Slitherine

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ORIGINAL: Froonp

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ORIGINAL: po8crg

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United Kingdom - note corrected rail lines

Yes, and they're not right. The LMS express should go directly to Glasgow, not via Edinburgh. The correction here is to change the mountain hex Newcastle 1W - it should connect to Glasgow and to the hex marked "Pennines", but not to Edinburgh. The connection to Newcastle is optional - there certainly is a line along the English side of the border, but it's pretty minor; if such lines were represented elsewhere in England, then almost every hex would connect to every other.

First, thanks for the feedback.
About this, well, the UK is a place where the MWiF map is nearly verbatim the WiF FE map. Only a couple of areas on the border of the map were changed (very slightly) in some remote places. I think that editing UK is out of the picture.

This said, the railways of this map may not be as bad as they seem, especially if one consider that the hexagon is 70-80 km across, and considering also that the program has the railway automaticaly converge to cities when there is a city in the hex. So, a railway may seem to go through a city when in reality if only passes 70 km from it. If you look at the attached illustration, it shows what I mean, by comparing the WiF FE map (left) the the MWiF map (right). On the left, we see that the railway indeed pretty much go directly to Glasgow without going through Edinburgh. On the right, we see that the program has the railway going through Edinburgh automaticaly.

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ORIGINAL: delatbabel
A few things concern me about the Russian map, and have done since WIF/5e. I don't think they've been corrected in WiFFE but if you have a look at a few other games of the period in terms of how they treat some of the Russian rivers and area around Leningrad, you'll see some differences. Also check google maps.

Firstly, Leningrad is not a major port. The major naval port is Kronshtadt, an island about 50km W of Leningrad, I'd put it one hex west. It's hard to reach from the mainland, and is quite heavily fortified. I can't remember exactly how Europa treats it but from memory you can only get to it from Leningrad, it's a fort hex and you have to use a strait crossing to get there. Someone with a copy of Fire in the East can go check. You can look for Kronshtadt on google maps, it's fairly easy to spot, although it helps if you can read Russian.

Secondly, some of the rivers in the south, especially around Kiev and the Volga. The entire stretch of the Volga north to Saratov and to some distance south of Stalingrad is pretty much a lake hexside rather than just a river. It's not really passable. You can run ships across it, and the Russians had ferries that ran across it, but to rate it the same as all other rivers is a bit misleading.

Similarly, there's a piece of land called the Okhosha (sp?) landbridge, which is basically what Kiev sits on. Either side of that, north and south, the Dneiper is pretty much impassable. I'd rate the 2 hexsides N and 2 hexsides S (and a few others to the S, check google maps for example or an atlas, the geography hasn't changed much since 1945) as lake hexsides. This is what makes the defense of Kiev so important, as it's the only way across the Dneiper in that area. Without that, Kiev loses a lot of its historical importance, the gameplay loses its historical accuracy (you should't just be able to run a narrow encirclement of Kiev, you have to come from quite wide, perhaps around Smolensk and through Dnepropetrovsk, to get in behind it), and damages the gameplay.

The Dneiper river hexes south of Dnepropetrovsk should also be marked as lake hexsides.

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ORIGINAL: delatbabel

Good answer Steve, and I didn't really expect any changes for MWiF, I just wanted to raise these issues so that people knew about them.

It'd be nice to see a scenario / map editor at some stage to allow people to correct these problems if they so choose. When a friend and I play (not that often, he lives in NZ) then we usually play with some corrections to various rules and maps to make up for these.

And yes, I did consider map scale. If you look at satellite or aerial photos and line it up with the map geography, Kronshtadt really belongs one hex W of Leningrad. Also the width of the rivers that I mentioned in particular -- especially the Dnepr N and S of Kiev, well it's almost a hex wide. Wider than most of the waterways in Finland that show up as lake hexsides, and yet in WiF it doesn't even rate a movement barrier.

I remember making a comment on the thread about the review of the Australian map. Some of the things marked as rivers on the Australian map are no wider than the average mud puddle in N Europe. e.g. when we say "river" it means that for most of the year it has a bit of water in it. It's a pity that WiF never developed a major/minor river differential like some games (e.g. Europa) has done. When some rivers are really smallish creeks and some are navigable by ocean liners then they deserve better treatment than all the same.

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And yes, I did consider map scale. If you look at satellite or aerial photos and line it up with the map geography, Kronshtadt really belongs one hex W of Leningrad. Also the width of the rivers that I mentioned in particular -- especially the Dnepr N and S of Kiev, well it's almost a hex wide. Wider than most of the waterways in Finland that show up as lake hexsides, and yet in WiF it doesn't even rate a movement barrier.

