Oh, Canada

[Shannon V. OKeets]

Rob finished the coastal, river, and lake bitmaps for Canada yesterday. He had done northern Canada before Xmas but I was waiting for the southern half before posting screen shots. Patrice has made a first pass at correctng the map data and he and Rob are working on fixing some smaller stuff where the rivers do not quite reach the ocean - Quebec, for instance.

here is where Alaska meets the Yukon.

[Shannon V. OKeets]

Canada is very big, especially using a Mercator projection. I have had to slice and dice the whole map into a lot of pieces.

This one is due east of the first screen shot.

[Shannon V. OKeets]

And yet further east. I have trimmed the top 11 hex rows from these first 3 screen shots.

It is looking more and more likely that I will trim 15 hex rows from the top of the world map. There is nothing up there: no ports, cities, resources, rail lines, just a whole lot of nothing. Patrice is aghast, and I haven't mentioned it to Rob, who has done a lot of work creating graphics for the coast lines and rivers up there. This would change the dimensions of the world map from 360 hexes wide by 195 hexes high to 360 by 180. Nice round numbers, but what is really driving this is bitmap memory, ...

[Shannon V. OKeets]

This is due south of the last screen shot. It shows most of the Hudson Bay.

Including all the Canadian bitmaps, there are presently 4320 coastal bitmaps in the game. If I use all 195 hex rows, there will be 5010. If I trim the top 15 hexrows, there will be 4329. Since the program now runs with the 4320 (it doesn't complain about insufficient system memory resources - bitmap memory exhausted), it should run with the full map of 360 by 180 hexes. I am almost certain it won't run with 360 by 195 hexes (5010 bitmaps). That's because, ...

[Shannon V. OKeets]

This piece is due south of the last. You can see 1 hex of all sea overlap from Hudson Bay.

I can no longer run the Delphi debugger with the game - it fails when trying to load in bitmaps: insufficient resources. That's because the Delphi Integrated Development Environment (IDE) requires bitmap resources (I guess). I have an easy work around that let's me continue working on the code, but it is a very strong indicator that MWIF (when running stand-alone, not from within the Delphi IDE application) is close to tapping out the bitmaps resources. I have been anticipating this ever since Rob sent over the bitmaps for Japan, so I am actually really happy that we can load in all of Canada - 4320 coastal bitmaps.

There are two solutions, ...

[Shannon V. OKeets]

This piece is to the west of the last. I am sort of moving around in a clockwise direction, having started in the Yukon.

There is a low probability/outside chance that all 5010 coastal bitmaps will fit. I have the code written (but not typed) to consolidate the unit bitmaps which may or may not have an effect on MWIF's required internal system bitmap resources.

The 2 solutions, should the problem be intractable to small improvements in coding efficiency are:
1 - trim the map (as describe above), or
2 - paginate the coastal bitmaps.

[Shannon V. OKeets]

This is due west of the last screen shot. I will post some close ups of the more populated areas in the second half of this series of posts.

[Shannon V. OKeets]

And this is due north of the last screen shot. This completes the circle - some of the middle of Canada might be missing (?).

Paginating the coastal bitmaps was the design solution I planned on in September of 2005 when I decided on 24 bit color, hexes 136 pixels wide by 152 pixels high and units 96 pixels square. I knew that design decision would push the envelope of what Windows was capable of supporting. However, I wanted the 24 bit color, I wanted the 96 pixel square unit bitmaps, and I wanted the fine detailed drawings of the coast lines.

As it turns out, I might not need to code up a pagination routine.

[Shannon V. OKeets]

A close up of the islands around Juneau - this coastline is all in Alaska.

[Shannon V. OKeets]

British Columbia and Vancouver coastline.

The reason I prefer trimming the map versus writing the coastal bitmap pagination code should be obvious.

Pagination routines are notoriously fickle, sometimes running so smoothly you do not even know they are there. At other times they devour all the CPU cycles and the program execution speed drops to near zero. I have confidence in my ability to design and code a good one - but why bother if it can be avoided?

[Shannon V. OKeets]

A close up of the most likely invasion sites for the Japanese in Canada and the NW USA. None of this looks very attractive to invasion forces.

