I red in the Newswire about the changes that will be made to SPWW2, and the one that I found most interesting was the one about allowing up to 15 elevation levels. This may be because of my special interest in Tunisia, Sicily and Italy. When designing maps for battles in these theatres the three elevation levels currently available mean that one really has to stretch the imagination!
I was enthusiastic when I first started using SPWAW and quite happy to make it my new Steel Panthers environment. It is a bit confusing to find that a modification that would mean so much to me will be made to the old SPWW2 module and not to SPWAW. Is anyone else interested in more elevation levels? Will we have to split game systems to take advantage of this new design feature?
And what about missing out on the excellent enhancements included in SPWAW for games that can only be designed with SPWW2?
While I am on the subject of mountainous terrain, has anyone found a way of simulating
impassable cliffs?
And will a forthcoming patch allow us to put crops, orchards and vineyards on slope hexes?
Having said all this, I think that what the SPWW2 and SPWAW teams have done for us SP fanatics is simply marvellous. Keep the good things coming, guys!
I agree wholeheartedly. I've always thought the 4-level system of the SP games was a bit limited and it would be good to have more mountainous terrain.
I know there's a lot of things to address in forthcoming patches but I reckon that more height levels would add a lot to the game and offer a whole new dimension to map design, scenarios and battle tactics.
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"There is nothing more
exhilarating than being
shot at without result"
- Winston Churchill
The problems with adding an extensive "third dimension" are very complex.
Gradients: SP right now has a "plateau effect" ie elevation levels are like steps you go up and down, go up a step and you get higher, but its like being ion a escalator, you never "tip". For small height compared to the size of teh hex, thats not that bad an abstraction, but for 150m or more (3 times a hex width) its a big problem.
How do you decide the maximum gradient a vehicle can go up? A new data entry is needed to assign this.
How do you determine the angle up or down a unit can elevate or depress its gun? Two more data entries for each weapon. (and a difficult research effort).
Coupled to that is how does the angle the vehicle is "tipped" when on a slope? THE elevation or depression can be enhanced or degraded if the vehicle is not level. With the slopes in "steps" you can get stuck where "you can't shoot at that from here" because on hex might be "too steep" and an adjacent hex "not steep enough".
Then there is the problem with teh angle effects and hit location in 3 dimensions. The 55 degree slope of a Panther glacis is 0 if you are firing at it for 140m up and two hexes away (assuming you can pepress the gun 55 degrees:-) The old armor factor combat system can't take the angles involed into account.
You can abstract this at a number of different levels, and get good results! But we felt we wanted to wait until we could take these aspects of movement and combat effects at the same level of detail as the rest of the improvements before we tried to do it.
You are right, Wild Bill, all terrain types will go on slope hexes. I was confused by the graphics, which look like clear hexes in the middle of, say, a field of crops on level ground.
I would also like to thank Paul Vebber for the detailed explanation of the complexity of the problem.What had excited me was the announcement that SPWW2 were doing it.
It will be interesting to see how they have got round the very good questions that Paul identified.
While on the subject of elevations, will it be possible to run a stream down tha side of a hill in future? At the moment stream hexes can only be at level -2. The same applies to gully hexes, who only come in -1. I would also like to see some sort of cliff feature represented in the game.
You must think that I am obsessed by hilly terrain! Maybe it's because I grew up in a hilly area.
Originally posted by Paul Vebber: The problems with adding an extensive "third dimension" are very complex.
I understand the difficulty, but the reward may well be worth all the trouble it will be to do it. 15 levels of terrain! Think about it . . . Fantastic! Can you imagine the scenarios you can build? Can you imagine the real terrain features you can model? It wouldn't just lend another dimension to the game -- it would radically change the way the game is played.
Don't get me wrong -- SPWAW is great, and I appreciate everything everybody connected with it has done. But I'd LOVE to see 15 levels of terrain more than any other new feature.
Then another good reason for there to be two teams doing game mods! SP Camo Group thought there were too many loose ends in redoing the armor combat model, we think there are too many loose ends in adding higher hill heights.