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ORIGINAL: Shannon V. OKeets

The European map segment was the first one done. That was quite a while ago, and there have been many revisions, so a fresh, complete presentation seems justified. Thanks for asking.

United Kingdom - note corrected rail lines.

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ORIGINAL: Borger Borgersen

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ORIGINAL: Shannon V. OKeets
The European map segment was the first one done. That was quite a while ago, and there have been many revisions, so a fresh, complete presentation seems justified. Thanks for asking.

United Kingdom - note corrected rail lines.

i I noticed the rail line from Liverpool to Holyhead goes graphically across water. Is it possible to alter this rail line so it goes to the center of the Holyhead hex before it turns north to the port? Then it wouldn't cross the sea to get to Holyhead.

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ORIGINAL: Froonp
Hannover Hanover

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ORIGINAL: Shannon V. OKeets

Northern Scandinavia

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ORIGINAL: Borger Borgersen

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ORIGINAL: Froonp
Hannover Hanover

Hannover is the German spelling of the city. Hanover is the English spelling. Is it intended to use
English spelling of city names whenever possible?

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If you want to add reference names then you could add the town of Namsos in the hex where the railroad
ends north of Trondheim (2xNE+E). Namsos and Åndalsnes were the towns where the British and French
troops landed to try to encircle the Germans who had just occupied Trondheim in April 1940.

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ORIGINAL: Borger Borgersen

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ORIGINAL: Shannon V. OKeets
Northern Scandinavia

If you want to add reference names then you could add the town of Namsos in the hex where the railroad
ends north of Trondheim (2xNE+E). Namsos and Åndalsnes were the towns where the British and French
troops landed to try to encircle the Germans who had just occupied Trondheim in April 1940.

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Hmm, that gave me a thought. It wouldn't be difficult to create a CSV file to hold text associated with map labels/names. I would simply structure them the same way I do the text files for unit descriptions. When a player right clicked on an empty hex that contained the first letter of a label, the program would would bring up a text box with the description. This would only take about 50 lines of code total, and most of it would be cloned from existing routines.

Is this worth doing?

I wouldn't be writing any of the text descriptions, mind you. These would be something like 'cookies' in that very few labels would have text descriptions associated with them.

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ORIGINAL: Froonp

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Hmm, that gave me a thought. It wouldn't be difficult to create a CSV file to hold text associated with map labels/names. I would simply structure them the same way I do the text files for unit descriptions. When a player right clicked on an empty hex that contained the first letter of a label, the program would would bring up a text box with the description. This would only take about 50 lines of code total, and most of it would be cloned from existing routines.

Is this worth doing?

I wouldn't be writing any of the text descriptions, mind you. These would be something like 'cookies' in that very few labels would have text descriptions associated with them.

I think that this is a GREAT idea.
Also what can be done is to simply put the link to the relevant page in Wikipedia.

But, a lot of the labels I add are not "linked" to the hexes in the same way that city / ports names are linked. I mean that, a city name will appear on the map, but also in the status bar when the mouse is over the HEX where the city is (which is not necessarily the hex where the label is).

So, will your 'cookies' system be able to "detect" that a given hex is linked to a label ? for example, for the "Vemork" label (the heavy water works in Norway), how will your 'cookies' system know that the hex where I right clicked has the "Vermork" label ?

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ORIGINAL: Shannon V. OKeets

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ORIGINAL: Borger Borgersen

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ORIGINAL: Shannon V. OKeets
The European map segment was the first one done. That was quite a while ago, and there have been many revisions, so a fresh, complete presentation seems justified. Thanks for asking.

United Kingdom - note corrected rail lines.

i I noticed the rail line from Liverpool to Holyhead goes graphically across water. Is it possible to alter this rail line so it goes to the center of the Holyhead hex before it turns north to the port? Then it wouldn't cross the sea to get to Holyhead.

The program logic for drawing in the rail lines is to always go to the city icon if one exists. When there is no city icon, then it goes to the port icon. When there are no icons in the hex, then there are 25 locations (center + 12 o'clock positions * 2) within a hex that the rail lines can be directed to.

So, this could be handled by placing the Holyhead port icon in the center of its hex. The Liverpool text would have to be moved down a tad, and therefore the Liverpool factory would have to be repositioned at 6 o'clock instead of 7 o'clock.

