I must beg your indulgence regarding the cavalry plumes. The plume of which you wrote comes from a generic Napoleonic helmet object Mr Barish used to create the cavalry, not an Austrian 3D helmet object per se.
Some plumes were black horesehair, some were big poofy feather things, which could be all sorts of colors. I originally did try them w/ black plumes for some countries, but their heads just looked like black blobs. Identifiablity of country was overriding concern here.
Again, there was enormous variation of uniforms even within a country. Individual units would have radically different types of uniforms from their peers. I mean, there were french cav that wore red head to toe, and others that wore all white. At some point we have to draw a line and actually make this stuff.
The 3D objects require an enormous amount of work, and it is simply beyond our means to make custom 3D helmets and coats for each nation.
Indeed! It's a HUGE effort to do that. Also, modelling aside, if we had to re-render all those frames of animation (there are several
tens of thousands of distinct frames) for each type of unit w/ a historically correct attire... well ... needless to say, we'd be waiting a lot longer for CoG. Like this time next year. (The napoleonic uniforms are fun, though. I wouldn't mind spending a year or so just doing fun flamboyant napoleonic uniforms.)
I believe Mr Barish uses the Osprey series as the basis for his uniforms.
Yeah, mostly. Also lots of paintings. Again, for all you folks saying that the austrians never wore gray coats, I refer you to Msr. Vernet and the paintings hanging at the Versailles. Lots of dead ausrian troops in gray. In any case, playability and clarity of what's on screen has to trump historic precision.
Maybe you could look to Age of Rifles for Norm's 3D type symbols for Tactical battles, also his historical uniforms.
Interesting. We tried something like that early on. Thought it didn't show enough w/ formation. Do those animate?
I want to say something about those generic flags on the strategic map that the minor provinces will be using. It would be real nice if they could be 100% accurate (regarding each nation) as well.
We tried to get them as historically accurate as possible using a variety of sources from the period, including a couple graphic encyclopedias which were published in the early 1800's. It's worth pointing out that our concept of the 'nation-state' is a somewhat recent thing. There isn't a perfect 1:1 correlation to political entities of the day and our province divisions. (ie various parts of poland, turkish regions etc.) For the ones for which no data exist, we would make things based on earlier or later materials.
If you aware of a particularly eggregious error w/ one of the flags please let me know. But please be mindful that there has been a significant amount of research already done, and we're not just making things up at random. Also, because of the severe time constraint we have, I have to prioritize work and I might not be able to fix it, because there are plenty of critical things that must be addressed.
