Chris Holmes Online

This article made me laugh. Not the article itself. What made me laugh was that it reminded me of a YouTube video I’d seen a month or so ago about a German kid screaming at his computer.

I think what this goes to show is that no matter what, there’s always going to be some small segment of the population that can’t handle their liquor.

A few week’s ago I was thinking about baseball. That is a really odd thing for me to think about, because I generally don’t care for baseball. It’s not my favorite sport. It’s not even my 3rd favorite sport. I prefer football, specifically the NFL. But I saw a commercial for a new baseball game for the XBox 360 and Playstation consoles, and a thought occurred to me: Wouldn’t it be fun to write a baseball simulator?

I thought about that because I thought it would be software I could actually write. In my head, I thought of a baseball simulator as something largely non-graphical, more akin to the business software I build everyday than the fancy graphical applications I buy for entertainment. My thought was that you wouldn’t need to model players in 3D with lots of complex motion-capture graphics, or write tons of low-level shader graphics effects. You could more or less program a really sophisticated spreadsheet application. And I thought to myself, “Hey, that’s something I could do in my spare time, because I do something similar everyday.”

But then the lazy gene in me (which all good programmers have, I think) said, “I bet someone has already done that.”

So I started hunting around on the internet for a baseball simulator.

Sidebar: A long time ago there was a football game called Front Page Sports Football Pro ’96, and it was the king daddy of football simulators. FBPRO ’96 was the deepest and best sports simulator I’d ever encountered. It allowed users to create their own leagues, players, plays, playbooks and strategies. It allowed users to form online leagues and pit their skills against each other. It had a lively and proactive user base that provided all sorts of 3rd party tools and add-ons. And it tracked a lot more statistics than Madden does. It was the most engrossing sports game ever.

Then the company pushed a bug-ridden release out the door too soon and the game died. Since that day I’ve been waiting for a sports sim to capture my attention like FBPRO ’96. Finally, that has happened. Only it’s not a football sim, it’s Out Of The Park Baseball 2007.

OOTPB just released their 2007 version, so it was perfect timing on my part to find them on the web. The website for OOTPB looked very good, and they had a download for a 20+ day free trial, so I decided to try the game out.

At first, since OOTPB is basically a huge simulator with very little graphical detail, the volume of menus and options seemed daunting. I was a bit concerned initially that I wouldn’t be able to penetrate the learning curve of the game. But the interface to the game is not only sleek as silk, with very sharp, smooth graphics, but it’s intuitive as well.

Information in OOTPB is grouped logically. There’s a main page for team managers that gives you hyperlink access to just about every major interest point of your team, from roster setups to schedules and minor league teams. There’s also a really cool feature: Bookmarks. You can bookmark any screen in OOTPB. By doing so, the screen gets an “F” key (like F9) associated with it. This is a fantastic feature for newbies like myself, who find an interesting screen while browsing around and might not be certain how to return to that screen. Bookmark it for easy access, until you become familiar with the program and learn how to get there through normal means.

There’s also a couple of navigational arrows in the upper left corner of the screen, so you can go back and forward through screens you’ve visited. Navigation in OOTPB is almost like web surfing with a browser, which should be intuitive to just about any human being who hasn’t been living on an island with Nell.

Of course, OOTPB does come with a couple small drawbacks. For one, because it’s a small company they don’t have the licensing power to be officially licensed by Major League Baseball. So the default installation of OOTPB 2007 doesn’t come with accurate MLB rosters. But this is where the community kicks in: the users of OOTPB have compiled the rosters and rated the players. The downloads for these rosters can be found on the community pages for the website. I found a particularly good 2007 roster that I was able to import into the game that had nearly all the major league players on the correct teams, with the correct team names, colors, and logos. Then I was able to find another group of downloads from a fellow who goes by the moniker “Gambo”, that allowed for accurate player photos. In minutes I was able to create a replica of the real Major Leagues, complete with minor league teams and players.

All of this was, however, just setup. I still wasn’t a baseball fan, but still just a computer programmer looking at someone’s implementation of a sports sim.

And then I played the game.

I have to give kudos here to the people who designed this game. They obviously love baseball and that passion shows in the game itself. Playing OOTPB is one of the most fun and addictive gaming experiences I’ve enjoyed since Everquest showed me what it was like to slay a dragon with 40 other guildmates.

