Mods for other theatres

[Captain Cruft]

Cobra's super sexy German planesides got me thinking. How possible would it be to make a mod for the Mediterranean or European theatre? After all, you have a map of 9,000 x 9,000 miles to work with. The Eastern Front would fit into that easily.

Well, there is a problem. Zones. These are hard-wired to hex co-ordinates and to some extent base (location) slot numbers. So you can't fundamentally prevent the existence of malaria in the western area for example. Or make more of the map cold e.g. for the Russian front. Weather is zone dependent too.

That's to say nothing of how well the engine would work in other theatres. 60 miles per hex is too big for the Med and it would make European land war ridiculous. As would the silly rail lines.

Shame. I suppose you might be able to hex-edit the zone co-ords but finding the particular bytes in question would be a nightmare.

Still, I bet some one tries eventually

[DuckofTindalos]

Hey, we could end up with a malaria zone in Denmark. That would be very interesting...[8D]

[Captain Cruft]

Don't you have malaria in sub-tropical Denmark then? ROFL

I just had a quick look. You can get most of the interesting part of Europe into about 50 x 50 hexes, so you could just avoid the malaria zone. Plus the cold zone is more or less in the right place for Russia.

It gets more possible

The "interesting part of Europe" means the area bounded by Britain, North Africa, Scandinavia and Russia up to the Urals/Caspian Sea. That just shows how truly vast the Pacific is BTW.

[Captain Cruft]

Also, you could easily encompass the Atlantic Ocean and US East Coast in about 100 x 50 hexes. Then the malaria zone would either be in the sea or maybe somewhere in the region of the Caribbean.

[DuckofTindalos]

But consider this: how interesting would 4 years of chasing and defending convoys be? I'm feeling old just thinking about it.[>:]

[Captain Cruft]

Yes there would be lots of gameplay problems. It would be fun to look at though

[TheElf]

ORIGINAL: Captain Cruft

How possible would it be to make a mod for the Mediterranean or European theatre?

This has been brought up by the CHS team before. In fact, several times. Most recently by yours truly. The database and coding experts all agree that the WitP engine is not ideal for modelling those theatres. Nor would the Med be "interesting" enough to invest all the time. It was actually said that UV would be a better jumping off point specifically due to it's scale.

[Aawulf]

There are still a couple fields in PWHex with values associated to locations that we have not yet defined so far as I know. Until those fields are "declassified" I would be fearful of the AI in mod for another theatre. Come to think of it, I imagine the hard coded activities could create problems (for example, Vietnamese militia spawning in Bulgaria might make the game interesting but lacks in the realism category).

The 60 mile/hex conversion to another scope such as 30 mile/hex wouldn't be a significant intellectual challenge since we can define terrain, transportation systems, aircraft range and ship speed. The biggest challenge would be in finding a work around for 6/6 movement max for fleets.

Just my two cents.

[pad152]

The AI is scripted for the campaign and can't do anything else. I created a scenario where Japan AI player invades several bases in Alaska and else where on turn one. The inital attacks work, but the damm AI won't even re-supply these bases once supply runs out. Even WPO is using the same AI script and I'll bet we will just see the AI invade the same bases all over again. If Matrix ever turns the game over the other developers, then well maybe.

[Captain Cruft]

I wasn't including any thoughts of the AI player in my speculations. Obviously it wouldn't even remotely be able to cope with something like this.

To TheElf - you might say that the WitP engine is not especially suited to simulating the entire War in the Pacific either.

To Aawulf - yes the 6/6 thing is the only real impediment to doing a gash 30 mile per hex conversion. I personally wouldn't mind the 50% reduction in speed ... As to mysterious fields in the pwhex.dat, I didn't seen any during my decoding efforts on AB's version. That doesn't mean there aren't any gotchas to be found there though.

I'm sure an editor-based kludge could be effected to deal with the Vietnamese thing. As with most of the other hard-coded niceties. I think it's only the zones that would be a real problem, as I said.

Anyway, I think it would be a laugh to do this even if it does turn out to be "non-optimal". I'll start messing around with making a map and some bases and see how it goes.

[Captain Cruft]

I'm thinking whole shebang BTW, including Eastern Front and Battle of Atlantic. This would mean 60 miles per hex and, very probably, not enough slots.

[Aawulf]

As to mysterious fields in the pwhex.dat, I didn't seen any during my decoding efforts on AB's version.

I discussed these fields with Andrew when I was putting together the PWHex editor and he said he would enquire with the powers that be. I cannot tell whether they are binary or numeric representations, but there is clearly one field for Japanese locations, another for Allied and a third field that I am simply clueless to it's purpose.