They may well have as much success with their new hills as we have had with the new armor combat
Originally posted by Paul Vebber: They may well have as much success with their new hills as we have had with the new armor combat
Very true. And further thought on the subject of elevations -- there are actually many elevations . . . -2, 0, 1, 4, 5, 6, 15, 16, etc . . . true, you can only set 5, and all the others come from modifications of terrain . . . but maybe they have found a way to set these intermediate levels manually. IF (and that's a BIG "if") that is the case, it is not such a big improvement . . . still, it is an improvement.
The problem is not in making the game think the ground is at all different levels! Thats a pretty straight forward graphics and LOS issue.
The problem is in getting the terrain to "act right". If you have a hex that drops from 150m to 0 in one hex, that's like a 70 degree slope! Accounting for how that impacts movement and combat is the hard part!
Originally posted by Paul Vebber: The problem is in getting the terrain to "act right". If you have a hex that drops from 150m to 0 in one hex, that's like a 70 degree slope! Accounting for how that impacts movement and combat is the hard part!
I hear that, but what I was asking was: if the extra levels are only the extra modified terrain levels already in the game (build a 10m hill and the surround hexes are 5m) . . . can they be coded to be set manually so that you could build a 5m hill? Would -that- be easier? Aren't these intermediate levels already accounted for in all other aspects?
I am not too sure what effect elevations such a -1 and -2 have on the game. I take Paul's point about the two developing teams, but SPWAW has some overriding elements that IMO make it far superior, the most important one being that it is fully Windows compatible. Perhaps the real difficulty here is that SP is mostly about Armored Combat, although it attracts Infantry fans because I don't know of any other game system that works so well for this scale simulation. For Armored Combat the elevation system is OK, as armor needs low gradients and reasonably clean terrain to fight. But what about down and dirty Infantry fighting in difficult terrain? In East Africa,Tunisia, Sicily, Italy, Greece, Yugoslavia, Burma, New Guinea and even in Normandy, Belgium and Germany plenty of Infantry engagements were fought on terrain that the current system can not reproduce even aprroximately. Tanks in the current system can get through practically any terrain except deep water hexes. There are risks on some types of terrain, but there is no terrain that is impassable to tanks. Please understand that I am making these observations constructively, without whishing to detract from the outstanding achievement that SPWAW represents in its current form. I am not a trained programmer and it is difficult for me to understand what technical limitations exist that would make this sort of enhancement detrimental to game play. Having said this, there seems to be two key elements here: effects on movement and effects on the ability to shoot at something that you can see but is at an awkward angle, either directly or indirectly.
If the current system already takes elevation changes into account when calculating movement then would it be possible to code an elevation change between two hexes that would stop a vehicle from moving across? And given that in the current combat system advantages are gained if the firer is at a higher elevation than the target, can this be developed into a check that would determine whether the shot is allowable or impossible because the gun can not be depressed/elevated sufficiently? The point about relative angles of the armor should then be avoided from the vehicle's point of view as if the slope is so significant as to alter it dramatically the vehicle would not be allowed to set up or transit through such a Hex. If the firer is at a much higher/lower elevation than the vehicle, what part of the vehicle will he be aiming at, and can the angle not be calculated? The range should be less bewildering because of limitations to gun elevation/depression ability.
As I said, I am not a programmer and I do not know enough about technical issues to know what impact such changes would have on game play. If a compromise is necessary, what about introducing just two or three extra levels instead of ten? Just that may considerably improve the feel of the simulation. Oh, and could we please have streams and gullies that run down the sides of hills?
Well, maybe instead of dealing with weird elevation dependant terrain effects, one single piece of terrain should be added. How bout some transparent terrain type that is coded as impassable to vehicles? This can be slapped on in scenarios manually, and possibly you can code in a difference in elevation calculation to determine where it would be placed in random maps. Lets say you want a sheer cliff for a beach assault, then just slap this terrain feature on the slope of the cliffs so tanks cant go there. Now for a random map, maybe if we figure a 50m difference in height is impassable to tanks, then this terrain feature is automatically programmed to be put on slope hexes with this difference in height between adjacent hexes.
I suppose it could work, right? It would also allow for those impregnable forests (like the ardennes..ha) for scenario designers. Possibilities are endless. Anyways, I realize it still doesn't take into account the gun elevation/depression, but maybe this could be useful for the time being.
[This message has been edited by Desert Fox (edited 06-07-2000).]
