Hi all,
I'm new here, and I have come attracted by the sirens song of next Waterloo, which I am waiting eagerly. I'm a veteran of the Napoleonic wargames, and although I really like the SoW game system, the ACW conflict has never been my cup of tea. My experience with similar scale computer wargames have been always unsatisfactory, but I'm an HPS Nap series regular player and I'm playing actually a long CoG:EE 1805-15 campaign with 8 players, and I'm moderately happy with that. My preference is always realism 100%, and I think the SoW system using ADC's is ideal for the Napoleonic period, in a similar manner to my missed Kriegsspiel or Le Vol de l'Aigle games.
Thanks for starting this project.
We Understand!
Re: We Understand!
Last edited by lecrop on Fri Jan 31, 2014 12:21 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Martin James
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- Posts: 569
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Re: We Understand!
If you like Kriegsspiel, a group of us run MP games in that style twice per week. We play both ACW and Napoleonic, and you are very welcome to join us.Hi all,
I'm new here, and I have come attracted by the sirens song of next Waterloo, which I am waiting eagerly. I'm a veteran of the Napoleonic wargames, and although I really like the SoW game system, the ACW conflict has never been my cup of tea. My experience with similar scale computer wargames have been always unsatisfactory, but I'm an HPS Nap series regular player and I'm playing actually a long CoG:EE 1805-15 campaign with 8 players, and I'm moderately happy with that. My preference is always realism 100%, and I think the SoW system using ADC's is ideal for the Napoleonic period, in a similar manner to my missed Kriegsspiel or Le Vol de l'Aigle games.
Thanks for starting this project.
The group style is not especially competitive, and games are played in an excellent spirit. If you like the sound of that, have a look here http://kriegsspiel.forumotion.net/t954- ... edule#8674
Martin
Last edited by Martin James on Fri Jan 31, 2014 12:31 am, edited 1 time in total.
Re: We Understand!
As one of those SoW fans from 'across the pond', I am really glad to hear that a Napoleonic battle has been chosen for the new game. I'm looking forward to seeing those highland regiments!
I didn't previously have a big interest in the American Civil War as a subject, but since playing SoW over the past few years I have become a big civil war enthusiast.
Garnier's single player campaign mod has definitely kept me playing the game for longer than I otherwise would have(even if the game has become incredibly unstable and constantly crashes since I moved to Windows 8). Like others, I think the future is to integrate some kind of rolling campaign system that balances the long term planning of not committing your entire force to a single battle.
I think it would be good to start a suggestion thread so players can recommend some changes to the game. For me personally I would like to see the courier system overhauled and streamlined. It is just so unapproachable for most players at the moment, especially beginners, which is a real shame because it is probably one of the most interesting aspects of the game.
This is going to be a great game, I just wish it was coming sooner!
I didn't previously have a big interest in the American Civil War as a subject, but since playing SoW over the past few years I have become a big civil war enthusiast.
Garnier's single player campaign mod has definitely kept me playing the game for longer than I otherwise would have(even if the game has become incredibly unstable and constantly crashes since I moved to Windows 8). Like others, I think the future is to integrate some kind of rolling campaign system that balances the long term planning of not committing your entire force to a single battle.
I think it would be good to start a suggestion thread so players can recommend some changes to the game. For me personally I would like to see the courier system overhauled and streamlined. It is just so unapproachable for most players at the moment, especially beginners, which is a real shame because it is probably one of the most interesting aspects of the game.
This is going to be a great game, I just wish it was coming sooner!
Re: We Understand!
Hi all and excuse my bad English.
I'd like to wish the best luck and success to the team's guys with their Waterloo project.
Loving the Napoleonic period and having also appreciated the brillant ACW titles in the past, I'm really looking forward to it.
The only point of concern I've got so far after quickly reading a few discussions about the scale of figures / 5 miles maps / multithreading, is that the game might be somehow limited in performances.
Thus eventually affecting the possibility of future expansions/mods to larger scenarios (both in map size and troop masses) like say Leipzig or Wagram.
Assuming obviously a polished (can't eat the whole frame rate indeed) terrain engine with some sort of geometry LOD and QuadTree implemented, but even lacking of an advanced resources streaming system (preloading heightmaps, colormaps, etc. at startup in GPU memory),
I was wondering if, in your experience, is it really that critical working with say 100-200k animated camera-facing billboards?
It's worth restating I'm not a game programmer and is very likely I'm missing some parts of the "overall picture" (as AI coordinated movements for formations or precomputed ballistics and many more),
but with proper frustum-culling,
background loading/preparation and some caching strategies for sprites (if not a true 3D impostor system),
parallel submission to a draw list and sorting for early Z test,
minimizing render states / shaders / constants / materials changes,
extended use of hardware instancing to reduce draw calls,
fancy solutions to speed-up animations like (the first I can think of): one instancing VB (double-buffered on RAM, updated concurrently and in background, finally flushed to GPU in main thread) with each billboard taking 1 or 2 bytes (packing type of anim, frame number, ...) and allowing to point to one texture atlas of (shared) integer UVs to the sprite sheet,
etc. etc. etc.
it sounds challenging, but is really impossible with the capabilities of nowadays hardware?
Summing up, I'd be very interested to know your point of view (being surly much more experienced and practical than mine) on the major bottlenecks you see.
Thanks in advance and good luck again!
I'd like to wish the best luck and success to the team's guys with their Waterloo project.
Loving the Napoleonic period and having also appreciated the brillant ACW titles in the past, I'm really looking forward to it.
The only point of concern I've got so far after quickly reading a few discussions about the scale of figures / 5 miles maps / multithreading, is that the game might be somehow limited in performances.