There’s no fancy graphics when you play a game in OOTPB. What there is, is a diamond with small player photos and statistics on the screen.

But this is everything you need. The game provides a very fun play-by-play, and you can control every action on the field on every pitch. Want to put on the hit-and-run? Want to have your speedy player attempt to steal a base? Want to pitch around your opponent’s home run king? You can do it all. This is where the strategy of baseball comes alive. It’s the element of the game that I’ve been missing out on all these years.

In addition to the game play there’s also all of the other management stuff you can do, which is equally addicting. There’s minor league teams to manage, players to scout (and you get a scouting staff, each with his own spin on what’s important to look for in a player). You can make trades with other teams; try and drop payroll and add studs for rebuilding, or overpay to try and win now. It’s all there, just as you would imagine it would be. Free agency, drafting, waivers, disabled lists, it goes on and on.

Two weeks ago I would have considered myself a novice when it came to anything involving baseball. I also would have said I wasn’t a fan of baseball, and you can take that sport if you like, and I’ll take football instead. But OOTPB is the best damn sports sim I’ve ever laid eyes on. It’s a rock solid game built by people who love baseball. It’s taught me an incredible amount about the sport in a very short time. I’m having a blast managing the Mariners and molding the team to my own image of what it should be.

What I love most about OOTPB is that it’s converted me into a baseball fan. I find myself talking baseball with a coworker now, where before I just didn’t care. I actually find myself listening and paying attention to the baseball highlights on Sportscenter. OOTPB opened my mind up to the wonderful possibilities of baseball strategy. And I think that’s really cool. Because strategy has always been one of the reasons I’ve loved football so much. I love offensive gameplans and seeing how guys like Mike Holmgren think. But baseball has it’s strategy too, and at least in OOTPB is just as fun and addicting as football.

If you are a fan of sports sims at all you owe it to yourself to download the trial for OOTPB and give it a shot. It’s one helluva game.

Download it here: http://www.ootpbaseball.net/

This post is going to be longer than it needs to be. If you want to skip the backstory, just jump down to the section labeled How To Build XNA Games With Regular Visual Studio.

I originally started college as an Electrical Engineering major. That didn’t happen because I had affection for EE, I just happened to be good at understanding that sort of stuff and I figured the degree would get me a good paying job.

Then my mom bought a 486 DX2/66 and installed X-Wing from LucasArts. I was enthralled by the game and what computers were becoming capable of doing. About a year later I had to take an intro to programming class as part of my base curriculum as an Electrical Engineering major, and I was hooked. I instantly “got” programming. While people in my class floundered to understand the concept of a fixed array I was trying to figure out how to make Tie Fighters appear on my screen and blow up. I switched my major immediately to Computer Science.

A couple years later I tried to recreate the isometric engine from Diablo with (at the time) the latest version of DirectX (6). I was mostly interested in learning the API and graphical programming, but building that engine also taught me a lot about isometric games, 2D sprites, drawing algorithms, optimization and things like the “A-Star” algorithm (which I used for pathfinding so my little barbarian could walk around the screen).

I desperately wanted to be a game programmer. But life happens, and we make choices based on things that are really important to us. I knew what it would take to be a game developer; I’d have to move to a bigger city, my wife would have to leave her family and the job she liked, and I’d have to start at the bottom and work my way to the top. I wasn’t certain my marriage would survive such a thing; my wife is very attached to her family and our living location. With everything else that goes on in life it just wasn’t the kind of decision I could make. And so my career as a game developer died quickly and with little fanfair.

XNA Appears….

A week ago I learned that Microsoft has released a new framework called XNA. It’s designed to make developing video games for the PC and XBox 360 easier, especially for “hobbiest” developers. I’ve spent the past week examining XNA and working through some very good tutorials on the internet. XNA is a neat thing. It has completely renewed my interest in game programming.

There’s just one problem: Currently, the XNA Game Studio Express only works with Microsoft’s Visual Studio Express. You cannot write XNA Games on Visual Studio Standard, Pro or Team System. Joe Nalewabau of the XNA team explains the reasons for this decision.

This bothered me on a few levels.

My biggest gripe is that you can’t install a lot of 3rd party tools with Visual Studio Express, like ReSharper. I can’t imagine any professional developer today who wouldn’t have a tool like ReSharper plugged into their IDE. I was blown away when I read Dave Weller’s blog, the Game Developer Community Manager for Microsoft, and found out he only has Visual Studio Express installed on his machine.

