- Dec 14, 1999
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Nice pictures Folgore [NL], and I liked the explanation of the historical significance of various areas. How do you like my pictures of the Netherlands:
Kinda poor? Certainly not as nice as your's.
Except those pictures aren't mine, I've blatantly ripped them off. But I hope the copyright owners don't mind. Is it OK Paradox to post your maps?
They are the maps of the Netherlands area from EUIII. HOI3 uses the EUIII 3-d graphics engine to display its maps. It would be worthwhile to revisit how this engine works.
EUIII GRAPHICS ENGINE
The three maps are sections taken from three bitmap files covering: rivers and coasts; provinces; and terrain. There is a fourth bitmap file covering topology, but since it is just one colour, because the Netherlands is completely flat, then it doesn't really add anything. The engine takes these four bitmaps and uses them to draw the 3-d map that you see on your screen when you play the game.
The rivers and coasts bitmap provides the basic geography. Each coloured area on the provinces map is a unique RGB colour value. The colours aren't drawn on the map on the screen, the engine uses the colour value to look up in a list of provinces in a text file to identify which province each area is. By following the edge of each coloured area the engine draws the province boundaries on the map on the screen. From the list of provinces it can find the name of each province and write this on the map as well.
The terrain map has a set of colours each of which represent a different terrain type. Again these colours are not actually drawn on the map that you see on your screen in-game. But the game engine knows from this which areas of the map are plains, hills, forests, etc. when it comes to calculate movement speeds and combat effects.
Now back to those blocky ugly looking maps I've posted. The images you see are eight times the size of the actual files that are in the EUIII maps folder, so that you can see the detail, or rather the lack of detail. Fortunately, the map you see in-game doesn't look anywhere near as bad as this. What the engine does is try to smooth out the blockiness, especially with the coasts and rivers. But you can see why there are alot of straight lines and corners on the province boundaries in EUIII.
Now there are alot of great things about this engine. Firstly, you can mod the provinces names, just by opening the text file with the list of provinces in Notepad, searching for one you want to change, edit it and save. Easy. Secondly, but more difficult, you could mod those bitmap files using something as simple as MS Paint. Obviously, if you change the coast line, then you have to make sure that all of the bitmaps are changed in exactly the same way, otherwise you might have an area which is land, but has no terrain defined for it, or no topology, etc. You can also change the areas covered by each province, by changing the colour of some of the pixels. You need to make sure you use the exact RGB value of the province that you are extending. You can even split one of the bigger provinces in two, as long as you make absolutely sure that you use a unique RGB value that is not being used by another province anywhere else on the map. Once you've coloured an area for your new province, you just add the details of its RGB value, name, etc. in the provinces text file.
But there is one weakness of this engine. If you look at the peninsular which had just the one HOI2 province of Amsterdam, and which in the HOI3 screenshots has four provinces, which you have named as Amsterdam, Haarlem, Alkmaar and Den Helder. You can see that in the EUIII maps this is only four pixels wide, and in EUIII this included only province. You have compared this peninsular with Google Maps and decided that it should be narrower. But in EUIII to make it narrower means going from 4 pixels to 3 or 2, which is a 25-50% reduction. You can see from this that any slight change in the bitmap files, even of only pixel, has a noticeable effect on the map you see in the game.
EU:ROME GRAPHICS
Now, since EUIII vanilla was developed, Paradox have developed EU:Rome using the same basic engine. They have made the coasts and rivers bitmap bigger than was used in EUIII, and this allows the coasts and rivers to be rendered in-game with more accuracy than EUIII allowed. However, Rome is far superior aesthetically to EUIII not just because of this, but because Rome covers only Europe, North Africa and the Middle East. It has a fraction of the provinces that EUIII had, so each province and country can be rendered in far more detail. But Rome had the downside that it required more graphics memory to run smoothly - EUIII could run OK on a 128MB graphics card, this card struggles with Rome.
Johan recently mentioned that HOI3 will probably require a 256MB graphics card. But instead of providing even better graphics than Rome, it will be no where near as good, because the graphics memory will need to hold the map for 15,000 provinces in HOI3, instead of about 150 in Rome. The end result is two steps forward, one step back. So HOI3 will be better than EUIII but not doubly so, despite requiring twice as much graphics memory.