Thus eventually affecting the possibility of future expansions/mods to larger scenarios (both in map size and troop masses) like say Leipzig or Wagram.
Assuming obviously a polished (can't eat the whole frame rate indeed) terrain engine with some sort of geometry LOD and QuadTree implemented, but even lacking of an advanced resources streaming system (preloading heightmaps, colormaps, etc. at startup in GPU memory),
I was wondering if, in your experience, is it really that critical working with say 100-200k animated camera-facing billboards?
It's worth restating I'm not a game programmer and is very likely I'm missing some parts of the "overall picture" (as AI coordinated movements for formations or precomputed ballistics and many more),
but with proper frustum-culling,
background loading/preparation and some caching strategies for sprites (if not a true 3D impostor system),
parallel submission to a draw list and sorting for early Z test,
minimizing render states / shaders / constants / materials changes,
extended use of hardware instancing to reduce draw calls,
fancy solutions to speed-up animations like (the first I can think of): one instancing VB (double-buffered on RAM, updated concurrently and in background, finally flushed to GPU in main thread) with each billboard taking 1 or 2 bytes (packing type of anim, frame number, ...) and allowing to point to one texture atlas of (shared) integer UVs to the sprite sheet,
etc. etc. etc.
it sounds challenging, but is really impossible with the capabilities of nowadays hardware?
Summing up, I'd be very interested to know your point of view (being surly much more experienced and practical than mine) on the major bottlenecks you see.
Thanks in advance and good luck again!
Last edited by Guest on Sat Feb 22, 2014 9:55 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Re: We Understand!
Hi Fassan,
Those are all good questions. We may be able get better performance out of the graphics engine, given developer time to research, implement and test across a variety of hardware. At the moment gameplay is the top priority, so we can't comment on what, if any, graphics improvements there will be.
Those are all good questions. We may be able get better performance out of the graphics engine, given developer time to research, implement and test across a variety of hardware. At the moment gameplay is the top priority, so we can't comment on what, if any, graphics improvements there will be.
Re: We Understand!
The team is always looking at ways to make the game better.Hi all and excuse my bad English.
I'd like to wish the best luck and success to the team's guys with their Waterloo project.
Loving the Napoleonic period and having also appreciated the brillant ACW titles in the past, I'm really looking forward to it.
The only point of concern I've got so far after quickly reading a few discussions about the scale of figures / 5 miles maps / multithreading, is that the game might be somehow limited in performances.
Thus eventually affecting the possibility of future expansions/mods to larger scenarios (both in map size and troop masses) like say Leipzig or Wagram.
Assuming obviously a polished (can't eat the whole frame rate indeed) terrain engine with some sort of geometry LOD and QuadTree implemented, but even lacking of an advanced resources streaming system (preloading heightmaps, colormaps, etc. at startup in GPU memory),
I was wondering if, in your experience, is it really that critical working with say 100-200k animated camera-facing billboards?
It's worth restating I'm not a game programmer and is very likely I'm missing some parts of the "overall picture" (as AI coordinated movements for formations or precomputed ballistics and many more),
but with proper frustum-culling,
background loading/preparation and some caching strategies for sprites (if not a true 3D impostor system),
parallel submission to a draw list and sorting for early Z test,
minimizing render states / shaders / constants / materials changes,
extended use of hardware instancing to reduce draw calls,
fancy solutions to speed-up animations like (the first I can think of): one instancing VB (double-buffered on RAM, updated concurrently and in background, finally flushed to GPU in main thread) with each billboard taking 1 or 2 bytes (packing type of anim, frame number, ...) and allowing to point to one texture atlas of (shared) integer UVs to the sprite sheet,
etc. etc. etc.
it sounds challenging, but is really impossible with the capabilities of nowadays hardware?
Summing up, I'd be very interested to know your point of view (being surly much more experienced and practical than mine) on the major bottlenecks you see.
Thanks in advance and good luck again!
There has been a lot of time and effort into improving the game's look from maps, to additional uniform capabilities to even sprite improvements. Any decision made has trade offs, we definitely appreciate the feedback and I am confident the game will look better than any SOW to date. With that said we are also not looking to abandon what makes SOW unique and a big part of that is the scale of our battles and the scale of our battles does have a impact on other design options within SOW.
Last edited by Flanyboy on Wed Feb 26, 2014 6:34 am, edited 1 time in total.
Re: We Understand!
Must be the geek in me but I find this statement most exciting. Looking forward to the new game (plus my nick will make more sense!)We needed to incorporate threading in the engine to pick up the speed. That's partially done.
cheers Chris
Re: We Understand!
With lack of good wargames I don't think people will either buy one or the other, but both.HistWar looks beautiful. We won't be 3D modeling any of our units, so they've got the monopoly there. There's always room for more players and different takes on the war. Hopefully both games can be enjoyed for their own attributes.
They are very diffrent games.
I own HISTWAR 2, and it'sa huge imporvment over Les Grognards, yet SOW as always been "better working"
I think those that like napoleonics will buy both.
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Little Powell
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- Joined: Thu Sep 18, 2008 10:25 am
Re: We Understand!
Indeed. It's interesting to note; I was chatting with Ian from Matrix about this subject at Historicon. Anytime a new game is released, the sales for other games in the same genre jump.
With lack of good wargames I don't think people will either buy one or the other, but both.
Last edited by Little Powell on Wed Mar 05, 2014 12:31 am, edited 1 time in total.
Re: We Understand!
Just with Matrix games when I bought SoW I also bought Civil War II. Didn't even know Civil War II existed. I'm not sure what other game to buy when I get SoW Napoleon. I know I will probably buy some books though (which I will read after I finish the 5 books still have to read on specific Civil War battles along with the 2nd and 3rd book of Shelby Footes series).