I suspect these fields may have been 0'd in the alternate maps, but they are in the original scenario 15 and I can't imagine why they would be there if they at the very least didn't have a purpose at some time during the game's development.

Among my theories of their purpose, I'm leaning to believing they determine the priority of the AI to capture, defend or retake locations (several of the valued locations are non-base locations at critical junctures). But this is only a theory based on terrible evidence.

[Captain Cruft]

Would those be the 9th, 11th & 12th four byte fields? They are named as cruft1, 2 & 3 in my data structure

I suppose they could well be markers for the bases that you can define in the scenario (not database) editor for the AI. That is verifiable by testing if need be.

Since AB's map works fine without them I'm not going to worry. Compared to actually drawing the map all else is trivial. I hope to have something to show by about Christmas 2012 ...

[Alikchi2]

Europe would definitely be interesting! Slots could be a problem, though... some tinkering will be necessary of course.

Perhaps you could start it off after the Fall of France. That would save quite a few slots and you'd immediately have action in the Med, as well. I imagine it would be fun trying to protect the Afrika Korps convoys on the way to Libya..

Then again, don't you have something else on your plate already? [:D]

[Captain Cruft]

No that previous silly project got dropped.

I was thinking of starting this one on 22nd June 1941 with the Soviets "activated" ... Otherwise the German player will just send his hordes over to the Middle East for the oil and/or invade Britain using AKs ;P The engine is not very good at the sort of low-intensity stuff that you had in the Med in 1940 anyway.

Of course it's pretty unlikely I get very far with it at all. If I can do a map it will be a miracle, graphics is not my strong point.

On that note, here is the sum total of my efforts so far, a German base flag:

[eMonticello]

ORIGINAL: Captain Cruft
Don't you have malaria in sub-tropical Denmark then? ROFL

As long as the malaria season is limited to August, you could substitute "vacation" for "malaria"

[Aawulf]

Compared to actually drawing the map all else is trivial.

Would be nice to be able to employ the map editor from Op. Art of War or something akin to it. My adventurous urges to explore the possibilities are stymied by my artistic handicap and general lack of knowledge about graphics software.

Considering that PC games have included integrated map creators/editors for years, one would think that it wouldn't be too challenging for a graphics oriented programmer to put together a tile sheet editor for hex maps. Yet, I searched the web and found nada.

[Captain Cruft]

Yes there is a dearth of software around for this sort of thing.

I am OK with the basic drawing part, the problem is in lining up the bitmap with the underlying hex structure. You cannot see this whatever program you are using. I am trying to work out a a way to mark the structure on the map from "outside" before entering the graphics program. This is made more difficult by the map being split into 20 parts though.

The tools I am using are The Gimp http://gimp.org and ImageMagick http://imagemagick.org. Both of these are free open-source programs available for both UNIX and Windows. Gimp is the full-screen drawing program. It has a very powerful scripting language which I probably ought to use but it's not well documented. ImageMagick is non-interactive i.e. you use it from the command line or scripts/batch files.

[Andrew Brown]

ORIGINAL: Captain Cruft

Yes there is a dearth of software around for this sort of thing.

I am OK with the basic drawing part, the problem is in lining up the bitmap with the underlying hex structure. You cannot see this whatever program you are using. I am trying to work out a a way to mark the structure on the map from "outside" before entering the graphics program. This is made more difficult by the map being split into 20 parts though.

The tools I am using are The Gimp http://gimp.org and ImageMagick http://imagemagick.org. Both of these are free open-source programs available for both UNIX and Windows. Gimp is the full-screen drawing program. It has a very powerful scripting language which I probably ought to use but it's not well documented. ImageMagick is non-interactive i.e. you use it from the command line or scripts/batch files.

I use Gimp as well (can't beat the price!). If you are interested in doing some map work I can send you a .xcf file with a hex overlay that matches the hexes in the game. I use layers for editing my map, including a few hex overlays. I also have a Script Foo script that can be used to automatically make the 20 small bitmaps - WITP00 to WITP19 - from a single large one (I do the editing using one giant bitmap). Let me know if you are interested.

Andrew

[Captain Cruft]

Thanks to AB's generous gifts I am now ready to go. It is just a matter of actually doing it now. The whole map bitmap takes up 556mb of RAM which makes my PC sweat profusely

My first production, available real soon now, will be a simple colour coded map with a few strategic bases on it. The planned horizontal dimensions extend from approximately Florida to Karachi and the vertical from the Falkland Islands to Spitzbergen. I am just glad that more than half the map is composed of "sea" ...