ORIGINAL: Froonp
Don't know if it should appear here, anyway I ask : What about lend leased planes ?
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Anyway, lend lease plane need that special graphic to exist (the band of color from the provider of the plane).
As of the colors, there is also a need to have some counters changing colors during the game, come to my minds the captured ships, and the Territorials.
As a last note about color, there should be in the game the possibility to change the color of a Nation's counters (There is a quite big support in real life for Harry to reprint the CW counters to a less dark color or a tan color).
Thanks & Best Regards
This definitely belongs in this thread. I want to know any and all of your (that is the collective 'your') thoughts about counter mix (i.e., units) and their colors.
CWIF builds a unit depiction from a unit's associated labels and it numeric characteristics. For example, if you change the movement allowance of a plane from 4 to 5, then the depiction of the unit on the screen also changes. With this system it is easy to change any colors associated with a nationality, captured ships, etc., since they are all component parts used in the creation of the unit depiction.
The alternative is to have the graphics (taken directly from the WiF Final Edition) as static pictures. This would be the easiest way to get as good a match as possible with the printed counter sheets that come with WiF. The difference between the two methods of rendering the units on the screen is comparable to the difference between a JPG file that contains text and a text file. In the former, you cannot edit the text. Using static pictures would have all the limitations implied by the word static. You could not change the numbers or the colors.
Now a third possibility is to have some sort of composite of the two methods. The colors and graphics would be pictures on top of which the program places the numerics. This make the numerics dynamic, but not the colors. I haven't looked at the CWIF code for unit depiction, other than to note that there is a lot of it and it is complex. To get an appreciation of how complex, you merely need to think of how many of the counters in WiF are unique. Duplicate counters are quite rare. CWIF supports the creation of all the unique features of each counter: land, naval, and air for each country (major and minor).
Just to throw another variable into the mix, it would be possible to have the pictures (sans numerics) for a nationality produced in a couple of different colors. This would let you choose either the rich brown or the light tan background for the USSR units.
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Right now we have the CWIF system for rendering units on the screen in place, completed, tested, and fully functional. However, I have no hesitation to trash it all if that is what is neccessary to get good looking units.
Making these kind of decisions is why I created these threads. Once the game design is defined, there is serious work to be done to accomplish it. I need the design to be extremely well thought out and solid. Later, when I am in the throes of debugging some especially recalcitrant piece of code, I do not want to have any second thoughts about "do I really have to go through all this bother, or can I just eliminate this aggravation from the design?". Though we are considering unit rendering in this thread, the above statements apply equally well to almost every other aspect of MWIF.