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ORIGINAL: Borger Borgersen

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ORIGINAL: Shannon V. OKeets

Northern Scandinavia

If you want to add reference names then you could add the town of Namsos in the hex where the railroad
ends north of Trondheim (2xNE+E). Namsos and Åndalsnes were the towns where the British and French
troops landed to try to encircle the Germans who had just occupied Trondheim in April 1940.

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ORIGINAL: iamspamus

WARNING: Totally useless fact -

I think that the space N of Kiruna and E of Narvik is where the Ice Hotel is built every year. www.icehotel.com. At least, somewhere around there. Don't know if that qualifies for a name on the map though!

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ORIGINAL: Shannon V. OKeets

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ORIGINAL: Froonp
I think that this is a GREAT idea.
Also what can be done is to simply put the link to the relevant page in Wikipedia.

But, a lot of the labels I add are not "linked" to the hexes in the same way that city / ports names are linked. I mean that, a city name will appear on the map, but also in the status bar when the mouse is over the HEX where the city is (which is not necessarily the hex where the label is).

So, will your 'cookies' system be able to "detect" that a given hex is linked to a label ? for example, for the "Vemork" label (the heavy water works in Norway), how will your 'cookies' system know that the hex where I right clicked has the "Vermork" label ?

These are technical details, but you asked.

The program can matche the label to each city/port icon on the map because the each hex has a unique map label # in the TER.CSV file (most of these numbers are vacuous - there are not 70,200 named locations!). That same # has to appear in the NAM.CSV file which holds the labels for displaying the label on the map. What I am proposnig is that a NAM.TXT file be created that uses the same ID# for each text entry. A similar scheme is used to match units from the unit CSV files (AIR, LND, NAV) with their bitmap images (JPG) and their text descriptions (AIR.TXT).

Earlier I had indicated using the first letter of the name (which would also work), but let's go with having the player click on the hex that the name is associated with, rather the whichever hex the name is positioned in - since we sometimes reposition names/labels for cosmetic reasons.

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ORIGINAL: Froonp
Yes, but Vermork for example, is not associated with any hex (in the TERR file). It is only appearing on the map thanks to the NAM file. So, in the case of those kind of cosmetic names, would your 'cookies' system work ?

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ORIGINAL: Shannon V. OKeets

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ORIGINAL: Froonp
Yes, but Vermork for example, is not associated with any hex (in the TERR file). It is only appearing on the map thanks to the NAM file. So, in the case of those kind of cosmetic names, would your 'cookies' system work ?

I haven't looked at that code in a while (over a year ago) but I was under the impression that the TER.CSV should contain the index into the NAM.CSV file to make the linkage. I am pretty sure it is essential for displaying the name of the hex as part of the map header screen (there's a little panel that displays the name of the hex under the cursor).

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To answer your question directly, the index into the NAM file should be included in the TER file for the corresponding hex number (coordinates Column, Row) in order for the text description for the hex to appear. If someone is going to the effort to create a write up for a hex, then adding the NAM index for the hex in the TER file should be a minor additional task.

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Except if you change the TER fils structure so that multiple entries from the NAM files can be refered to herein.

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ORIGINAL: Froonp
Humm, in fact I wonder if I did not have this wrong from the start.

I think I could also have linked the 30,39 hex (TER file) with the Namsos entry (NAM file), and simply indicated in the Namsos entry (NAM file) the position of the railway using the city position field, instead of using the city position field of a "none" entry (NAM file).

If I'm right here, it seems that I will have :
- a lot of "none" entries to be removed and replaced by their mate-label entry.
- a lot of labels (islands and other places) to link to the TER file.
- a lot of blanks in the NAM file (useless "none" entries) to fill in with the bottom entries of the NAM file.

Am I right Steve ?
Am I also right that it is desired that labels appearing on the map (not river or mountain names, only places names such as small cities, island, etc...) are linked to the TER file ?

Hopefuly, I have the list of all "none" entries, and I can filter down the NAM file to all size 8 black color texts (miscellaneous labels) to help me .

I was afraid that doing so Namsos would appear in the list of cities & ports that you can have by hitting CTRL+F. It seems that it does not (I tried with another entry). How do the program knows the list of what should appear in that list ? Does it have to be defined as a city / port hex in the TER file ?

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ORIGINAL: mlees
Sorry if I missed it. I was thinking about the "Strait" crossing arrow and sea boundaries.

Is it possible to make the crossing arrow have a higher priority than the sea zone boundary, so that the arrow graphic rests on top of the sea zone boundary line?