Greetings,
Busy week in the Tactical Office, plenty of news to report...
1/ Three new battles and eleven free missions have been released this week, for all game platforms (TIE, XvT and XWA). It brings the Mission Compendium to a total of 256 Battles and 198 Free Missions, 1536 total custom missions online! A cookie for the first pilot who manages to fly ALL of them :P
2/ Beta Team: there is still some kind of backlog in the processing of new battles. for a better transparency about the status of submitted battles, I posted a listing of these with their current status at http://www.tiecorps.org/tac/beta.html . for your information, each beta playtesting period lasts two weeks, and playtests around 9 battles or set of free missions: 3 TIE, 3 XvT, 3 XWA if possible, which may explain TIE Battles and missions take longer to go through the Tactical Staff for approval. But, hey, we already have plenty of TIE battles... anyway, dealing with this backlog is one of my primary concern.
3/ For the first time since the Battle Center has been created, no bug report is pending ! All 553 bug reports have been taken into account, all relevant ones have led to bug correction. This is an accomplishment following the hard work done over the past year by Project Phoenix and by the various CA:TACs; anyway, there may be still some bug around, so please fill a bug report when you encounter one (please make sure before it is really a bug...;-) ).
4/ To complete the work of Project Phoenix (which has taken care of battles released until SA Kawolski's appointement as TAC), the Tactical Staff will welcome in addition to the Beta Team in charge of playtesting new battles a "Phoenix Engineers Team", in charge of checking/correcting battles released over the past year (TIE, XvT and XWA), the same way Project Phoenix did for the battles released before. This team will be under the direction of Vice Admiral Wlodek, send any application for joining the team to him. Tacticians positions should only be filled with skilled mission designers. Details about the Phoenix Team have been posted at http://www.tiecorps.org/tac/phoenix.html . It is going to be more checking than correcting battles, but I know there are at least a couple needing some briefing fixes ;-)
5/ Thanks to Vice Admiral Wlodek and Lieutenant-Colonel Calzeo Inkwolf, the compatilibity problem encountered by some Mac pilots has been solved: TIE Fighter doesn't handle custom missions with more radio messages than the original ones it replaces. This problem can be avoided using the Battle 13 slot instead of the Battle 1 one. You can get the necessary files for this there: http://www.tiecorps.org/tac/tac-man/files/mac.zip . This fix contains a generic battle13.lfd, so people will need to rename the mission file names in order to use it. All TIE Battles are going be updated with a custom battle13.lfd for Mac pilots, but it may take some time (around 200 TIE battles...)... this is going to be the "Big Apple Project" :P
6/ The Tactical Manual has been slightly updated, with the addition of the Asteroid patch for Tie Disk and of the "Battle13" fix for Mac users. Custom goal labels (XvT,BoP,XWA) are now required for new battles/missions.
7/ Thanks to SA Kawolski, the BSF system now allows XWA pilot files to be directly uploaded for grading. This is going to make easier XWA squadron commanders life after TIE ones ;-)
8/ TIE/XvT/XWA Mission design contest for the Jedi Convention 2001 : I will settle the details this week, the competition should be released next week-end.
9/ I guess IWCOM Admiral Maverick is still looking for someone to replace me as IWTAC ... if you think you are skilled enough in mission designing for such a position, drop him a line. Btw, the final battle of the IW 5-battle campaign "Rion's Shadow" is still under construction ... expect the sequel to IW26 to be released some day (btw, the XWA version, IW-XWA#26 is currently the fleet-wide best rated battle with four 5/5 reviews... fly it, it rocks).
10/ Concerning subgroup battles, people are free to submit them to me if they meet the EH standards of the Tactical Manual. In addition, plotlines of these SG battles must be approved by the appropriate SGCOM (or "SGTAC") prior to release. Free Missions are mixed in the mission compendium, there is no separation between TC, IW, ID or DB ones.
11/ The X-Wing Alliance Mission design course reached 6 graduates... plenty of useful information for any XWA mission designer, it may even be useful for XvT ones (AlliED is very similar to XvTED).
12/ I will be out of town from Sunday night to Thursday... please have mercy on my mailbox ;-)