Maps for MWIF

[Shannon V. OKeets]

ORIGINAL: Glen Felzien
I feel the 5th Edition map was the best for the game. It was clear with a good mix of colour. It showed all the information required without any clutter. That said, I must admit I too saw the valleys of the brain trerrain. I wonder what that would be like with the courrent mountain colour proposed by Steve.

The follow on map to the 5th Edition (final ed.?) I feel was too "busy" with big fists, factor symbols too large etc and a colour scheme that competed with the counters. I believe the direction Steve is taking the MWiF map is very good although I too feel the marsh terrain could use a little more definition.

My feeling exactly about the Final Edition maps.

Could you be more specific in your complaint about the Marsh terrain? I had the artist revise it several times before posting anything to the forum, which means I would like to give him a detailed critique rather than a general felling of dissatisfaction.

However, my brother (a professional graphics artist with a masters degree and everything) once did a drawing for a beer company based on the photograph of a bull. They wanted it to look like the photograph but be rendered as a woodcut to make it more artistic. His work was reviewed by a committee which returned a list of 133 items they wanted changed in the drawing. The drawing was only 8 inches square!.

[Glen Felzien]

His work was reviewed by a committee which returned a list of 133 items they wanted changed in the drawing. The drawing was only 8 inches square!.

GOOD GRIEF! [X(]

Ok. I'll do a little touch up of it myself and see what I get then post it. In the mean time...

I have Anglo German War and I am allowed to mod my own unit colours. The design allows for RBG modding. It also has "lighting" effects from upper right to lower left. This allows for a 3d look. I dropped the upper right. I used the colours off of the counter sheets posted on the web to determine the RGB values. One more note, I could not add colour stripes or colour the box symbol. The lettering and numbering must be balck too therefore the Belgium units are not WiF colours.

Anyway, I am tossing in these screenies as an example of a 3d look, colouring and clipped corners. These are examples just to help the imagination. Ignore them if you wish.

Poland: These are jpegs but the Polish numbering did bleed.


I like how the Netherlands, CW and French blues worked out.


Italy: Notice the Italian. Nice colour mix.

[Shannon V. OKeets]

Nice pictures.

You are at a different scale which has some effect on choices for terrain.

Virtually no roads in WIF and no trails at all. A lot of rail lines though. I liked the WIF FE rail lines and am going to try to duplicate them. They are thinner in relationship to the hex and have less pronounced cross ties.

Same for the rivers. Rob is going to give me an overlay for all the rivers so we should get the exact same quality as in WIF FE. I am going with CWIF's naming of the rivers because I am a'feared of distortion when zooming out.

I'll also keep the city and port symbols from WIF FE. It is a scale issue really. Having little buildings doesn't seem appropriate with each hex representing so much area.

I prefer the patchwork clear terrain for MWIF because we have to differentiate it from desert.

I do like the forest though. I'll pass that along to Rob for consideration.

The other terrain looks like a mixture of rough and mountain (which would be right for the given scale). The mountains in WIF are filled with impassable hexsides and usually represent much higher elevations. Any green foliage in the mountains should be coniverous not deciduous in MWIF.

Rob has better coastlines already, which I hope to get working in the next couple of days so I can post them for all to be amazed by.

The units are intriguing. What is the font? Do you know? These all seem to be divisional sized units though some of them have XX2 which might mean 2 divisions. It is the clarity of the font face that I lilke.

Chris' use of status bars in CWIF seems appropriate to me and I will keep them for MWIF. The major concerns when playing WIF is whether the units are disrupted and/or out of supply. Other things that you want to know when playing is whether you have moved the unit already, if it can move during this phase (e.g., all the air missions have already been used up). That makes for a lot of details associated with each individual unit. The status bars handle the problem nicely with a rather small demand for pixels.

The 3D effect relies on shadowing which requires the units to be stacked with more separation between the units. That's a lot of pixels - look at a stack with 3 units in a hex. Do the white dots have any particular meaning or are they just to help legibility?

And the big problem of lack of contrast between black print on dark units certainly hasn't been solved here.

Thanks for the information.

[Shannon V. OKeets]

ORIGINAL: WiFDaniel

2. Chunking MIL hasn't got an R sign whereas Canton's does. The 5-1 GAR label reads "(Res)" instead of a right wing "R". Some lack of consistency here.
Daniel

This is how it is done in WIF. I am just following what WIF FE does - for whatever reason it does that. Reserve units are handled differently in WIF. Only uinits with the R are reserve units in the WIF FE sense of the word. Perhaps the others have some sort of reservations for dinner at a nearby eatery?