I’ve had ReSharper installed for several months now at work, and like the wheel, television and the internet, I simply can’t live without it. Writing code without ReSharper is like trying to watch TV without a remote control, or trying to drive a vehicle without power steering, or trying to plan a cross-country trip withoutYahoo Maps. Sure, you can do all of those things given enough time, patience and Advil, but why?

The other major gripe I had was that I didn’t know this before I went out and spent $250 on Visual Studio Standard edition. As soon as I found out Visual Studio Express wouldn’t handle ReSharper I had to go get a real IDE. It arrived today in a nice Amazon.com box (side note: can Christmas compete anymore? I get more thrill from the Amazon.com boxes that arrive at my house than I do from Rudolph wrapping…) But it wouldn’t open or compile my XNA game.

But that doesn’t mean you can’t make it work.

How To Build XNA Games With Regular Visual Studio

The culprit here is the .XNB file. For every piece of “content” you need to load in your game, you need a corresponding .XNB file. When you compile a XNA game with Visual Studio Express, the .XNB file is created. Without it your game will throw an exception when you try and run it. Compiling with any other version of Visual Studio won’t do the trick, so we have to generate those files in another way.

First thing you have to do is install Visual Studio Express. Yes, you still have to install it on your machine, mostly because XNA utilizes some aspect of the .NET Framework that deploys with the Express edition of VS. But that doesn’t mean you have to be handicapped by that IDE.

Next thing you need to do is download the XNA ContentBuilder, a project on CodePlex. It comes in source or msi installer versions. The XNA Content Builder is what we’ll use to make our .XNB files.

Go ahead and create a Windows project in Visual Studio Standard, Pro, or whatever version you enjoy. Reference the XNA libraries in your project (Microsoft.Xna.Framework & Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Game). Write your XNA game code. Riemer’s XNA Tutorials are a good place to start.

After you’ve added the necessary content files to your game project, open the XNA ContentBuilder application and set the Intermediate, Output and Root directories to point to the correct directories of your game build (hint: the Root and Output directories should probably point to your bin/Debug directory). Then use the “Add” button to add the content files to the XNA ContentBuilder project. Hit the “Build” icon on the toolbar and the XNA ContentBuilder application will build a .XNB file for each content file added.

Bingo – you’re good to go.

Go back to Visual Studio Excellent Edition (whichever version you’re using) and build/run your game. It should work.

The whole process is painless and will only take a few minutes. If you’re like me and can’t stand the thought of having to code with an inferior IDE like Visual Studio Express, have no fear. You can still write XNA code with your powerful Godmode IDE thanks to the nice folks who wrote the XNA ContentBuilder project on Codeplex.

Happy game building!

As a software developer, I’m keenly aware of code re-use, and its cousin, feature re-use. I try to follow good Object Oriented patterns and design my solutions to maximize code re-use, and I expect other developers to do the same. Especially in video games. When a successful feature is implemented in a game that is good, I expect other games in the same genre follow suite. Some people calling this “stealing”, but I call it “being smart”. When something works, you use it.

For instance, “tabbed browsing” is such a nice feature in web browsers that even Microsoft has finally caught on and included it in Internet Explorer 7. So while they aren’t exactly re-using code, they are implementing a feature from other browsers, and that is the essense of code re-use.

So when I see a sequel to a successful video game, I expect a certain amount of code re-use, or feature re-use, to occur. I expect successful features and functions of the previous game, or similiar games, to make the transition to the sequel in whole.

Neverwinter Nights 2 is the sequel to the original Neverwinter Nights, a successful, if not completely accurate or enjoyable, roleplaying game based on the Dungeons & Dragons ruleset. I say not completely accurate or enjoyable because for most people, myself included, it never lived up to the level of gameplay like other D&D titles, such as Baldur’s Gate, Icewind Dale or The Temple of Elemental Evil.

I had two big gripes about the original Neverwinter Nights. First, you could only control one main character and a “sidekick”, which significantly limited your options. After playing games like Baldur’s Gate and Icewind Dale, where you were allowed to control a full party of six different and unique characters with varying classes, skills and abilities, Neverwinter Nights was a significant letdown in the “party development” department. Part of what made Baldur’s Gate so memorable was listening to Minsc converse with his hampster or dealing with Jahera and her meddling harper friends. Plus, with six compansion of varying classes and skills, you could approach difficult combat situations with a variety of tactics. If one approach didn’t work, there was usually another way to win. In short, more companions meant more fun.