[Shannon V. OKeets]

Back to the east coast. Here are Newfoundland and the St. Lawrence River (Gulf of St. Lawrence). Patrice and Rob will fix the link between the two.

[Shannon V. OKeets]

Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Prince Edward Island. A lot of people contributed on detailing this coast line. How does it look?

[Shannon V. OKeets]

From Duluth to Quebec, with most of the Great Lakes in between. we won't have the bottom portion of the Great lakes until Rob does the map for the USA.

Speaking of which, when they arrive, I expect the bitmap resources to run out and I will be able to count precisely how many coastal bitmaps can be supported without pagination. Then I'll tinker around some with the exsiting bitmap code to see if I can free up room for some more. Lastly, I'll figure out how much of the northern portion of the map I need to trim. Oh, and then I'll start my long series of apologies to Patrice and Rob for any hexes that fall on the cutting room floor.

[Shannon V. OKeets]

15th and last in the series. An overview of Canada at zoom level 1.

[lomyrin]

ORIGINAL: Shannon V. OKeets

And yet further east. I have trimmed the top 11 hex rows from these first 3 screen shots.

It is looking more and more likely that I will trim 15 hex rows from the top of the world map. There is nothing up there: no ports, cities, resources, rail lines, just a whole lot of nothing. Patrice is aghast, and I haven't mentioned it to Rob, who has done a lot of work creating graphics for the coast lines and rivers up there. This would change the dimensions of the world map from 360 hexes wide by 195 hexes high to 360 by 180. Nice round numbers, but what is really driving this is bitmap memory, ...

I would think you might shave off 12 rows in the north arctic and 3 rows in the south arctic all the way around the globe.

There are Norwegian items in the 14-15 th row from the north. I have not noticed any itmes in the southernmost 3 rows.

Lars

[Froonp]

The 2 solutions, should the problem be intractable to small improvements in coding efficiency are:
1 - trim the map (as describe above), or
2 - paginate the coastal bitmaps.

Needless to say, I'd prefer if the coastal bitmaps were paginated.
Even if they were only pasted in a 2x2 area, I think that we would have at least half the number of bitmap files.

[Froonp]

but why bother if it can be avoided?

Because of the beauty of the useless coastlines of the top 15 rows [:D]

[Froonp]

ORIGINAL: Shannon V. OKeets

From Duluth to Quebec, with most of the Great Lakes in between. we won't have the bottom portion of the Great lakes until Rob does the map for the USA.

Speaking of which, when they arrive, I expect the bitmap resources to run out and I will be able to count precisely how many coastal bitmaps can be supported without pagination. Then I'll tinker around some with the exsiting bitmap code to see if I can free up room for some more. Lastly, I'll figure out how much of the northern portion of the map I need to trim. Oh, and then I'll start my long series of apologies to Patrice and Rob for any hexes that fall on the cutting room floor.

This part of the map brings 2 comments from me :
- First, we see here the problem with the strait graphic & lake graphics that I talked to you about, and that you told me would be easy to fix.
- Second, I think that you should try drawing rivers on top of borders, because the former are slimer than the latter, and I think that rivers won't obscure borders as borders can obscure rivers now. You can see borders obscuring rivers with the 1 river hexside that is between Lake Superior and Lake Huron.

About trimming the mal, except that I would mourn the loss of those lovely drawn coastlines, I would also worry about their loss in the advent of the use of the game engine and the map to designe sequels to MWiF that would extend the game duration into the 50s, as for PatiF for example. The reason I say this is that the northern waters were more and more used, with the help of icebreakers, or simply by SUBs, and a game extention of MWiF that would enter the 50s may need those areas.

I also thought about a feature that could be pleasant to have in the CSV datas of the maps : These are timed additions. For example all railways, all minor ports and cities could have a date (a year would suffice) at witch they began to exist, and the game would add it to the map when the year would come. The map would need to be regenerated at the beginning of each J/F turn, but this would be a cool addition that would allow the MWiF map to dynamicaly show the improvements of the rail network over the years. A rule about railways building would be better, but this does not exist yet neither.

[ptey]

I love the map too! Dont trim it if it can be avoided i would say.[:)]
Most of the time you will just be looking at europe and far east asia anyway, so slowdowns should very rarely be experienced.