New Guy and other stuff

[ChrisMcTwist]

Hey everyone,

I wanna start off by introducing myself as the new guy from Germany. As one of not too many Civil War buffs from Germany I guess, I only recently discovered the Take command series and I´m happy to see there is a new game / sequel in the making.

I´ve strolled around the page and the forums a bit already and gotta say that the screenshots look really nice.

Since a lot of people have already made suggestions or asked questions about the upcoming game here is another one (hope it hasn´t been asked before already):

Looking at the screenshots I have to say they have a pretty realistic look so you get this "I´m there feeling" a bit. What bothers me a little are the flags though. I know they are used as unit icons for control as well but I still think they look a bit too bright, too colorful or too comic style. It´s just an idea but what about making the flags look more real and still using them as the icon to click on to control the unit. What about placing them in the hand of one of the sprites, holding them up instead of having them floating around above the unit. I think it would be cool if they would have not so shiny colors.

Another idea would be to change the look/condition of the flags as the battle progresses. the condition of the flag could be an indicator for the condition of the unit, for example an exhausted unit who has suffered a lot of casualties could be indicated by a torn, bullet-ragged flag or something. basically an optical damage system for battle flags.

The idea about wounded soldiers dragging themselves or stragglers or dropped items, rubble etc. to present some chaos on the battlefield that I read about in the forums sounds great too.

Anyway I have no idea how hard or complicated all this stuff is so I just wanna say I´m thankful that people are putting so much effort into this anyhow.

Cheers
Chris

[norb]

I believe we are actually looking into using the appearance of the flag to represent the overall state of the reg in this game. I know that it has come up.

Here are my weak excuses why I don't do what you ask

1. I just do not know, and I have tried, how to coordinate the soldier sprite with the flag sprite. It is always off to some degree and therefore I found it more realistic to not even appear to try.

2. It would take up way too much memory to put the flag in the same sprite as the man.

So there are my weak excuses. Now as far the look goes. I do not believe that we are 100% done on the flags, but I'm not sure. I do believe that we are going to lose some of the glow to the flags. We are experimenting with ground icons to show the selected unit. You would still click on the flag to select them, but the selected status would be on the ground. It's an entire new area that we are experimenting with. But we all have some good opinions about this, so you are not alone. We want immersion, so we're working towards that goal.

Welcome to the boards.

[JC Edwards]

Welcome aboard ChrisMcTwist.

Sarge

[Amish John]

Hi Chris,

Welcome to what's shaping up to be the best Civil War game ever.

This board is very friendly and mature so feel free to jump in with comments anytime to keep it active.

Are you a native German or just living there?

John

[ChrisMcTwist]

First of all thx a lot for the warm welcome


that´s kind of exactly what I had in mind that you would still have to click on the flag to activate the unit but then have ground icons to show the selected units. that way the flags could be far more realistic.

as to your "weak" excuses: as I am just a casual gamer (as most of you still waiting and dreaming about THE civil war game that will change it all) there are no weak excuses to me when it comes to realizing any ideas and concepts since I don´t know shit about programming, coding etc. so any "excuse" if you even wanna call it that way is good to me.

i´m just happy that guys like you are putting a lot of effort into this and are open to ideas and suggestions. I guess, as with most of you guys, I believe I have ideas and concepts in mind of how to make the ultimate civil war game but just no clue of how to actually do it

@ amisjohn: Yes I am a native German and live over here. I did spend a high school year in Massachussetts though and lived for 4 months in Miami last year. Also I´m a regular visitor to the states.

[Amish John]

The reason I asked is that your written English is so good I would have no idea it wasn't written by a native English speaking person.

[norb]

OK, Jim just threw a hole in my proposal for the ground icons...

What if there is terrain shrubbery? Wheat field, trees, bushes, it's going to be impossible to see who is selected without turning off the foliage. Looks like we are going to have to stick with using the flag for now.

I don't think that you will get what you want for this version of the game. But... right around the corner, once we get the engine out, we are going to start moving towards using 3D objects rather than sprites for a lot of the graphics (like flags). When that happens, we will have much more freedom about what we can do, as we won't have to worry about them taking up more video ram.

Right now you could have 10 animation frames for a flags * 2 states (selected,not selected), you know I really should find a way to do the selected in the code so that we just have one state.

Anyway, if we add the state of the reg to the flag, we then get, say 5 droopy states * 10 animation * 2 states * x number of flags. See it grows pretty quick.

This is the reason behind the decision to not move on this for this release. The flags will be much better when we 3D them.