HoIIV - Developer Diary 11 - Map & Graphics -[ NO COUNTERS DISCUSSION ]

First of all I have to say I'm saddened that people can't behave like adults when discussing games. You are free to state your opinion, but that doesn't mean name calling of other people or belittling their opinions is ok in doing so.

Please try to act like adults. If you can't the thread will be locked again. We have a very low tolerance for bullies, especially when I have to spend my free time on a saturday keeping an eye on things.

dizzle3 said:

Can you tell us anything that would quiet down the mass hysteria?
1. Can the little helmet/tank/artillery pictures be modded into NATO counters for those people who prefer the board game feel
2. is there an option ingame to use counters all the time rather than sprites?
3. will modders be able to change stuff to remove the sprites if desired?
4. will modders be able to do transparent textures on the sprites as a last resort?


And on the actual content of the DD:
5. what's the difference between wind sock and airplane symbol?
6. ditto with the green circle on ports?
7. what are the menu headers?
8. what are the map view buttons?

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1. Of course, although we'll make a NATO version for people who are familiar with that so you wont have to
2. No there isnt. I am posting a counter writeup very soon in this thread
3. of course
4. of course, or just change the shader, its easier
5. wind-sock is empy base, airplane is a base full of planes. Its not a clear enough icon yet and blends too much into background. We'll be redoing it
6. ports have a 3 state icon. green circle port = port with ships, port icon = no ships in port, port icon with questionmark = not enough intel to know if there are ships or not
7. Politics (flag), Production, Tech, Diplomacy, Deployment and force planning, placeholder used for development, Trade/Resources
8. Main ones: Land mode (default), Strategic Naval mode, Strategic Air mode. Minor: supply, state view (dev only atm), rebels/partisans/occupation, trade/convoys/resources. There are also some not shown yet.

safe-keeper said:

I was sceptical about this at first, too, but seeing screenies of it now, it just looks awesome. Can't wait to see the video footage tomorrow .

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Not sure how that got confused. There is no video today. I just said we'll make a video in the future showing stuff, not exactly when

Axe99 said:

Woah, not many DDs hit 18 pages before I’m awake and giving them a gander all the way over in +11 GMT.

On the DD – the map surpasses all my expectations, and looks absolutely stunning. Most importantly, it takes a far more refined approach to presenting information reducing the need to flick between map modes. I expect we’ll still need more than a few discreet map modes (supply possibly, or diplomacy?), but keeping the key stuff intertwined in one ‘main’ mode will make for considerably less ‘map mode flicking’ while playing the game. Awesome .

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Yes the goal has never been to remove mapmodes, there are things that are completely unrelated you want to see. The ideas is to reduce the number of times you need to swap around between stuff you need to make decisions about what you are currently doing.

Axe99 said:

- As Calders mentions in post 162, it might be easier to spot buildings if they don’t colour with weather – making something contrast with the background is about the best way of making it visible. Pick a colour that contrasts with the terrain modes, or give the models borders (like cell-shading in a cartoony platformer) are some ideas.In the screenshot of Stalingrad the airbase is very well camouflaged.

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Air bases have icons to identify them better, especially at a distance. The current ones are just placeholder and not clear enough at all.

Axe99 said:

- I’m totally down with 5000 province names being pretty hard to put in, but how will it work when we’re attacked in terms of finding the location, or the old ‘find a province’ option in HoI3 (which I used a heap)? The state name would do for me (if I can’t find the battle once I know the state, it’s probably time for a break ). Also, it’s probably way too early, but if there’s a chance for a ‘find a province (or state)’ button (and even better, hotkey ) then it could make usability better. The HoI series requires more jumping around the map than any other PDS does, and this can be right handy.