The other big problem I had with the original game was that the outdoor environments looked bad; they were blockly and unrealistic, and thus destroyed immersion. One of the main concepts behind Neverwinter Nights was to provide a construction kit for players to create their own adventures. The developers opted for a very easy-to-use world creation system, and because of that, everything in the game world was created with a square “tile” that displayed some part of the environment. This worked great for dungeons and interior portions of the game world that are naturally square and flat, as it made those environments quick and easy to create. Unfortunately, outdoor environments looked blocky and unrealistic.

The basic problem was that the square tile system was too simple; you couldn’t create rolling hills or organic looking forests or swamps. Everything was created flat, with cliff-type “mountain walls” and “ramps” allowing you to navigate from lower to higher ground. It was, without a doubt, the dumbest thing I’ve seen in any video game terrain-wise. Couple that with the release of Dungeon Siege around the same time, which also provided it’s own construction set yet managed to do so without creating a single fake-looking “wall” or completely “flat” outdoor surface, and it made the Neverwinter Nights design decision look like an even bigger blunder.

With that said, much of Neverwinter Nights was done well. The Quickbar was amazingly customizable, allowing you to place anything on it, from spells and weapons to potions and even commands for your henchman. The graphics possessed absolutely silky-smooth animations and camera movement, and the spellcasting effects were superb. It was ripe for a sequel to address the shortfalls, but keep the primary features in-tact.

So here we have it: Neverwinter Nights 2. How does it stack up?

Well, NWN2 looks, at least on the surface, like a sequel should. The same logo, the same artwork, the same box packaging – even the voice over dialog available during the character creation process is the same (so at least we’ve reused some audio files). And the two major problems from the original have been addressed.

First, outdoor environments are no longer constructed with sqare tiles. Instead, they have been replaced with a three-dimensional mesh system that allows for a much more organic and realistic outdoor environment. By pushing and pulling the mesh around, you can create the many uneven undulations necessary to mimic an outdoor environment, like a valley or hillside. Obviously the ease-of-use that came with the old system is gone as well (this is not nearly as simple as selecting and placing a tile), but I think the end result is well worth it. The outdoor environments look much better.

The party size gripe has also been addressed to some degree. You can now control up to three companions in addition to your own character, giving you a total party size of four. This improves combat significantly, since you now have more options available at your disposal.

However, it’s still disappointing compared to games like Baldur’s Gate and Icewind Dale. Four companions is somewhat limiting compared to six, forcing you to make hard choices about who to include and who to leave behind when progressing through the game. In a game like Baldur’s Gate, you might include a less capable character, such as a storytelling bard, just to experience the dialog interactions with other characters in your party, or to open up a sub-quest associated with that character. But in Neverwinter Nights 2, with only four total party members, everyone needs to pull their weight. The storytelling bard has to go.

So Neverwinter Nights addresses the two big issues. That means it’s a hit, right?

Well, not entirely. While the game looks like a worthy sequel, there are also some problems that shouldn’t exist, and those problems are dragging the game down.

For instance, in the previous version of Neverwinter Nights, if you wanted your character to be able to easily switch between using a ranged weapon (bow) and dual-wielding swords (or a sword and shield combo), you could stack your two swords on the same hotbar item, and they would “cross-over”, showing both weapons at the same time. Thus, you could swap to the swords with one button click. That sort of functionality doesn’t exist in NWN2, and its absence is somewhat of a head-scratcher considering it exists in the previous game.

The same thing can be said of the “Action Bar”, which is fairly ineffective in NWN2. Knights Of The Old Republic, and its sequel had very well-done “Action Bars”. These bars allowed you to queue up as many as four actions for every character, and those actions could be anything, from healing to special abilities (the Neverwinter Nights equivalent of a “spell”) or even specialized melee attacks. The inclusion of this feature made those two games much more enjoyable to play given their real-time, fast-paced combat implementations. You could pause the game, cycle through the characters in your party, and issue them four commands at a time. This saved you from having to pause the game frequently to issue individual commands to characters to ensure they’re doing the right thing.

