Hi Monty!
Fantastic news! Thanks for all your efforts in BAT development and campaign design.
Can I give you a piece of advise before releasing your WWI campaigns?
I'm trying to make a humble contribution to the BAT community. Lacking high-tech knowledge in modding and so, I'm just trying to add flavour to the campaigns, reworking and adapting awards of some countries to the Great War environment. I've finished French awards and have Russian almost done. I've learned too how to include this awards in DOF without overwriting the default WWII ones. I'll try to upload a set with French, British, German and Russian awards and ranks as soon as posible.
In the meantime, I've learned that there is a tricky in-game behaviour in awards recognition, which is controlled by the lines
[Main]
Class il2.game.campaign.CampaignRed
awardsClass il2.game.campaign.AwardsRUfighter
which are included in the campaign.ini file inside every campaign
awardsClass il2.game.campaign.AwardsDEfighter: it has nothing to do with Germany. It describes just that awards are earned in a lineal sequence, from the lesser one (award0) to the most important one (award6 or higher).
awardsClass il2.game.campaign.AwardsRUfighter: it uses the Sovietic award system, in which you can earn the same award more than once. This option should be used just for Sovietic campaigns, whereas German, British, French and any other country should have
AwardsDEfighter insinde the campaign.ini file.
Here you have a picture of a French campaign awards which was wrongly set as AwardsRUfighter:
As you can see, the Military Medal has been incorrectly awarded twice.
In my humble opinion, ALL campaigns in DOF should be set as AwardsDEfighter, to get all awards in a sequential order.
Another minor suggestion is to place the Russian campaigns in a RE folder instead of RU folder. In the properties file #DOF2 > STD > i18n > country, there is listed a RU country (changed to 'Imperial Russian Air Service' for DOF) and a RE country (an unused 'Russian Empire'). I think it should be better to use RE for the Imperial Russian Air Service (with its own awards and ranks), and keep RU for the Soviet Army (so it could be used for a Russian Civil War campaign).
I will try to explain this with more detail when I release the awards sets, but I thought it would be better to tell this before Monty uploaded the campaigns, just in case he wanted to take this into account.
Cheers!