of the OOB.

While there is quite some information avaible about the German Army for that time period, finding detailed information for the French Army - in 1940 considered to be the world's strongest army - is a lot harder.

But digging deep enough has yielded some very interesting websites with tons of details on French equipment, OOB's and unit TOE's.

Our latest addition to the OOB is the French Armored Division or "Division Cuirassée", a small part of which is shown in the screenshot above. On situation maps these units were shortened to "DCR" where the "R" stands for "Reserve" because they were in reserve when the Germans started their attack.

So much of our time is spend on last-minute details.
We did manage to add a BLOG entry. This one explains how we are able to fill a whole planet with content.
Read it on our website.

The information in the OOB database format we now have created has been completely separated from the representation in the game's code, in effect making it a generic format.

Our load code now transforms this into the specific data used by the engine and if the engine changes we need to change that code, but the information gathered in the OOB database can remain the same.

We felt this was needed since the OOB's are the result of historical research and thus represent some kind of "ground truth" and we don't want this effort to be wasted or require massive modifications if we change some detail inside the engine.

So we went the extra mile and separated the OOB format from the engine format and wrote a new loader for the engine. This separation will allow us to work on OOB's and engine features in parallel without them interfering with each other. This also means we can add more information to the OOB than the engine currently uses but might incorporate in the future.

In parallel we added more features to our OOB editing UI so we can create and edit OOB's a lot faster than before.

There's a new blog post up on our website, this time the topic is Information Flow and how this works within the Unit Hierarchy. Just follow the link to our website.

1. Polish and UI tweaks for the Benchmark release next month.
2. A fancier OOB file format that supports a number of new features.

The first one isn't that exiting.
The second one is!

For saving game-play progress we use a normal, binary dump that contains everything. It makes an exact recreation of the game state possible.
Exactly what you want for a safe-game.

For OOB editing however, you want something else. You want to benefit from any improvement of the simulation and unit-Database without any additional integration effort.
So we devised a "recipe" file format. It contains not exact binary data, but a description of an OOB/scenario.
When loaded we can instantiate that description using what ever the recipe ingredient-state is at that time.
So if we change an ingredient, we automatically benefit from it when we load the recipe.

It is like the MIDI format. MIDI is a description of audio. It uses the described characteristics of audio to recreate analogue sound.
It is not an exact reproduction, and the quality depends on who is doing the interpretation of the audio description, but is very flexible.

We are very pleased with the results and exited about the possibilities.
It is ideal for modding without breaking compatibility when updating the engine.
This brings proper modding support so much closer!

We had a very nice response from the gaming press:
https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2018/05/04/the-flare-path-heavily-engauged/
https://www.wargamer.com/articles/military-operations-benchmark-release-date/
https://www.wargamer.fr/military-operations-rendez-vous-en-juin-pour-la-version-benchmark/

If you like to read the press-release yourself, here it is .

of the Benchmark release-date and treated us on a proper feature on their regular "The Flare Path" .
It is so gratifying to notice when people understand what we're trying to achieve.
It makes all the long hours and lack of social life worth it!

Go over there and see what they think about our little project.
I think it speaks for itself :-)

It highlights some of the invaluable sources of information and inspiration we could not do without while developing MilOps. We recommend you take a look at these .