Global Warfare Project

[mattismedaddy]

I have fallen in love with Armoured Brigade- Its ability to simulate a wide variety of conflicts and situations with ease makes it the closest we have to a ground-based CMANO. To leverage this, I want to make a community standard expanded database with as many factions as possible. The goal of the Global Warfare project is to bring the best part of games such as win SPMBT to Armoured Brigade.

I have already started research on factions from African conflicts myself, but I want this endeavor to be open to the community. If you wish to join me please message me. I am setting up a discord to help collaboration, but matrix won't let me post a link in this post, so feel free to message me to join. Hope to see you guys there!!

[CSO_Talorgan]

It won't let you post a link because you are new.

You could spell it out though.

Didn't Steel Panthers have a weapons and equipment encyclopoedia? Porting the entire 20th Century's orbat to the new game might take an hour or two, but would be well worth it. If the Steel Panthers community have already carved some form of order from the chaos of history then you have a start, even if the games have completely different data sets.

[Mr_Luxury_Yacht]

While SPMBT is a good tool to get some quick and dirty stats for units, I can tell you from experience it takes considerably longer than a couple hours. The numbers always need a bit of tweaking to work in AB. Sure, nobody will care if a penetration value is off by like 20mm. However, some of the existing stats in SPMBT differ from what's in AB by like 100mm or more, or there's also the fact ERA is modelled entirely differently.

It's taken me about a month and a half in my spare time to get two nations (Egypt and Israel from 1950 to 1995) into the game. Sprites are a real bottleneck. If there's an equivalent sprite already in the game for another nation (who cares if the camo pattern isn't perfect?), then it speeds things up considerably. SPMBT's MOBhack tool also lets you dump a unit's sprites, and it does it in a format that makes it pretty easy to slightly modify them to make them usable in AB as a placeholder (even if they're a bit ugly). The other big issue is formations. Making and assigning them to a country takes waaaay longer than making a unit.

Like let's say I've got two eras of mechanized squad that can ride in two different APCs. With platoon/company/HQ levels, that's 12 formations that need creating and assigning to the right dates.

Also, if you're doing a community collaborative database, you'd need a lot of communication to make sure you don't both use the same unit/formation IDs (or that they will get overwritten by future updates to the base database). If I can give one bit of advice, it's if you want to merge your custom stuff into a new version of the main DB later, start at the bottom for unit IDs (i.e. make your first unit ID # 5000 and work down from there). Then you can at least copy and paste things across in Notepad++.