[Glen Felzien]

The units are intriguing. What is the font? Do you know? These all seem to be divisional sized units though some of them have XX2 which might mean 2 divisions. It is the clarity of the font face that I lilke.

No idea as to the font and yes these are all div size units although they can be broken down to battlion and regimental size as needed. The game covers 39-45 at a divisional level and is very much at the operational level.

The 3D effect relies on shadowing which requires the units to be stacked with more separation between the units. That's a lot of pixels - look at a stack with 3 units in a hex. Do the white dots have any particular meaning or are they just to help legibility?

I must admit that some of the stacks can get quite large. The down side is that you can't rotate the map to "see" behind them. The game compensates for this however with ability to right click on a hex which brings up a separate window displaying the hex's units.

The white dots are there on purpose. A series of numbers appears above the dotted line that will designate various states the unit is in. This is very much like the proposed MWiF units: AGW displays numeric and MWiF display colour coding. As you see the idea is the same. The rest of the unit numbering is dynamic as the unit loses strenght, changes HQ linking etc. In all, AGW units can display as much as 11 different and distinct states at anyone time. Remarkable really but it is all at a different scale.

I agree the map is for a completely different scale and is simply perfect for it. Absolutely beautiful really.

I have been playing with the marsh artwork and discovered that all my efforts leads to a hex that looks like muted coloured bacteria under a microscope! So how about this, maintain the same colour scheme for the hex but have the squigglies (blues and dark greens) stretch up in a horizontal as opposed to a haphazard circular shapes. Did that make sence?

[wfzimmerman]

ORIGINAL: Shannon V. OKeets

Chris' use of status bars in CWIF seems appropriate to me and I will keep them for MWIF. The major concerns when playing WIF is whether the units are disrupted and/or out of supply. Other things that you want to know when playing is whether you have moved the unit already, if it can move during this phase (e.g., all the air missions have already been used up). That makes for a lot of details associated with each individual unit. The status bars handle the problem nicely with a rather small demand for pixels.

For what it's worth, I had a very hard time making sense of the relatively small status bar on top of the counters in CWIF. I would like something much more dramatic to indicate disrupted or out of supply like a huge watermarked D or OOS on top of the whole counter!

[wfzimmerman]

ORIGINAL: Shannon V. OKeets

The units are intriguing. What is the font? Do you know? These all seem to be divisional sized units though some of them have XX2 which might mean 2 divisions. It is the clarity of the font face that I lilke.

The font looks like a modified Courier (fixed space) to me.

I really like the rounded corners.

[Shannon V. OKeets]

ORIGINAL: wfzimmerman

ORIGINAL: Shannon V. OKeets

Chris' use of status bars in CWIF seems appropriate to me and I will keep them for MWIF. The major concerns when playing WIF is whether the units are disrupted and/or out of supply. Other things that you want to know when playing is whether you have moved the unit already, if it can move during this phase (e.g., all the air missions have already been used up). That makes for a lot of details associated with each individual unit. The status bars handle the problem nicely with a rather small demand for pixels.

For what it's worth, I had a very hard time making sense of the relatively small status bar on top of the counters in CWIF. I would like something much more dramatic to indicate disrupted or out of supply like a huge watermarked D or OOS on top of the whole counter!

I do want to revisit the status bars and what they indicate. Chris had 5 originally and changed it to 6 (making them smaller). One possibility it to make a couple of them larger and others smaller. Maybe every other one larger to make it easier to differentiate between the 2nd through 5th at a glance. The more important ones (disrupted and out of supply would be larger).

I know they are hard to understand at first viewing. Good documentation and pop-up, context-sensitive help would make them easier to learn. Did you still have trouble with it after playing several turns?

[c92nichj]

Option B
I am considering using a large asterisk after a land unit's movement # to indicate its elite status (aka "white print"). This would let me always use a white font for the major powers with dark backgrounds and a black font for those with light backgrounds. Indeed, I could do that for all the minor countries too. Then all the combat and movement factors for land units would be clearly visible all the time. This should rile the experienced WIF players, because it changes a fundamental definition in the game: white print units would no longer be white print! Taking a broader point of view, the asterisk (or some other symbol, E for Elite?) could communicate the same information. The gain in legibility would be enormous. I can do the same thing for the numbers in the corners of the air and naval units to make them more legible too.

