Maps for MWIF

[Shannon V. OKeets]

"I've been workin' on the railroad ... "

Here are a couple of screen shots of the Europe with the new coastline, correctly placed cities (within the hexes), positioned other icons within each hex, positioned names, and the railroads.

Some of that positioning needs to be tweaked a bit still. I do that when I need a break from harder stuff and it usually takes several iterations to get things "just so".

The rail lines are almost complete. Their placement is all automated - driven purely by logic. I want to smooth out the curves a bit, otherwise they are done. How to do the smoothing requires a little more thought, which means I won't look at it again until a couple of days have gone by. Let things bubble around for a while until I am certain how to do it.

[Shannon V. OKeets]

Here is the second screen shot of rail lines. This one shows rail lines along a coastline. I am especially happy with Valencia to Barcelona (off the top right of the screen).

The rail lines go to the cities in the hex, if there is one. If no city is present, then they go to the port. If neither are present in the hex, then I use logic to choose another point within the hex that avoids water and smoothes out the line. For an example of the smoothing in operation, look at Madrid to Saragossa. Or Seville to the intersection of the rail line from Madrid to Lisbon.

[stretch]

with the recent posts of some old CWiF maps.. it really hammers home to me how much more I like the new scheme. I know you want to smooth the railroads but oddly, to me, the slight unsmoothness doesn't see too big a deal, almost normal for rails which spend so much time going in straight lines... It gives it a kind of non-uniformity that keeps it from looking robotic and repetitious.

[scout1]

Speaking of rail lines, is there a penalty/conversion required between the european gauge rail lines and the soviet rail lines in WiF ?

[JanSorensen]

The Santander - Bilbao rail line looks like its passing into the water at one point and the Vigo-Ferrol line certainly is running a bay. If that is intended I dont mind but it does look slightly off.

Apart from that its looking splendid to me and I concur with stretch that smoothing may not improve things.

[Shannon V. OKeets]

ORIGINAL: scout1

Speaking of rail lines, is there a penalty/conversion required between the european gauge rail lines and the soviet rail lines in WiF ?

No. Nor is there a conversion process as in other Germany-USSR WW II games. Given that these are 2 month turns, that seems appropriate.

The supply problem for Germany in Russia is modeled by requiring individual combat units to be near HQ units in order to be in supply and attack. If an HQ becomes disrupted, it stops moving, which brings all the units it is supplying to a halt (sort of at the end of a tether). Disruption can occur due to an unsuccessful attack by the HQ, a successful ground strike on the HQ by enemy bombers, the HQ adding bonus effects to an attack, or (most often) the HQ using its reorganization points to undisrupt other units. In the last case, the act of removing the disruption from other units disrupts the HQ. Weather effects on supply lines are what you would expect.

[Shannon V. OKeets]

ORIGINAL: JanSorensen

The Santander - Bilbao rail line looks like its passing into the water at one point and the Vigo-Ferrol line certainly is running a bay. If that is intended I dont mind but it does look slightly off.

Apart from that its looking splendid to me and I concur with stretch that smoothing may not improve things.

Yeah. I will probably move the location of Ferrol to the center of the hex. Doing the same for Santander would work too.

I have tried to follow the placement of the cities and ports within the hex as they were done in WIF FE, though their placement within the hex has no effect on game play. On the other hand, whether a hex has a city and/or port is very important to game play, and cannot be messed around with.

Next I am going to take the river and lake overlays and insert them into the map, removing all the blue lines along the hexsides (CWIF graphics for rivers). Then I will be ready for a final placement of the labels for named locations. Or almost. I want to see the new map icons: cities (3 kinds), ports (4 kinds), factories (3 sizes), resources (2 types), and straits. Also the Alpine hexsides.

For the Alpine hexsides, we are just going to go with a handful of images: single hexside, double hexside (adjoining), 3 connected hexsides (Y and C shaped). I'll use some program logic to select which type to use where (or maybe make it data driven).

[Froonp]

Here are a couple of screen shots of the Europe with the new coastline, correctly placed cities (within the hexes), positioned other icons within each hex, positioned names, and the railroads.

Well, man, I have to say that I have nothing to say. This is impressive, very impressive. [&o]

[Caranorn]

Yep, those rail lines look good. Except for a fiew very radical bends (for instance first hex Gibraltar to Seville, or north of that dutch resource (that railroad turns almost at right angle)) I see nothing that would absolutely require smoothing.

Though I must say the railroad graphic looks better at the resolution used for the Spain screenshot then the Germany screenshot.

[c92nichj]

The rail lines go to the cities in the hex, if there is one. If no city is present, then they go to the port. If neither are present in the hex, then I use logic to choose another point within the hex that avoids water and smoothes out the line.

The rail lines look great, good work!
I see that you abandoned your earlier thought, which I liked, that the third option for railconnection if no city or port are present would be the resource.

[Shannon V. OKeets]

ORIGINAL: c92nichj

The rail lines go to the cities in the hex, if there is one. If no city is present, then they go to the port. If neither are present in the hex, then I use logic to choose another point within the hex that avoids water and smoothes out the line.

The rail lines look great, good work!
I see that you abandoned your earlier thought, which I liked, that the third option for railconnection if no city or port are present would be the resource.

Thank you. It only took a couple of days.

As for the resources, it's just laziness.

The resources are not listed in the "named locations file" which is where I have placed all the positioning data for icons within a hex. Therefore they are all placed in the same position within a hex (if they are all alone). The center position works best for avoiding water. By ignoring isolated resources when drawing the rail lines, I have more control over where the rail lines go (the rail line do not have to go to the center) - which is a slight plus.