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a few points on province names:
- only some provinces are important, they have victory point markers identifying them and printing the name of the city etc
- the main job of provinces is to give you maneuver room for units. We dont care about any political borders for these at all. They need to be a rough shape and size to be able to handle showing units fighting etc and the stuff thats important to play the game. They could just be hexes but then we couldnt adjust them at all along state borders/country borders for historical purposes. Above this s states where we do care about political borders. Most of them are ad-hoc, but some follow real state borders where it makes sense (USA for example).
- Even if we gave each province a name it doesnt matter. Nobody (except maybe 5 ppl with photographic memory) is going to know where something is just based on a name where there are 10,000 names out there. When we need to refer to something by name we use the state name, a nearby victory point/city or supply goto buttons/alerts to just take you there (its also nicer because we can get battle names that fit how they were historically called like Battle of Midway from fighting in waters nearby the island).
- drawing text on the map isnt cheap and also clutter things up, so we want to do it only for gameplay relevant stuff

Axe99 said:

I’d say this would be because of Runemaster – I’d be very, very surprised if it was practical to not have mouse and keyboard as the main form of control for something like HoI. That’s not to say PDS might not try to build a pad-oriented strategy game for console (and I’d personally be interested in what they might come up with), but the UI issues of converting any of their core strat titles to a gamepad would be immense – would make much more sense to be a new title altogether.

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yeah runemaster has driven a lot of tech development for us that I'v stolen over to hoi4 project .
Porting hoi4 to a console would never work. You need to design for that from scratch to get good results (unless perhaps with special controllers. eu4 worked fairly ok with steambox controller)

Axe99 said:

+1 to this – love the effect, but it would be very odd seeing a lit-up London in 1940. Even east coast (at least) US cities dropped their lights at night later in the war to make it harder for u-boats to see ships at night (silhouetted against the city light).

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I too would like to see cities go dark during war, but technically its quite expensive so I am not sure we'll actually manage to do this.

TheCrimsonMajor said:

I have a couple of questions:
1. Will the fog of war obscure weather and terrain type? I would prefer if it did not, personally.
2. Will you be able to see weather events represented at sea?
3. Will the 3D models for airfields, ports, and other buildings be clearly visible to the player at a glance? You may want to consider having the option to have icons appear above them at a certain level of zoom.
4. Will provinces/buildings that have sustained heavy damage from strategic bombing or combat be represented on the map? This could be represented by some (appropriately small) columns of smoke, craters, or scorch marks. It's worth thinking about.
5. Is there a way for you to represent the location of major battles visually? Maybe through small flashes representing an exchange of fire? It would be useful to know at a glance where heavy combat is currently taking place, especially if other players are like me and turn off notifications for when ground forces engage the enemy, to reduce the amount of popups. Even if it's not happening to your forces, I think it's still relevant for the player to be directed to the location of a pivotal battle involving one of their allies. Knowing about something like that might help explain where the AI ally's divisions suddenly went, for example.

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1. No you can still see weather, and while it makes terrain a bit harder to see its still visible
2. Yes, in fact they are very important
3. We do have icons pop up at distances. Some arent final yet though and not very visible.
4. Its doable, but I'm not sure we'll have the time to add it. its not something an artist can add on their own and all the coders are currently busy with bugfixing and gameplay. Its been discussed though
5. We havent really shown battles yet, but I'll keep the suggestion in mind.

Adonnus said:

German Reich? Why not just Germany like in previous games?

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You'll see in a future diary

Dalwin said:

I share this concern. My first reaction to seeing the pretty fog of war approach was the it MIGHT make it harder to compose battle plans. I am not saying that it certainly will, I don't think we can tell that from one screen shot. I am just concerned that it might be obscuring things that should not be obscured.

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Yeah it does sometimes hide too much, its a work in progress and we have a few more things to do to make it clearer (such as have borders shine through more). Fog goes away pretty fast as you zoom out though so its more of a minor tweak than a real problem.

Counters.

So there are a lot of feelings connected to this, so I will clarify our thoughts on this and what we are working with, because stuff is still under construction and always is until release. So grab a cuppa of something hot and snuggle up to your life sized Von Rundstedt doll and lets go.