Neverwinter Nights 2 has an action bar, but unfortunately it doesn’t allow you to queue up anything other than spells. There’s no way to queue up melee attacks or ranged weapon attacks; there’s no way to tell your archer to shoot three different targets in the next three rounds, spreading the damage around. Consequently, your characters must rely on rather simplistic Artificial Intelligence to do the right thing, or you have to take manual control of your characters via “Puppet Mode”, which turns combat into a laborous affair of micromanagement.

In addition to the poorly realized “Action Bar”, there’s also the equally ineffective “Mode Bar”. Characters can obtain certain abilties via their class or skill selection and those abilities can be toggled through the Mode Bar. One such useful skill is “Defensive Casting”. Defensive Casting allows your character to cast spells in melee combat without automatically causing enemies to initiate an “Attack of Opportunity”. With a simple Concentration check, you can cast a spell without your enemies getting a free swing at you. For a character like mine, a Fighter/Mage with aspirations of becoming an Eldritch Knight, the vast majority of my spellcasting is done in combat (I’m half Fighter after all). I would like to be able to stick my character in “Defensive Casting” mode and just leave it at that. But no, it doesn’t work that way in Neverwinter Nights 2. Instead of being able to turn on Defensive Casting mode and always cast your spells that way, your character continually drops out of Defensive Casting mode for no apparent reason.

Another frustrating “bug” with the mode bar is that modes which shouldn’t have any conflict with each other apparently are mutually exclusive. For instance, you can’t enter “Power Attack” melee mode and “Defensive Casting” spellcasting mode at the same time. When you compare this method to the way Knights Of The Old Republic handled Power Attacks (by letting you determine individual melee attacks as being Power Attacks, and queuing them up in the Action Bar), the Neverwinter Nights 2 method seems stupid and inferior.

The gripes don’t stop though. Remember the super-customizable Quickbar from the original Neverwinter Nights? Well, it’s still here, but severely neutered. You can’t assign party commands to it (like “Guard Me”), nor can you put class specific abilities on it (like a druid’s “Wildshape”). And, as previously mentioned, the whole dual-wield quick-swap is shot too.

Oh, and finally, another huge problem that players are complaining about on the message boards: the view angles suck. Players are complaining about the camera, but it’s not the camera that is broken (it uses the same mechanics as the predicessor). What’s wrong with Neverwinter Nights 2 is that buildings and other structures don’t “disappear” when you rotate the camera around the game world. Your view is constantly being obstructed by walls and roofs that don’t properly turn opaque, and rafters in ceilings that don’t disappear. There is a lot of clipping that is missing from the game engine and it makes the world much harder to navigate and the game much harder to enjoy.

What’s odd about these flaws is that the solutions to them already exist, either in the first Neverwinter Nights game, or in contemporary roleplaying games (Knights Of The Old Republic, for instance). Playing Neverwinter Nights 2 is like surfing the web in Internet Explorer 6. There are other web browsers out there and they have better features, so why doesn’t Neverwinter Nights 2 have them as well?

That said, Neverwinter Nights 2 succeeds more than it fails. It’s fun; the story is bigger, the voice acting is considerably better (and there’s lots of it), and there are more levels. There’s more prestige classes this time around as well and the game world is a bit more open-ended.

If Obsidian, the makers behind the game, can iron out the bugs and implement the features that players have come to expect from this genre of game, then Neverwinter Nights 2 could elevate itself to rare status. I don’t think it will make anyone forget Baldur’s Gate or Baldur’s Gate 2 anytime soon, but with the proper patching it could be a much better game than the first Neverwinter Nights, and that’s all you can ever ask of a sequel.

In early 2004 Atari released a Troika game called The Temple of Elemental Evil. It was subtitled as “A Classic Greyhawk Adventure.” Originally, The Temple of Elemental Evil (abbreviated as TOEE) was a module, released in 1985, for the pencil and paper Dugeons & Dragons game. Fans of the pencil and paper version of D&D always loved the TOEE module, and hoped it would one day be reincarnated as a video game, especially given the success of certain roleplaying computer games like the Baldur’s Gate series.

The catch in all of this was that many pencil and paper roleplayers often disliked the way computer games translated the D&D universe.