I might add the logic to support unnamed locations in the named locations file, so I can drive the rail lines to specific points within a non-city, non-port hex. A vague thought at this time. There is one rail line in Greece that seems impossible to do unless I provide that capability (next to Athens). Interestingly enough, if the rail lines work in Europe, then that's about it for rail lines. The rest of the world has very few by comparison (low density).

[c92nichj]

I have been thinking about the issue with the swamp.
The old style swamp was too similiar to clear and the new style too similiar to forest, we cannot make the forest darker as it will then possibly look like jungle.

How about going back to the old swamp style and making the clear terrain a little bit lighter. Looking at the screenshots which do look great, makes me realise that the clear terrain here is the murkiest version in any Wif version that I have seen.
- In WIF5 they were totally white.
- In WIFFE very light green
- In cyberboard also light green
- In CWIF some very light not so greatlooking green/brown/yellowish colour.

[Ballista]

Looking good ! Very good ! When CWIF came out I spent a lot of time just scrolling around the map looking at places that were now in the European scale hex scale (maps fascinate me, like shiny objects to a child, or string to a cat). Methinks I'll be doing that a lot with MWIF too...

[Shannon V. OKeets]

ORIGINAL: c92nichj

I have been thinking about the issue with the swamp.
The old style swamp was too similiar to clear and the new style too similiar to forest, we cannot make the forest darker as it will then possibly look like jungle.

How about going back to the old swamp style and making the clear terrain a little bit lighter. Looking at the screenshots which do look great, makes me realise that the clear terrain here is the murkiest version in any Wif version that I have seen.
- In WIF5 they were totally white.
- In WIFFE very light green
- In cyberboard also light green
- In CWIF some very light not so greatlooking green/brown/yellowish colour.

My current request into the person doing the graphics are for 3 changes to the bitmaps for individual hex terrain types:
(1) Add some dark brown to Forest to differentiate it from Swamp while at the same time keeping it distinct from Jungle.
(2) Add some red or other accent color to Clear so it isn't so boring.
(3) Modify the Desert mountain so it is midway between Desert and Mountain.

The recent modification in Mountain has required the change for Desert mountain.

I also have a request in for the Clear terrain to be a 6 bitmap tile (instead of 1 like all the others). That way large groups of Clear terrain hexes won't look so repetitive. I will use the row and column numbers (MOD 2 and 3 resepctively) to determine which of the 6 Clear bitmap tiles to use in each hex.

There is also the question of the Qattara Depression area which we will probably do as individual bitmaps since it is so small. That will let the artist do some dramatic stuff with the edges of the QD. Part of my philosophy that problems are opportunities - take a mess and turn it into beauty.

As more pieces of the map details are layered on, the previous ones need to be reviewed. I am not real worried about that. Small tweaks to color selection are pretty easy. And just as long as we don't get all emotionally committed to something, and remember that it is inevitable that changes will have to be made, these things can be handled in a straightforward manner.

[Shannon V. OKeets]

I put in the names for all the sea areas. Here is Sicily and Malta.

[Shannon V. OKeets]

Here is the Baltic in the middle of setting up the USSR units.

The numbers under the air units yet to be set up denote how many are yet to be chosen and from how many. The 1st one is a Fighter that costs 2 build points. There are 4 of that type of air unit to be selected from a group of 8 - you can see all 8 in this screen shot.

[Shannon V. OKeets]

Here is another (last in the series) with the Germans setting up their units.

Note that the one remaining fighter and 3 land units are in the stack. When the cursor is moved over the map, they can be dropped with a single click of the mouse. The N3 naval air unit has been selected and has a pilot (picked to use CWIF terminaology) but it is not in the stack. A single click on the unit would add it to the stack the cursor carries around as it traverses the map. Clicking on any of the selected units unselects them.

I have yet to make all the subset buttons work (e.g., LND, ART) but that is pretty easy. The hard part was removing the need to click on the Place button.

I also have to enable the capability to reposition units already placed while there are still units remaining on the setup form. That might be easy or that might be hard. Either way it will be a learning experience (learning how the existing/CWIF code works).

I need to reverse the process too (undo capability). That shouldn't be very hard.

All of this is in preparation for placing naval units directly into the sea boxes.

Much more to be done, but progress on the setup process has come a long way this month.

[Froonp]

The numbers under the air units yet to be set up denote how many are yet to be chosen and from how many. The 1st one is a Fighter that costs 2 build points. There are 4 of that type of air unit to be selected from a group of 8 - you can see all 8 in this screen shot.

I like this idea a lot !
Thanks.
The shots are still great !

[c92nichj]

A small minor thing, the rail betweeen Königsberg and Memel seems to be going over a bridge.

[Shannon V. OKeets]

ORIGINAL: c92nichj

A small minor thing, the rail betweeen Königsberg and Memel seems to be going over a bridge.

I am waiting on the regsitration problem being fixed before going after the very fine details. You can see the misregistration by examining the top center point of the Konisberg hex and the left side of the Memel hex. The hex grid is perfect but the map/picture underneath it should be shifted to the left about the width of the letter 'i' in Konisberg. That should place the land under the railroad mostly, but maybe not completely. Anyway, I am holding off on final tweaking until the registration is corrected.

Did anyone notice that between the last 2 screen shots the Russians swapped out some regular infantry for the Siberians?