History:
Reasons for FireStrike :
To provide a source for historical simulation, and as a tool for
wargamers.
T.E.W.T: My
inspiration was the British army's use of TEWT's (Tactical Exercises Without
Troops) to simulate tactical deployment.
Table Top
Miniatures: The use of
tabletop miniatures rather that the real thing gives brigade, company and
platoon commanders the ability to see the whole battlefield without the expense
of deploying real troops & vehicles on the ground. It also gives them a tactical
understanding and a viewpoint that would never be possible at the ground level.
Tabletop miniatures give a 'real' General's-eye view to a wargame that just cannot be found with computer games.
The experience is somehow more genuine.
 Wargamers:
FireStrike was originally aimed at the wargamer. Their rules tend to be very
long, convoluted, and to the unconverted - in fact, a trifle dull. I had
always fancied myself as a tank commander, but I don't have a tank, but as
I'm not a converted wargamer I found the rules to be too time consuming. A
typical household PC has all the computing power to carry out the necessary
calculations. Firestrike has up-to-date graphics but will run on any reasonable
quality Pentium based PC with XP.
 Historians:
FireStrike gives the historian on-line access to the technical
characteristics of the majority of vehicles, armoured and softskin, guns and
planes used by the major combatants in the
Western Theatre of Operations
from '44 - ' 45. Firestrike's database allows not only the static viewing of
these technical characteristics, but using the scenario module to build a
battle it also gives the ability to see how these characteristics worked in
reality and gave this weapon it's ability to fight.
Development
in QBASIC: Back in 1990 I
set to writing some software to do the above but never finished it. The original
program was something I conceived, named and started to program in Quick Basic
4.5 because that was a mature and competent development environment available at
that time.
 Development in
VBDOS: Development was then moved to VBDOS to take advantage of the environment's better memory
handling, less bugs &c. but I did not update the interface to VBDOS
forms due to the limitation of not being able to display graphics whilst the
forms are on screen. VBDOS shelf life was not long so it soon became apparent
that it would be best to recode to take advantage of a better development
platform.
Visualbasic
6.0 :
The code is now being
converted to the
VB6
environment. The screens have all been updated. New graphics throughout but
re-using code whenever possible. The porting is not a simple task but in the
course of the work many improvements have been made to the code structure and
content.
 Alpha/beta Version:
This is still the
alpha
version of Firestrike as I have not yet completed the
conversion. The work progresses and the aim is to get the tank to tank portions
of the game working first, other sections following after.
 FireStrike is Free: The alpha
and beta versions of the Windows code will be
free
for download. The old DOS version will also be completely free as the DOS version is a little old
now. As time progresses the utility will mature, modules will be added and
the stable version will be produced being relatively bug-free.
 Using
the Software: I have
used the DOS version of FireStrike to control all my WWII
wargames and it does so in a fluid manner speeding up a large wargame up
considerably. The Windows version has been designed to make the
selection of units and unit characteristics as easy as possible.
 Programming
: When I started this project I was not a professional programmer and only a
part-time wargamer, but I'm doing my best to make a product worthy of the former...
and useful to the latter.
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