Video games are a different animal than traditional pencil and paper roleplaying games. P&P games were designed to be played at a table, with friends, and often involved long nights, lots of pizza and Mountain Dew. D&D in the pencil and paper era was as much a social event (if not more) as it was a game.

Video games changed all of that. Baldur’s Gate, and it’s wildly successful sequel, Baldur’s Gate 2, were single-player games. The social aspect of D&D was dropped and computerization took over. The result was a mixed bag. While Baldur’s Gate was a really fun video game (and one of my favorites as well), it was not what many old school players considered as true D&D. The biggest complaint from D&D fans was that the combat happend in real-time, as opposed to the turn-based nature of a P&P game. Yet, because of the success of games like Baldur’s Gate, nearly every other roleplaying game to hit the PC has utilized a real-time combat engine.

Enter Troika and The Temple of Elemental Evil. The developers for TOEE decided that it was time for a computer roleplaying game to finally deliver a product that emulated the pencil and paper experience. Combat in TOEE is turn-based, and as much as possible, every single rule and detail in the Dungeons and Dragons handbook was coded into the TOEE engine.

There was just one problem. Atari wanted to publish the game too quickly, and it flat-out was not ready. With their feet held to the fire, Troika pushed the game out the door in an unfinished state. What resulted was one of the worst game publishing nightmares of all time. TOEE was one of the most bug-ridden pieces of software ever to hit store shelves.

Fans who had waited for a turn-based Dungeons and Dragons game were at once elated, and then mortified. The game had the mechanics correct; it was a thing of beauty from a purist point of view. But it was littered with so many bugs, flaws and glitches that it was virtually unplayable, even after several patches from Atari. The Temple Of Elemental Evil looked like it could have been one of the greatest roleplaying games of all time, but a poor decision to publish it before it was ready killed the potential for the game.

But the story isn’t over.

Just when things looked grim, the Circle of Eight showed up, a group of fans with coding and hacking skills and a passion for Atari’s butchered game. They loved the game so much, and realize it had so much potential, that they spent their free time trying to reverse engineer and demystify the TOEE game engine. They worked tirelessly to modify it, and in the process turn a turd of a game into something worthy of every D&D fan’s PC gaming shelf.

The end result? This past July the Circle of Eight released their final patch to update The Temple of Elemental Evil. While they weren’t able to fix every bug (you can only tweak things so far without access to the source code) they did a fine job of modifying the game and bringing it out of the deep hole that Atari had cast it into.

I just finished playing through the game with the Circle of Eight’s final patch, and the improvements are amazing.

For the longest time I’ve considered the Baldur’s Gate series of games to be the best Dungeons and Dragons roleplaying games ever made for the PC. And in terms of story and character they still are. But The Temple Of Elemental Evil is the only game I’ve ever played that gets the turn-based combat engine correct. It is perfect in every way.

I know in our fast-paced, reward-me-now, instant-gratification society, turn-based combat isn’t as popular or stylish as real-time combat. But after playing through The Temple of Elemental Evil with the Circle of Eight patch, I can honestly say I prefer roleplaying games, at least in the Dungeons and Dragons universe, to utilize a turn-based combat system. It saddens me a bit to know that future games (for instance, the upcoming Neverwinter Nights 2) will not be utilizing a turn-based engine for combat.

My hope is that somewhere a roleplaying developer gets a chance to play this patched version of The Temple of Elemental Evil. In fact, every developer working on a roleplaying game for the PC ought to play this game. At least see how it feels. It’s a totally different experience.

Which brings me to my last point. In the latest issue of PC Gamer Magazine, one of their columnists wrote an article about (paraphrasing the exact title here) “Five things the developers of Fallout 3 can do so it doesn’t suck.” He had some basic, common-sense advice for the developers of Fallout 3. But nowhere in the five suggestions did he mention turn-based combat.

So, let me do it. Fallout, and it’s sequel, Fallout 2, are generally regarded as some of the best Roleplaying Games to ever hit the PC screen. And those games exclusively used a turn-based combat system. Due largely to this design decision, the Fallout games provided a much more strategic and rich combat experience.

Please, whoever you are, whoever is responsible for developing Fallout 3, strongly consider utilizing a turn-based combat engine. Moreover, please take a look at the way The Temple Of Elemental Evil handles things like Area of Effect and in-combat distance.

It would be a shame if the maligned, patched version of Atari’s game is the last, good turn-based game we PC gamers ever see…