HOI3 ALPHA
Until we see the finished game, we can't be sure of the exact detail that the latest version of the graphics engine will be able to render on the screen. Nevertheless, I find it difficult to believe that the developers have just used a set of straight lines for the coast line, if the engine is capable to actually defining far more detail. The cry of "Alpha" from some people of the forum is just ridiculous. No-one is going to spend the amount of time necessary to create all of the provinces we have seen so far, but just done it roughly, with the intention of coming back to it later to make it look better for Beta, then for Final Release. There might be some minor amendments (province names for example are easy to change right up to Release), but I don't believe there is going to be a complete rework of the map.
Just to take one example of the work required by the devs, in the provinces text file there will be defined for each province the centre point of the province. This is used as part of the combat/movement algorithms, to calculate the distances between provinces, but it is also used by the graphics engine to position the province name on the map. You can see on some of the Alpha screenshots, they have used this point to position not just the text but the icons for airbases and the sprites. My guess is that this aspect really is still Alpha, with more work still to be done. You can't properly read the province names for provinces with AA installations on a recent screenshot in Germany, and the position of the AA needs to be offset slightly. A recent screenshot of the Netherlands shows this done for that area, for ex. with Amsterdam, where they needed to fit inside the province an air base, a naval base (incorrectly as you pointed out), AA installation and sprite/counter. And when you zoom in a little more you will also need to be able to see the province name, or at least enough of it to be sure that you are looking at Amsterdam.
MAP DESIGN CONSIDERATIONS
This is critical for map design. It is not a case just of making every province as accurate as possible as they would appear on Google Maps - each province has to be big enough to fit in the name as closely as possible, and all of the other bits and pieces. Remember we can choose to build AA, airbases etc. where-ever we want, so EVERY single province on the map has to be created so that it is big enough to fit in all of the text/icons/sprites necessary. This is one of the reasons why it is just completely impractical to split-up some of the urban provinces as requested in a recent thread, into several smaller provinces, divided between "light urban" and "dense urban". You can't have provinces much smaller than we have now, without the whole province being completely obscured by the sprites/counters.
As well as the overall size of the province, clearly some provinces along coasts, rivers or country borders, could become very awkward shapes if drawn accurately as per Google Maps. Maastricht is the most obvious in the Netherlands. It's no use pointing out it's not the "right" shape - the fact is the real shape would present really difficult problems for drawing things on the screen, but really screw over the movement/combat gameplay. A German unit in Aachen which wants to head north east into the Netherlands straight across the river into Weert, instead is forced to first move south east into the province of Maastricht, then north into Weert. I don't believe they have made a mistake with Maastricht - they have made a carefully considered decision about what to do with it given the restrictions of the graphics engine, and the requirements of gameplay. Their policy is clear - there will be none of the stupidity of HOI2 where movement/combat was severely compromised in favour of the defenders or attackers because of the shape or size of a particular province. HOI3 provinces are areas for manouevring armies, and are not meant to accurately represent administrative areas.
So while work is still progressing on the "furniture" on the maps, IMHO they are not going to come back and redo all of the coasts and province boundaries if they can avoid it. The Devs must have been pretty pissed off when they realised they are going to have to significantly rework Yugoslavia after getting the rivers completely wrong. They can't afford to have too many mistakes like that if they are going to get the game out on time. But even if they were willing to reconsider the Netherlands, my main point is that the game engine just can't draw some of the detail you have drawn on your map. Particularly your coastline in Zeeland, which you have given the province name of Middelburg. My guess is that the graphics engine just isn't capable of dealing with such narrow sea areas, but even if it is then actually including it in the game in the way you have drawn it creates major gameplay problems. How does the game engine deal with sea straits which are within a province? It can't, and it's better to just pretend that Middelburg is a normal coastal province (probably with terrain of marsh) than divided up in to five separate landmasses as you have it in your map. The vast majority of us would never have noticed the difference if you hadn't pointed it out, but once you draw the map in that way (ie. accurately) then there will be an expectation that this province will need FOUR river crossings to be completed to fight through it, which would make it unique in the game.
Anyway, that's enough for tonight. Tomorrow, I'll try to deal more with the rivers/bridges and Market Garden. Again, an understanding of the EUIII engine is required to clearly understand how HOI3 will work with combat/movement.
POTM.
While the thread starter has good intentions, and we might be able to do a few tweaks, there is also the thing called technical feasibility. Potski explains things very good here.