Milestone SEOW Release

[IV/JG7_4Shades]

Hi everyone,

Even after 20 years have passed, it seems that SEOW campaigning is still relevant. For this reason we have spent considerable energy over the past year or two to bring the SEOW code base up to a more modern state. Once upon a time, well 2005 to be precise, the MP was developed expressly for Internet Explorer using ASP, the SEDB only ran on Microsoft Access and the DCS was a tiny application pushing the boundaries of the original Microsoft .NET 1.

Stepping forward to 2025, the MP now runs well on all major browsers (Edge, Firefox, Opera, Chrome) using PHP 9, and we are running the SEDB on MySQL 9 with no issues, having jettisoned MSAccess years ago. SEDCS posed significant migration problems as it relied on obsolete ODBC drivers for database functions, and was written using .NET Framework 4.8, which is generations of .NET ago. This situation has just changed. I am delighted to announce the release of SEDCS x8.1, a milestone in SEOW technology. It is built using .NET 8 and an industry-standard set of packages for MySQL operation (MySQLConnector) and file transfer (FluentFTP). SEDCS v8.1 leverages the advances made in the beta version of SEDCS 8.0 in 2024 in refactoring the entire database layer away from ODBC to ADO.NET.

At the same time, we have moved to including SEDB patch functions in the MP so that patches are automatically applied to databases connected to the MP. And there is an experimental MP update tool now that, with a single click, downloads and applies the latest MP patch updates from the SVN repo at Sourceforge.

So you can see that SEOW has been future-proofed a bit. It should still run for a few years yet, as long as IL2/HSFX and ArmA2/Iron Front are still around. The next project may be a port from ArmA2 to ArmA3. Stay tuned for that. In the meantime you can download the new SEDCS from the following link

seowhq/net/SEDCS/

Cheers,
4Shades

[Rejsyg]

Thank you 4Shades and everyone else involved up to this point, nothing quite like SEOW around, especially with everything about it being publicly available. Quite a few "dynamic campaigns" have popped up here and there across various flight sims over the years and this is one of the few that isn't a closely held secret by the author(s). I can't say I've seen anyone else tackle the level of depth that SEOW has and after 20 years for it to still be supported!

I only happened to discover this gem thanks to VARP squadrons about 10 years ago... There was no going back to 1946 without SEOW
I did hope for HSFX 8 to be developed by 242sq and friends up into IL-2 1946 4.13, but alas its only a few features to miss out on. Its kind of funny that most people choose to install HSFX without knowing of SEOW.

The SEOW framework is a truly a passionate example of how to extract the potential inherent in these types of games, and I do wish it will one day be seriously considered as a core feature of new games by developers.