Historic vs. game battlefield

[Amish John]

In a perfect world, the game would have every building, road, farm lane, woodlot, orchard, crop field, watersource, rocky features, and fence line able to be identified by available sources. I assume this won't be possible in the game. How do you decide what of the above mentioned items to put in the game and what gets left out? Obviously, where significant historic action took place can't dictate this since gameplay action can be anywhere on the battlefield. If a certain area was historically fenced off by, for example, twelve separate fields, do you try and fence off those twelve fields or do you show less to be representative. Do you represent all farms with at least a house and barn if not additoinal outbuidlings?

Also, how many different fence types will be represented?

[norb]

John, I want to answer all your questions, but we can't yet. We are just finishing up the first map, then we have to make sure that we've got it right. Then we have to make sure it's playable. We always start with the best intentions, but sometimes playability and performance get in the way.

[Amish John]

No problem, Norb. I was just curious. I certainly understand what you're saying. We'll tackle this question later.

[Jim]

Our intention is to get as close to the actual appearance in 186# as the technology and recorded history will allow. IIRC, there are only 3 fence types listed, but we might fall over more in research. There are certain iconic structures that will be modeled in as much detail as possible. An example of this would be the Stone House on the 1/2 BR maps. Other areas outside of the historic zone are not well described beyond something like 'Smith Farm' Those will get more generic farm buildings since we have no idea what they really looked like.

There is a balance between having everything on the map and having a playable FPS number. We will probably aim towards a setup that will require a mid to higher end machine to run with all graphics options on. We will also have a number of options to allow people to turn things off to find the appearance vs performance balance that works for them.

As you can see from the screenshots from the interim/experimental builds, the maps look a large amount better than previous games. There is a lot of testing left to do before we will have an approximation of where the balance will finally end up.

-Jim

[Amish John]

Jim,

Thanks for the information. We'll all be anxious to see how it develops.

John