Slitherine

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Notice the pretty lake hexsides.

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The upper portion of the lake is off the WIF FE map, so they will need to be completed by the artist by hand.

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ORIGINAL: Shannon V. OKeets

The issue of which cities to include does affect game play. While the CSV files can be edited by the players and cities added or removed more or less as the player chooses (where's Berlin?), a standard/default should be established. Unless I miss my guess, whetever MWIF uses as the default will become the defacto standard. New players to the world of WIF are unlikely to edit the map files to make them match a WIF FE official version. My personal preference on this is to definitiely exclude anything that is post-August 1945 since that is the end of the standard global war scenario (the latest end date for any of the 11 scenarios in fact).

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Does this mean you can also add names of rivers, mountain ranges and other geographical features that aren't the default for the map? Got the atlas out and did the same on my maps of WiF FE before I had them put on backing boards and laminated. Just added to the general atmosphere of the games I played.

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ORIGINAL: Rooboy

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ORIGINAL: Shannon V. OKeets

The issue of which cities to include does affect game play. While the CSV files can be edited by the players and cities added or removed more or less as the player chooses (where's Berlin?), a standard/default should be established. Unless I miss my guess, whetever MWIF uses as the default will become the defacto standard. New players to the world of WIF are unlikely to edit the map files to make them match a WIF FE official version. My personal preference on this is to definitiely exclude anything that is post-August 1945 since that is the end of the standard global war scenario (the latest end date for any of the 11 scenarios in fact).

G'day Steve.

Does this mean you can also add names of rivers, mountain ranges and other geographical features that aren't the default for the map? Got the atlas out and did the same on my maps of WiF FE before I had them put on backing boards and laminated. Just added to the general atmosphere of the games I played.

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ORIGINAL: Rooboy

G'day Steve.

Does this mean you can also add names of rivers, mountain ranges and other geographical features that aren't the default for the map? Got the atlas out and did the same on my maps of WiF FE before I had them put on backing boards and laminated. Just added to the general atmosphere of the games I played.

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ORIGINAL: Froonp

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The upper portion of the lake is off the WIF FE map, so they will need to be completed by the artist by hand.

There is one more hexrow above this screenshot who is also on the WiF FE European Maps.

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ORIGINAL: Shannon V. OKeets

Thank you for your offer.

Why don't you send me an email to Steve@PatternDiscovery.us so we can continue this discussion off-line.

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ORIGINAL: lomyrin

To my eyes the Nantes hex still needs better clarity in the south where the river goes into Bay of Biscay.

The Hull/Sheffield bay could also be more definite all the way to the end of the common hex borders. As shown there is still a small part that can be mistaken for a connection.

Lars

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ORIGINAL: lomyrin

At least in CWiF the Southeast hexside of St Nazaire is all sea. The river emptying into the Bay of Biscay is shown following the two southern hexsides of Nantes to the junction of the St Nazaire and Nantes hexes where the ocean begins.

If this corresponds to the real geography of the area or not I do not know.

Lars

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ORIGINAL: Froonp

Passage from Nantes to 1828 is possible.
Edit : And the southeast hexside of St Nazaire is not all sea
Look (2004 maps) :

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ORIGINAL: Shannon V. OKeets

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ORIGINAL: amwild
I thought that in the atlantic and mediteranean at least, you could overlay the hex dots and sea-box info over a copy of the Kriegsmarine position chart - you know, the one where you describe a location with two letters followed by two numbers, e.g. Malta is CN34, New York is CA51, etc... I don't know if ther is any similar sort of chart for the pacific or other ocean areas.

Whatever you decide to use as decoration in open sea areas, I would suggest that you have an option to toggle this decoration on or off, and make it clear in the options and help files that this decoration has no game effect.

Actually, my total knowledge concerning Kriegsmarine charts comes from what you wrote in your post. They talk about blissful ignorance, and I am a happy kind of guy.

So, you will have to give me a better understanding of what you envision. Would there be one identifier per sea area? Or more? Would the font size be the same as for the sea area or smaller - if smaller, comparable to the size which other map labels?

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ORIGINAL: Ballista
The maps are looking great ! One thing though- would it be possible to "lighten" the rivers a bit so that they stand out a little more- they appear to fade into the background terrain a bit (or is this because of the screenshot process, or just my fading eyes ?).....

- Don

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ORIGINAL: amwild

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ORIGINAL: Shannon V. OKeets

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ORIGINAL: amwild
I thought that in the atlantic and mediteranean at least, you could overlay the hex dots and sea-box info over a copy of the Kriegsmarine position chart - you know, the one where you describe a location with two letters followed by two numbers, e.g. Malta is CN34, New York is CA51, etc... I don't know if ther is any similar sort of chart for the pacific or other ocean areas.

Whatever you decide to use as decoration in open sea areas, I would suggest that you have an option to toggle this decoration on or off, and make it clear in the options and help files that this decoration has no game effect.

Actually, my total knowledge concerning Kriegsmarine charts comes from what you wrote in your post. They talk about blissful ignorance, and I am a happy kind of guy.