NATO or icons?!
From a pure game design standpoint nato counters are insane. There is almost nothing about the symbols that indicates what they symbolize, so thats why they arent the standard symbol for stuff. However, in wargames they are pretty common so a lot of people have experience with them and so including them is a no brainer because plenty of players wont have to relearn a new icon set and feel at home. So we are giving players the choice between both NATO and regular symbols.

Sprites (models) or Counters?!
Why not both? See you can have the cake and eat it as well.
In hoi3 the choice was simple, the 3d models were frankly an atrocious interface and offered little information and made playing really hard. I hated them and just played with counters. In HOI2 the sprites were well done and clear so in that game there wasnt really an advantage to either, although counters could show a few things more if I recall.
So when designing hoi4 we decided we wanted both a pretty model that could show stuff a counter couldnt (stances, tech levels, maybe more) and a counter below it giving you as much information as quickly and completely as possible. HoI3 style counters stopped being useful when zooming out, or when stacks were too big, so our new counter system can summarize information for you in a much better way. They will stack by category so that you can see how much of a stack is made up of armor for example, as well as when zooming out instead of overlapping into a giant mess like in previous games they combine to show a summarized stack over areas. see example picture, here we zoomed out so much most of the german army is clumped up in one stack makign it super easy to see exactly how much of each you have and to select sub groups (click the 3 armored divisions just to select those to see more info for example):

A counters only view?!
I established in the above section that out new counters are better in every way as interfaces than the counters from HOI3, so the only reason would be that you don't like to see pretty 3d graphics and feel this is immersion breaking in your games if they dont look like an old boardgame. Since we know there are people who feel this way we still investigated the option of a counter only interface:
- You can either make a 2d overlay like we have currently, so the only difference would be to turn off the 3d models. I am not going to do something I feel adds nothing and just makes the game ugly, but I am sure someone will make a mod that does this.
- The other option is 3d counters that look like 2d, or boardgame chips (sort of what the hoi3 ones were, they were costlier to render than the 3d objects btw). The problem with these is that the shape isnt natural and when placed into a 3d map trying to represent the world will end up clipping into, falling off mountains and lots of other terribleness that is extremely hard to work around. we would also end up having to reimplement all the work we did with the 2d overlay counters in the previous section, but now in 3d. We are still a small core team of 3 programmers and I cant justify spending that much development time just to add a visual choice of the same thing, or we'll end up where hoi3 was with too much stuff, none of it balanced or working quite right.
- I also feel there is a large overlap between this crowd and people who only want a 2d map as well. These people I am sad to say we will never be able to make happy with the release of hoi4. A 2d game is possible to make, but its not a game anyone in the team wants to make, or that has a chance of selling as much as a nicer looking 3d one. If you are in this camp, get together and make a 2d mod. Its definitely possible, but its a lot of work we really cant justify doing if we want to keep making games and not starve on the streets.

I spent part of my precious weekend writing this because I care about what you, the fans and players, think about the game. Possibly a lot more than is healthy, so I hope people will give it time to read through and think about the points I raised before giving feedback and staying on the side of logic and politeness in the following discussion.

Sifaus said:

Mods change checksum. Options don't.

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visual mods dont change checksums

Kesselschlacht said:

Considering how this thread turned out I feel bad for Joakim who's spent a not inconsiderable amount time producing a really good looking map that promises to drastically reduce the need for incessant flipping between map modes; something that's plagued every PDS title I can think of. I hope he can ignore all the nerd rage that really doesn't have anything to do with him or his work.

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I just feed him the good bits over skype. if he kept reading past page 3 he would probably be a wreck by now

Art1985 said:

Is there a chance to have DLC in future with more schematic mapmode (maybe 2D) and counters only? I understand that to make it possible it takes time and resources, and I think a lot of people will pay for this DLC (I will).
Thank you for your work and patience.

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if there is enough interest there is of course the possibility of DLC, but as I tried to explain above, its not easy to make something that is better or just as good.