Waterloo Screenshots #2

Flanyboy · Post by **Flanyboy** » Sun Jan 19, 2014 5:00 am

[article=link]184[/article]

RDBoles · Post by **RDBoles** » Mon Jan 20, 2014 8:08 am

Excellent work Norb and team. I got on YouTube today and checked out the HistWar2 videos. They were very nice. The action of the troops were very disappointing. Our game is so much better. I mean your game , sorry, I have been with SOW sense the beginning and support you guys so much I feel part of this endeavor. Keep up the good work.

Saddletank · Post by **Saddletank** » Mon Jan 20, 2014 9:35 pm

Extremely pretty. I have a question though and I think its a critical one, so could an NSD person please give a response. I mentioned this when the La Haye Sainte pics were released but no-one's yet answered me.

Both complexes of buildings are built to a different scale compared to the Gettysburg game. It looks very much like the whole Hougoumont complex covers about as much real estate as the entire town of Sharpsburg from the Anitetam add-on.

SoW:G uses a 12-foot tall man for its sprites because 1 sprite represents 4 real men. So the buildings are scaled to suit the figures (doorways are 12 feet high, roofs are in proportion, etc, etc) which means their footprint is way out of scale with the map horizontal scale. Its the standard miniatures figure scale to ground scale compromise that table top wargamers have had to deal with for decades.

I am asking about troop scale here. If a battalion of 500 men is represented by 125 sprites, then the very small garrison of Hougoumont is going to be about 2 such units (the 4 light companies of British Foot Guards, about 500 men) and the 1st Btn, 2nd Nassau Regt (also around 500 men). There was a company of Hanoverian Jager and some Hanoverian landwehr as well, maybe another 200 men. In all around 1200 men. If that is about 3 small batallions in total then those sprites will be completely 'lost' inside that huge complex, and the garden, and the orchard and the wood to the south.

This implies you guys have a new sprite to figure scale planned, right? Or else this is going to look beautiful but be very awkward to play.

Little Powell · Post by **Little Powell** » Mon Jan 20, 2014 10:43 pm

There is still a lot to be determined in this area and please remember that all screenshots posted are still very early previews. Jim is the guy when it comes to explaining sprite ratio, so I'll see if he can chime in here. But from a map design perspective, Houg is definitely going to take up more room due to scale. The same with La Haye Sainte, and the other large farms. The scale is a little different than SOWGB, but still follows the same general formula. But how the troops will move around and occupy Houg and other complex's etc., is still to be determined. Sorry for the crappy answer, but again, still very early dev..

Saddletank · Post by **Saddletank** » Tue Jan 21, 2014 4:17 am

I understand its early days, but clearly a lot of careful work has gone into making the two farm complexes you've shown us so far. I would have thought you'd have got your troop scale, ground scale and basic concepts on assaulting and defending buildings down first, before setting your artists doing all this lovely looking work. For example will buildings be destructible or burnable? You'll know that the French directed a number of howitzers against the Hougoumont buildings later in the day, setting them on fire and forcing parts of the main house to be abandoned by the British. I'm no game designer but my thinking is those questions ought to be answered before the 3D models are built in case polygons need to come off or be replaced with others, etc.

For a structure to be enterable it may need different properties within the 3D model. It just seems very cart-before-horse to make these great models without deciding properly how they function in the game.

Sorry if I sound like I'm having a moan, I just want this game to be so good and these are things my gamers brain gets curious about.

Davinci · Post by **Davinci** » Tue Jan 21, 2014 6:07 am

For a structure to be enter-able it may need different properties within the 3D model. It just seems very cart-before-horse to make these great models without deciding properly how they function in the game.

As far as I know the Power-Render-Map-Program has always been capable of having an indoor \ outdoor perspective, it just hadn't been used (i.e..Programmed) before.

This also applies to the previous game Map-Making capabilities.

It will be interesting to see how this is done in the game.

davinci

Little Powell · Post by **Little Powell** » Tue Jan 21, 2014 6:29 am

I understand its early days, but clearly a lot of careful work has gone into making the two farm complexes you've shown us so far. I would have thought you'd have got your troop scale, ground scale and basic concepts on assaulting and defending buildings down first, before setting your artists doing all this lovely looking work. For example will buildings be destructible or burnable? You'll know that the French directed a number of howitzers against the Hougoumont buildings later in the day, setting them on fire and forcing parts of the main house to be abandoned by the British. I'm no game designer but my thinking is those questions ought to be answered before the 3D models are built in case polygons need to come off or be replaced with others, etc.

For a structure to be enterable it may need different properties within the 3D model. It just seems very cart-before-horse to make these great models without deciding properly how they function in the game.