This option is the best one I think, but please come up with a graphic detail to make the elite units look like elite, instead of just putting an asterix or a litte E.

Examples:
- fill the Nato symbol with a different colour (like you do with Para and Mar)
- outline the counter differently than with a normal unit use for example gold, silver or white. Instead of the normal black.
- add a golden star, crown, ironcross or something, but not an asterix.
- Only have the colour of the unit-size XXXX, XXX, XX in black or white if it is a white print unit.

It gives a much better feeling to move around units that looks like elite than if they only have an asterix.

[c92nichj]

I have been playing with the marsh artwork and discovered that all my efforts leads to a hex that looks like muted coloured bacteria under a microscope! So how about this, maintain the same colour scheme for the hex but have the squigglies (blues and dark greens) stretch up in a horizontal as opposed to a haphazard circular shapes. Did that make sence?

Did you try to add a little bit darker blue to the Marsh, should make it more different from both Jungle and forest as well as clear.

[Shannon V. OKeets]

ORIGINAL: c92nichj

Option B
I am considering using a large asterisk after a land unit's movement # to indicate its elite status (aka "white print"). This would let me always use a white font for the major powers with dark backgrounds and a black font for those with light backgrounds. Indeed, I could do that for all the minor countries too. Then all the combat and movement factors for land units would be clearly visible all the time. This should rile the experienced WIF players, because it changes a fundamental definition in the game: white print units would no longer be white print! Taking a broader point of view, the asterisk (or some other symbol, E for Elite?) could communicate the same information. The gain in legibility would be enormous. I can do the same thing for the numbers in the corners of the air and naval units to make them more legible too.

This option is the best one I think, but please come up with a graphic detail to make the elite units look like elite, instead of just putting an asterix or a litte E.

Examples:
- fill the Nato symbol with a different colour (like you do with Para and Mar)
- outline the counter differently than with a normal unit use for example gold, silver or white. Instead of the normal black.
- add a golden star, crown, ironcross or something, but not an asterix.
- Only have the colour of the unit-size XXXX, XXX, XX in black or white if it is a white print unit.

It gives a much better feeling to move around units that looks like elite than if they only have an asterix.

You made me laugh at my own suggestion of an asterisk or E.

The NATO symbols are heavily modified for militia and territorial units. Check out the French and British territorial units for a cacaphony of colors (mixed methaphor). Any change to that would likely go unnoticed.

The counter outline also varies quite often for the same two unit types. But I still like the idea of a gold outline.

A gold star is clearly a better symbol for elite. Hey, that's why I post these things, so you guys can tell me when I have stupid thoughts. I am open to more suggestions for elite unit indicators. The white icon interior alone isn't sufficient because of countries with white as their primary color (e.g., Yugoslavia).

Even the coloring of the XXX's above the NATO symbols are colored differently already. This is why I have so many different colors associated with each country. Here is the color list for each country:
1 - basic unit background
2 - icon outline
3 - icon interior
4 - icon interior X (may be different from outline)
5 - icon interior letter
6 - unit strength, reorganization, and movement values
7 - unit name
8 - unit size (e.g., XXX)
9 - elite interior color
10 - elite font color
11 - divisional interior color

I am using the same coloring for #6 and #7 at all times. I am thinking of also using the same color for #8 for all non-militia, non-territorial units for major powers. Right now, #8 is always black except for militia, territorial, and minor country units.

I am using white for both #9 and #10. That gets overridden by marine and paratroop coloring.

I have to select new colors for #11 for each major power. They get overridden by marine, paratroop, and artillery unit type coloring (AA, AT, and all artillery unit types).

[Shannon V. OKeets]

ORIGINAL: c92nichj

I have been playing with the marsh artwork and discovered that all my efforts leads to a hex that looks like muted coloured bacteria under a microscope! So how about this, maintain the same colour scheme for the hex but have the squigglies (blues and dark greens) stretch up in a horizontal as opposed to a haphazard circular shapes. Did that make sence?

Did you try to add a little bit darker blue to the Marsh, should make it more different from both Jungle and forest as well as clear.

A stronger blue might work.

I am holding off on using striae (which means marks that give the impression of being like a line) for Swamp terrain , because I want to do the weather as slanting lines: sparse and black for rain, sparse and white for snow, more dense and black for storm, and more dense and white for blizzard. The weather could be toggled on and off and the images would be overlaid on top of the terrain, but under the units. I thought about having it on top of the units too, but that would affect legibility too much.

