Matrix Games Forums

ORIGINAL: brian brian

I have no opinion on the nomeclature of naming the Japanese units, but if you are looking for excellent additional historical material to spruce up the game presentation, I would suggest a re-hash of one of my favorite wargaming articles ever. This was a piece in the General in the 1980s for use with the excellent Avalon Hill game Victory in the Pacific (to which WiF owes quite a lot, and I would love to play on a computer), it was a short one page list of all the major Japanese combat ships and how to pronounce them phonetically. I learned most of them pretty well and this has been pretty nice while gaming over the years. Perhaps the ship write-ups already have this?

ORIGINAL: composer99

I would agree with Jimm: "Gd." looks better than "Gau" (A term used in the Third Reich for political sub-units of territorial organization, alternatively "Gaul" with a letter missing or a charcter from the Squaresoft game Final Fantasy VI) or "Gua" (no idea what the heck that is... Guam? Guano? Guadaloupe?). [:D][:D][:'(]

ORIGINAL: Shannon V. OKeets

ORIGINAL: composer99

I would agree with Jimm: "Gd." looks better than "Gau" (A term used in the Third Reich for political sub-units of territorial organization, alternatively "Gaul" with a letter missing or a charcter from the Squaresoft game Final Fantasy VI) or "Gua" (no idea what the heck that is... Guam? Guano? Guadaloupe?). [:D][:D][:'(]

When a unit's name is too long the program calculates the maximum # of characters that will fit, chops off the rest and then throws in a period. Elsewhere the full name of the unit appears (e.g., in the unit write up, the unit data panel, etc.).

ORIGINAL: dale1066

Do the captured units have to have their colours changed on a horizontal basis? is it possible to have a vertical bar added down a side? or even a corner flashed in the different colour?

ORIGINAL: Shannon V. OKeets

The graphics for the naval counters are anti-aliased, which means that to change the color around the ship graphic would require another complete graphic of the ship. That's not really feasiable given that any naval unit can be captured by any major power (for example, the Germans end up controlling some Italian naval units after the fall of Italy). The math is # of naval unit bitmaps * 8.

ORIGINAL: jchastain

ORIGINAL: dale1066

Do the captured units have to have their colours changed on a horizontal basis? is it possible to have a vertical bar added down a side? or even a corner flashed in the different colour?

I believe, based on Shannon's earlier post, that the base counter will be in the original owners color.

ORIGINAL: Shannon V. OKeets

The graphics for the naval counters are anti-aliased, which means that to change the color around the ship graphic would require another complete graphic of the ship. That's not really feasiable given that any naval unit can be captured by any major power (for example, the Germans end up controlling some Italian naval units after the fall of Italy). The math is # of naval unit bitmaps * 8.

You can likely do various modifications from there. Since the numbers are "known" to the program, I suspect you can change any of the edges and then just draw the numbers onto the counter. But the graphic cannot be overwritten.

I suspect it likely would be possible to do a verticle stripe, but the problem is the graphics are of different size. Look at the Yamato counter in the image above. It stretches nearly to the edge. So any verticle stripe would only be able to be at the very edge of the counter to ensure it could accomodate any image.

There is definitely also a point of diminishing returns. Drawing a circle around the graphic and leaving the image with the original builder's color and then painting outside of that circle with the current owner's color was my first thought. But at the end of the day, that's likely a good bit of work for something that is somewhat rare and the stripe across the top and bottom seems almost as good and a heck of a lot simpler. That was my thinking anyway.

ORIGINAL: jchastain

Only a minor point, but I notice the stripe across the top ends at the last pixel of the numbers (while the orange circle extends another 4? pixels). I think it would look better to extend the red stripe down another 2 pixels so as to had it extend slightly beyond the numbers (and make the new stripe at the bottom extend 2 pixels beyond the numbers there as well).

I still need to clean up the dirty edges but otherwise it's looking good (graphics from Patrice).

ORIGINAL: paulderynck

I still need to clean up the dirty edges but otherwise it's looking good (graphics from Patrice).

Yeah looking good, but you do want to clip the corners on those Oil counters. We always do that to prevent them sticking to one another. There are only about 14400 corners to clip in a deluxe WiF set.[:)]