[MAP] FN map for Darkest Hour and AOD

[novapaddy]

Hello, myself and fabfeingold are currently working on improving mumia's E3 map.

Mumia's E3 map is excellent and we salute his work.

From using the E3 map in mods, I found the performance suffered from having 8021 provinces. Our aim is to do our best to keep the overall integrity and quality of the map, but to reduce the number of provinces. The number of provinces is directly related to game performance.

We will post images soon so you can compare one map to the other.

UPDATE: July 20th, 2018
The E3FN map is released.
See: http://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum...kest-hour-and-aod.994288/page-2#post-24495907

which is #29 on the E3FN MAP forum.

Apologies for the mis-direction. That link is for the MAP ONLY.
Darkest Hour in the E3FN map is not released yet. I am still doing work on it.

 

[Korsteeni]

Great!

One thing I absolutely must ask is the removal of Sable Island from the map - it serves no strategic purpose whatsoever and in real life is too small to even hold an in-game unit.

 

[LCPD2012]

Wish lists
-Remove the border changed of the treaty Bucharest (1918) of Transylvania.
-Remove the suffix of Japanese City 'shi' like Tokyo-shi should be Tokyo.

 

[WdS]

Best of luck to the both of you, will eagerly be watching this project unfold, will fabfein' s topographical E3 look be integrated or at least included as an optional extra with this new map?

 

[fabfeingold]

Sure it will. Probably there will be two versions.

 

[bestmajor]

Great news! Nice to hear that AoD is supported as well!

 

[novapaddy]

Starting work this morning on converting the dh map to the E3 map.
The FN map will not be too different from the E3 map, so I feel fairly safe doing this.

The first step in having Darkest Hour in the E3/FN map is to convert the provinces, one map to the other map.
Then you work through the AI and event files etc swopping one number for another.

I did this before many years ago, when I converted the HOI2 map to the DH map. This was for when I converted the HOI2 World in Flames mod to darkest hour, back in prehistoric 2011... when the world was a more normal place...

 

[Mundane]

when the world was a more normal place...

Haha, as if.

How will you be tackling the North American provinces? My personal bias tells me that Québec has the perfect amount.

 

[novapaddy]

Haha, as if.

How will you be tackling the North American provinces? My personal bias tells me that Québec has the perfect amount.

Oh you'd have to ask Fabian. When I was doing the map, I removed too many provinces, whlie in my opinion, Fabian removed too few. So we settled it by Fabian doing the map and me doing the files. "... could eat no fat, and ... could eat no lean...!" He did the USA first and is currently doing Russia. That is all I know until I see the final map.

 

[fabfeingold]

Canada lost quite a few provinces. Alas Quebec too. But rest assured, no vital provinces were removed and Mumias original intent (as far I can judge it) is still intact. But as Nova said I am very careful in not removing too much because the Map really is a beautiful piece of work as it is. The amount of reasearch Mumia must have done is staggering. (All possible historical contingencies and border changes are accounted for. All provinces have the correct historical names etc.) Hence I would feel bad messing around too much. However if this yields no significant speed improvement I might have to cull some more.

 

[Conquerer1234]

but to reduce the number of provinces. The number of provinces is directly related to game performance

well, I mean for some computers that are very old that may need to be the case, but even my horrible 10 year old laptop can handle the Putin mod with the .exe increased to 4 GB from the standard two, now, I haven't tried the nofog cheat out, but why should I as the game is meant to be played with the fog of war on. besides it has the standard 2GB of RAM and even then the Putin mod was working, it may have been slightly slower than Darkest Hour Full, but at least I could play it and start editing some events for personal use, which may be why I am uploading a version of the current map with the Cold War Tech Tree integrated into it.

 

[Mundane]

I'm still interested in this project! I don't want to start any personal projects without this map.

 

[fabfeingold]

That's good, because I'll upload the final version in a couple of days.

 

[Mundane]

That's good, because I'll upload the final version in a couple of days.

That's great to hear! May I ask how many provinces exist in this final version compared to DH Vanilla and Mumia's E3?

