Shannon V. OKeets
Posts: 22095
Joined: 5/19/2005 From: Honolulu, Hawaii Status: offline
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quote:
ORIGINAL: Borsook quote:
ORIGINAL: Shannon V. OKeets 1 - I want the game to match the board game as much as possible, and World in Flames Final Edition (WIF FE) uses the NATO symbols for the land unit depictions. Sure, that's why I have been inquiring about the existence of an alternative system, not a different default. quote:
ORIGINAL: Shannon V. OKeets 2 - There are 70 unit types in MWIF and most of those are land unit types. Devising a new system to replace the NATO symbols would be a lot of work and would force all the players to learn the new symbol set. And I cannot guarantee that you would like the new version any better. There are quite a few graphical systems already made, of course there may be copyright issues preventing their use. As for personal preference - everything is better than Nato That said I do understand your point, and obviously there are other areas to concentrate upon than just graphics. quote:
ORIGINAL: Shannon V. OKeets 3 - MWIF permits 8 levels of zoom and the unit depcitions have to be legible at most of those levels of zoom. I was unable to make zoom level 1 achieve that, and for zoom level 2 it is iffy. But for zoom levels 3 - 8, the NATO symbology works. Mostly this is because it does not rely on fine details. Would it not be the same problem for Air/Naval units which seem to have graphical representation? quote:
ORIGINAL: Shannon V. OKeets As for letting players edit the graphics, from day 1 of working on this project (it is in my contract) I am not developing a WIF design kit. There is too much else to be done. Design kit? I merely hope files containing the counters will be in some "typical" format (bmp, tga, etc etc), this would be more than enough. Concluding Nato symbols or not, the game seems to be a very promising one. For the air and naval units, which have individual bitmaps for each unit (2500+), I have devised an alternative set of 'crude' bitmaps (medium resolution) for use at the lower zoom levels. There are only a dozen or so different unit types for each or those branches of the armed forces, but even then, it can be hard to tell them apart at zoom level 2, without careful examination. For the land units, I simply make the NATO symbol slightly larger at the lower zoom levels - as well as making all the numbers larger at the same time. What is lost is the text and other smaller symbology (e.g., R for reserve unit). But it is fairly easy to understand what type of units are ni each hex at zoom level 3 using medium resolution.
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