So, you will have to give me a better understanding of what you envision. Would there be one identifier per sea area? Or more? Would the font size be the same as for the sea area or smaller - if smaller, comparable to the size which other map labels?

Steve,

I have since done some more research, and there are some sites that give more details on the Kriegsmarine charts:

http://www.german-navy.de/kriegsmarine/articles/feature6.html
http://uboat.net/maps/grid.html
http://home.att.net/~rodney.j.martin/gridmap.htm

Unfortunately, even though it is stated that these charts were made for the entire world's seas, I have only ever seen them for the Atlantic - on the net or otherwise. I have copies of the atlantic maps from the sub-sim games "Aces of the Deep" and "Silent Hunter III", though scanning them and sending you an electronic copy would result in a rather large set of files, and might breach copyright.

The Kriegsmarine grid system does not correspond to the sea areas used in WiF. Since you were talking about decoration, I thought that overlaying a version of the grid onto empty sea areas would be an artistic touch relevant to the WWII period.

I thought that if the grid was painted over the map as vector art plus text, its size would be relatively small compared to a bitmap. Of course, if you are having frame rate problems, these charts or any other decoration probably won't help.

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Aside from #5 I am going to wait and see what the beta testers say. It is very difficult to run timing studies when everything happens so fast. For example, a complete scroll from London to Moscow at the lowest resolution (zoom level 1), with everything on, takes about 8 seconds. My ability to control the stopwatch and detect when Moscow appears is poor, so that is an average of a set of bad measurements. The London to Moscow section of the map has the greatest concentration of map elements so it is the slowest test I could devise.

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ORIGINAL: mlees

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Aside from #5 I am going to wait and see what the beta testers say. It is very difficult to run timing studies when everything happens so fast. For example, a complete scroll from London to Moscow at the lowest resolution (zoom level 1), with everything on, takes about 8 seconds. My ability to control the stopwatch and detect when Moscow appears is poor, so that is an average of a set of bad measurements. The London to Moscow section of the map has the greatest concentration of map elements so it is the slowest test I could devise.

Did you time this with units on the map as well? I imagine that they will slow things up a little as well, especially when you are zoomed in close enough to see the "scanned" planes-in-flames pictures...

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ORIGINAL: Shannon V. OKeets

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ORIGINAL: Ballista
The maps are looking great ! One thing though- would it be possible to "lighten" the rivers a bit so that they stand out a little more- they appear to fade into the background terrain a bit (or is this because of the screenshot process, or just my fading eyes ?).....

- Don

The artist supplied me with the equivalent of scanned images from the WIF FE paper maps. The colors for the rivers are basically 2 on the paper maps: an interior light blue and a dark blue outline. The computer translates this into a screen image using anti-aliasing and there are 30 or 40 different shades of blue in the images I received. The anti-aliasing was done against a white background.

What I have done is use 3 shades of blue, matching the 2 from the paper map exactly and adding a third, lighter shade for some of the anti-aliasing effects. These bitmaps take up an enormous amount of room and I have compressed them to 4 colors (no river/lake being the 4th) and done several other programming tricks to reduce the amount of memory they need. As always there are tradeoffs between memory, speed, and functionality. In this case the functionality is the rendered image on the screen. Speed is the refresh rate, and memory is the constraint imposed by Microsoft on the 'amount' of bitmaps available at one time in program memory. I am pushing all 3 of those constraints pretty hard.

So, I have complete control over changing the 3 shades of blue, but beyond that, I do not feel like investing any more time. For example, I could make the rivers the same color as the blue of the label for the rivers. Now all the labels are true type fonts so they all are antialiased against whatever background terrain. That makes them appear very crisp to the human eye. That was done by programmers better than I who really got into the nitty-gritty of fonts (a world in an of itself - their is a magazine deciated just to fonts). Getting the rivers to appear as crisp involves a whole lot more work (many months).

On your suggestion, I'll play around with the 3 shades of blue I am using. Following the paper map seemed like a good idea, but since we have changed all the backgrounds/terrain against which they appear, perhaps something else will look better.

(...)

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ORIGINAL: Shannon V. OKeets
Microsoft documentation is about as low in my estimation as it is possible to get.

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ORIGINAL: cinsulan

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ORIGINAL: Shannon V. OKeets
Microsoft documentation is about as low in my estimation as it is possible to get.

Welcome to the world of Win32 API documentation

You might have read it, but here is a link that might help ( assuming you are using GDI ).
MSDN Windows Font Mapping Check the Font Rotation section.

Keep up the good work!

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Font Rotation
An application specifies the desired rotation of a logical font using the lfEscapement and lfOrientation attributes. The main font mapper does not use these attributes in its font selection process—no penalties are assessed for candidate fonts that are not rotated or rotatable—but the shortcut method does not choose a raster font if either of these attributes is nonzero. The key issue here is that not all fonts, raster fonts especially, can be rotated effectively. Because font rotation is not a factor in the mapping, it is possible that the chosen physical font is not able to rotate as desired by the application. Fonts that do rotate are TrueType fonts, the vector fonts, and some device fonts. It is wise for an application that desires rotated fonts to specifically ask for a font that the application knows can actually be rotated.