Sorry if I sound like I'm having a moan, I just want this game to be so good and these are things my gamers brain gets curious about.

Just trust us..

tim · Post by **tim** » Thu Jan 23, 2014 2:53 am

I understand its early days, but clearly a lot of careful work has gone into making the two farm complexes you've shown us so far. I would have thought you'd have got your troop scale, ground scale and basic concepts on assaulting and defending buildings down first, before setting your artists doing all this lovely looking work. For example will buildings be destructible or burnable? You'll know that the French directed a number of howitzers against the Hougoumont buildings later in the day, setting them on fire and forcing parts of the main house to be abandoned by the British. I'm no game designer but my thinking is those questions ought to be answered before the 3D models are built in case polygons need to come off or be replaced with others, etc.

For a structure to be enterable it may need different properties within the 3D model. It just seems very cart-before-horse to make these great models without deciding properly how they function in the game.

Sorry if I sound like I'm having a moan, I just want this game to be so good and these are things my gamers brain gets curious about.

Hi Saddletank - the 3d models themselves are easily scaled in 3D Max and in the map program itself so they can be quickly reduced or increased in size in a few minutes. We haven't nailed the scales down but they are very easy to adjust so there would be no lost work. As for the properties such as damage that is again reasonably easy to do either with alpha channels in the textures and adding damage and burnt bits (we have already experimented with this) and then the game engine decides when damage is shown. The buildings won't be any different if the can be entered and this property is handled in the game engine too.

You are right a lot of work has gone into these buildings and none of it will be wasted. I'm glad you like them - we have spent a lot of time, effort and research getting them right. I have visited the battlefield myself to get reference (once during a reenactment) as have others on the team and scoured books and the web for rare pictures so we believe they will be the most accurate representation of the Waterloo buildings possible.

They were a pleasure to build

Jolly · Post by **Jolly** » Thu Jan 23, 2014 8:38 am

... and to texture

More pleasures to come.

Saddletank · Post by **Saddletank** » Thu Jan 23, 2014 8:41 pm

the 3d models themselves are easily scaled in 3D Max and in the map program itself so they can be quickly reduced or increased in size in a few minutes.

Hey Tim, - and Jolly! - thanks for the replies, I am really fired up about this project, I've been interested in the Waterloo campaign since I began wargaming at the age of 14...

One issue though... changing the size of the structures means the sprite size has to still stay in proportion, so if you make the farm half the height, you have to make the sprite half the height. So really their physical size isn't the issue. The FOOTPRINT, the ground area they cover, is the issue. What I see different here from the Gettysburg game is that because buildings are enterable you need to get the game process of defence and assault correctly balanced and that means numbers of troops able to enter and garrison a structure is the key value, plus the defensive combat bonuses the structure provides (but that's not the issue here).

With Gettysburg, your horizontal ground scale was not the same as the vertical scale. Your sprites were 12 feet tall. I think you did this so that you didn't need to have so many sprites being used/rendered in the game. When you did this suddenly Gettysburg town itself, and Sharpsburg of course, all had to be represented in reduced form with buildings in scale with the soldiers but 4x the footprint of their originals. So both towns only needed 1/4 of the structures.

If you keep the same ground scale for Waterloo and Hougoumont is that big, its garden wall is going to be the length of a musket's range, or more, and that isn't right. If you compress the whole battlefield down using the 12 foot high sprite system you used in Gettysburg, suddenly Hougoumont is huge, covering 4x the ground area it should. Likewise this affects all kinds of things like how far units can march in a given time, its the dilemma that's faced wargamers who use metal or plastic figures on tabletops for decades - the scale of the figures isn't the same as the horizonatl scale of the terrain they are standing on.

I believe Histwar uses a 1:1 correct vertical to horizontal scale so its battlefields are really empty and uncluttered, just as they should be, while SoW battlefields seem very cluttered with troops, like a miniatures wargame table.

To make a Hougoumont with the correct footprint to the ground scale while retaining the 12 foot high sprite you'd need to throw away all the work you've done now and make a representative structure that fits into an area 1/4 the actual dimensions of the real farm, but actualy doesn't look anything like it.

Alternatively you need to make your sprites in scale at 6 feet but that means you'll need 1000s more of them because the 1:4 ratio no longer works, they have to be at 1:1. Customer computer load suddenly goes way up.

Do you see what I'm saying?

EDIT: This video by Didz when discussing the Kaunitz mod for Empire:Total War describes and summarises the problems of a figure scale different to a horizontal scale. In the video teh same propotions are used as by SoW, a man scaled at twice the vertical height.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dET7AcOtVbo

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