Campaign Series Cold War

[Jason Petho]

The East and West German Border. Nick is making excellent progress on this master map for Cold War. Exciting times are coming indeed! I can't wait to finish the Order of Battles and start building scenarios!

cold_war_preview_01.png (4.21 MiB) Viewed 2387 times

[Crossroads]

All that picture is missing are a few Scimitars, lurking under the foliage

[Crossroads]

Compiled the latest builds for all our three Modern Wars series of games, including Cold War 1.00 ALPHA.

So while there is a long wish-list for new features for Cold War, it won't have to start from the scratch. It will be in the very same codebase baseline as Middle East and Vietnam are.

Here she is, in her MERDC variant of Forest Green and Field Drab.

cscw100alpha.jpg (818.41 KiB) Viewed 1899 times

[Crossroads]

Meh. Let us make it all Forest Green for now. Plenty of time to settle with the final colours! While at it, I introduced the two-color gridview to front end launcher app as well.

cscw100alpha2.jpg (878.3 KiB) Viewed 1727 times

[Jagger2002]

Really looking forward to this one.

[Jason Petho]

Thank you for checking in!

I am super excited too. A whole new world of fun for the Campaign Series!

[Crossroads]

Since December I’ve been working on the graphics engine, dissecting the legacy DirectDraw framework and replacing it with a modern DirectX-based one. Progress has been slow: the Map Editor is mostly done, but I’ve only just begun work on the Scenario Editor, with the game engine still waiting to round off the whole process. With the Map Editor, the goal was simply to get the maps (and nothing else) rendering in Direct2D; the Scenario Editor then brings the units into the fray. The latter screenshot is from the game engine, but I’m not there yet — animations, unit outlines, and so on are still unported.

Even so, it’s a rather promising start.

Here’s a sneak peek at the new Map Editor. Bill, aka da MausMan, has been working on new 2D graphics for the Cold War game, and he’s updated the Map Editor toolbar as well. It’s looking pretty neat, especially considering we’re still at a very early alpha stage.

What’s also hugely exciting is that Jason has managed to generate export files from his professional cartography software, and we can now import them directly into the Map Editor: land use, elevations, map labels, roads, and soon rivers. It’s still at the proof‑of‑concept stage, but it’s amazing to see a 250×250 hex map come together with just a few mouse clicks. Jason has spent a ton of time creating those exports, of course, but once they exist, it’s pure automation. That said, all this data is very modern, so it still needs to be rolled back a few decades to suit the Cold War scenarios.

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Here's an early look from the game engine, with Visible hexes toggled on. Proof-of-concept level stuff at this stage, but so nice to be able to work with transparency and alpha channels now.

ColdWarD2D_2.jpg (522.88 KiB) Viewed 67 times

[RedwoodForest]

This is going to be another phenomenal title from CS Legion, I can already tell. I'm a big fan of games that make creating maps easy for the end-user, as I find the ability to create custom scenarios for PBEM to be fundamental to the longevity of any computer wargame worth its salt. Regarding porting the cartographic software back a few decades: maybe this is a sign from the cosmos to make a modern warfare campaign series title?

[Crossroads]

This is going to be another phenomenal title from CS Legion, I can already tell. I'm a big fan of games that make creating maps easy for the end-user, as I find the ability to create custom scenarios for PBEM to be fundamental to the longevity of any computer wargame worth its salt. Regarding porting the cartographic software back a few decades: maybe this is a sign from the cosmos to make a modern warfare campaign series title?

Thanks RF for your kind words, and I agree fully on having editors available for allowing for new community scenarios. Hopefully, the CS Event Engine automation is another level or two up from the second iteration it currently hosts. There's a rather spiffy artillery targeting available in the current one, hopefully operational awareness on the next one based on Engagement Type information tagged for the scenario in the Scenario Editor.

[Crossroads]

Today, something a bit different. I’d still like to take the time at some point to move all the Options menu items into a separate User Preferences dialog with tooltips and everything. But that will have to wait for another day. Or month.

With the new menu groupings and the options now in alphabetical order, there’s still quite a lot going on here. I’ve always felt these menus were almost intimidating, so hopefully they’re now a touch easier to navigate.

There’s still room for improvement, of course. This is the current look of the View and Options menus at the end of today’s happy time at the keyboard.

menulabels.jpg (563.01 KiB) Viewed 4 times

[Crossroads]

^ Oh, forgot to add, with the new high quality scaling algorithms available, I thought to try to add 15 % to 3D unit image sizes. Bigger the better, right? They are all hand drawn and deserve all the screen time they can have.