 

[mccarty.geoff]

My big peeves with DH and E3 are the 10-30px borders. It looks terrible. AI pathing in Europa is 'first best guess' and cannot pathfind directly between 3 zones without running somewhat intense calculations which the DH exe has stripped. This is why despite their unpopularity the original HOI2 map and the Iron Cross map (with their long ruled borders) are perfect for the Europa AI to find the fastest destination.
Definitley a daunting task so congradulations to anyone who can convert our globe into a 2D surface map without giving up in frustration.

 

[fabfeingold]

Could you expand on this a bit more. All I am trying is to speed up the map a bit more. Any help is appreciated.

 

[mccarty.geoff]

I'm an amateur to the subject compared to you. My two cents are that the map graphically is a minor tax on the processor but, will slow down paging/swap during initialization. The great flaw in having over 2,000 land provinces is the ESE and trade efficiency calculation. Path processing, the greatest tax are the air wings followed by land divisions. All of this can be mitigated by reducing the amount of provinces and seazones and/or reducing the amount of nations and their models in game. I suggest you test your map with misc.txt line:1280 set to 0. I assume that the 10 digit grid distances.csv results in the dist.tbl files are much more complex than the simple pixel based native calculations.

If you can find the Iron Cross map you should study it. Apparently, it runs only a little slower than Arma1.3 despite having thousands of additional provinces. My assumption here is that the provinces dressed properly with fewer connections are related to the supply, trade, pathing routine efficiency and overall game speed. Darkest Hour's map_1 and the E3 map are great bases for editing but, inherently flawed with nonsense connections. If the amount of connections (which are necessary for initializing the engine I understand) is a problem you could use an inaccessible province to hold the remainder for instance. Anything to ease the thousands of calculations burdened on the poor single threaded 32bit process.

So in editing the E3 I would be mindful of how model movement and per hour/day/month calculations are handled. Less busy land connections (polygonal not squiggle provinces), less overseas supply, less unnecessary international trade routes. During scenario creation lesser amounts of nations and their models and simple event chains with a logical slow pacing. One simplification I've juggled with is using Infantry corps as the regular infantry division and thus dividing that massive component of models by 3. Also, if air wings were properly modeled as 400 plane units instead of 100 plane squadrons those bit eaters would quadruple your pathing efficiency in that area. Keep it simple stupid and even a 7990 actual province map can work effectively I'm sure.

 

[fabfeingold]

Thanks. Some very good ideas here. I am not sure wether the pixel based calculation is the faster. In Aod the map is much slower and that is based on the pixel calculation. I am also not certain wether the way provinces are painted makes any difference as provinces are actually based on a rectangular boundbox. Then again AOD uses a more complex ESE calculation. I have now significantly reduced the number of sea provinces that should reduce the amount of supply calculations. There is very little else I can and will do at this point, because the amount of work involved is just staggering. We'll see wether there is a speed improvement once I am fully done.

 

[mccarty.geoff]

Any work is good work. We thank you for your efforts. I should remind you that HoI2 was slow and unstable on release despite only running the 770 land province map_0. Supply calculation frequency was cut exponentionally in the base game which made it run just as fast as it's Europa cousins. AoD really jacked things up but, has an undeniably more realistic supply model. Literally takes my old computer 5-7 minutes to start an AoD session which I consider fubar. Although aesthetically I prefer more polygonal/hexagonal provinces it is also better design-wise because it allows for fewer land connections to be represented. Every 24th hour the ESE routine runs a radiating pattern out of every nations capital through it's land and seazone connections and writes the ESE values into the province tables. Every model get's supply check and updates. That's why there is a 500ms-1sec pause every day in E3 at the beginning. I can only imagine how bad running it after 5 years game time with 1000 model groups on map trying to path and a very complex supply load. Please release your FN variant ASAP ;]

 

[Eginhard 38]

Regarding the pixel-based calculation, one should also remember that its results can be heavily distorted, depending of the cartographic projection used in the map. This is why DH opted for the coordinates-based system in the first place.