Right now for terrain changes I have:

Try adding some gray to Mountain.

Stronger blue for Swamp.

We can keep playing with this for a while. Once I get all the little icons done (cities, ports, factories, resources), we will need to revisit it again anyway.

[Glen Felzien]

Did you try to add a little bit darker blue to the Marsh, should make it more different from both Jungle and forest as well as clear.

Actually I tried serval blues, browns and tans.

I am holding off on using striae (which means marks that give the impression of being like a line) for Swamp terrain , because I want to do the weather as slanting lines: sparse and black for rain, sparse and white for snow, more dense and black for storm, and more dense and white for blizzard. The weather could be toggled on and off and the images would be overlaid on top of the terrain, but under the units. I thought about having it on top of the units too, but that would affect legibility too much.

This sounds very interesting. Would be good to see it before changing anything. After all, any change may look good now but with the weather overlays it might end up being a mistake.

[Shannon V. OKeets]

ORIGINAL: Glen Felzien

Did you try to add a little bit darker blue to the Marsh, should make it more different from both Jungle and forest as well as clear.

Actually I tried serval blues, browns and tans.

I am holding off on using striae (which means marks that give the impression of being like a line) for Swamp terrain , because I want to do the weather as slanting lines: sparse and black for rain, sparse and white for snow, more dense and black for storm, and more dense and white for blizzard. The weather could be toggled on and off and the images would be overlaid on top of the terrain, but under the units. I thought about having it on top of the units too, but that would affect legibility too much.

This sounds very interesting. Would be good to see it before changing anything. After all, any change may look good now but with the weather overlays it might end up being a mistake.

Clear weather depictions take priority. I expect that is how the players will usually play the game so it should be the foundation. The weather effects will just use black and white dashes and while I want them to be noticable they can not obscure the basic terrain features (e.g., rivers). If necessary, I'll make the weather effects very minor. They should not interfere with the player's understanding of what is going on in the game.

[Alexander Seil]

Would it be by any chance possible for a player to replace the map graphics with those from CWiF? Quite frankly, the new map looks rather boring and is exceedingly hard to read compared with the crisp graphics of the alpha [:(]

[Shannon V. OKeets]

ORIGINAL: Alexander Seil

Would it be by any chance possible for a player to replace the map graphics with those from CWiF? Quite frankly, the new map looks rather boring and is exceedingly hard to read compared with the crisp graphics of the alpha [:(]

The terrain bitmaps can be modified by the player. They have been increased from CWIF's 68 by 76 to 136 by 152, so the CWIF bitmaps won't work as is. You could use them as a starting point for creating comparable 136 by 152 versions though.

I am trying to finish incorporating the new coastline for the British Isles today. If you modify the underlying bitmaps for the terrain, that will not affect the coastline revisions we are doing; the modified terrain will be used instead of the MWIF default for the land portion of the coastal hexes - so everything will match.

[c92nichj]

I am trying to finish incorporating the new coastline for the British Isles today. If you modify the underlying bitmaps for the terrain, that will not affect the coastline revisions we are doing; the modified terrain will be used instead of the MWIF default for the land portion of the coastal hexes - so everything will match.

Neat.
Although I don't think that I will change the graphics the game ships with, unless the WIF modding community will be as active as the Civ one.

[Shannon V. OKeets]

All this stuff with the units and flags are a much lower priority for me this past week. I have spent the majority of my time on the coastlines.

That has required me to modify how all the factory and resource data are stored internally and all the routines that reference them. The factories have about 80 specific routines and I have to check all the ones that call those routines too. I have yet to get to the resources, but they should be a level of magnitude easier.

Where I am heading is to assemble the little pieces I have of the coastlines and place them into the map. Here are some of the pieces.

[Shannon V. OKeets]

Each piece will be cropped at the corners to make a hexagon, so the corners don't really matter. They could be random colors for all I care.

[Shannon V. OKeets]

All of these are taken from the British Isle and they match the WIF FE map perfectly. There is only one forest hex in England so you should be able to find this one easily enough. There was some anti-aliasing used between the land and the sea which I have a choice of addressing:

(1) have the artist take the anti-aliasing out completely so the sea and land abut perfectly, or

(2) leave it in and do the thresholding modification I have used in these pictures, which gives the little beach-like effect along the shoreline.