By now, a lot of the people following this diary must be thinking “so anyway, this game is practically done, right?”

I guess it depends on your definition of “practically”. It is certainly playable, there are very few features that are outright missing, and the scenario count is up to around 20-ish. On the other hand, we’re trying to make a game that’s better than merely playable, so expect more diaries from me until we’re judged release-ready.

As an example, the deformed Union Jack (on the left) is not an attempt at cheeky political commentary, it’s actually what we need to do to make the flag readable in its wavy shape. I was not even aware of this process until Goran, our lead artist, showed me how we do this for almost every flag in the game.

It’s a good illustration, I think, of the type of detailing work that we’re doing right now. We take the game to be mechanically solid, and we’re making rule changes only exceptionally. Our current focus is on the (many!) details that make up the flow and feeling of the game. Eventually, the plan is for the final round of scenario and balancing work to be done on a near-finalized, comfortably playable version of the game.

River-hugging Boundaries

Here’s another one of our cheerfully over-engineered™ features: we’ve made all the in-game boundaries (front line, movement range, etc.) tightly follow river banks. The readability improvements from this are indisputable, as you can see in the screenshot below, of an early Allied push to the Rhine.

It gets even better in difficult terrain such as in the Ardennes, which were a real concern to me. A lot of the action happens on that least-readable part of the map, and we were actively looking for solutions. I feel this not only does the trick, but also looks pretty attractive.

(click image for full size)

From a technical standpoint, you can see that the basic idea already existed in Developer Diary 8. Even back then, the front line lies on the near bank, and the movement boundary is set on the far bank. This worked without a hitch in practice, and even the first implementation pass was not so bad.

That was when we hit the edge cases though: river confluences, boundaries hopping from river to river, poorly drawn rivers which confused the algorithm… you know, the works. We ended up throwing an insane amount of computational geometry at this (cheers @Ante) and let no one in the comments tell me it was not worth it. Seriously, I double dare you and all that.

HQ Changes

Neatly contradicting my own words from the top of this very post, we made some important changes to the HQ mechanics. Previously, HQ areas were not allowed to overlap, and we had a map view that showed all HQ areas together. This looked pretty good – similar to a military situation map, and I still think it’s not a bad idea in simulation terms.

Unfortunately, it turned out it was impossible to find an HQ movement mechanic that does not play hell with that neat picture. The scenario setups were great, but the playthrough that followed not so much. Our solution was to remove the no-overlap rule, while at the same time shrinking HQ range. In practice, this removes most of the “unrealistic” overlap and is an OK, though not perfect, solution.

While we were at it, we solved another issue that kept popping up: it was not easy for us to see which units belong to which HQ. To this end, we are now showing subordinated units and the HQ range when it’s selected (screen below). Out-of-range units are shown in red, and actually now as I’m writing this, that red icon looks a bit more screaming than it should be.

Units being out of HQ range are nowhere near as bad as being out of supply. Yes, they can’t get reinforcements, and their HQ can’t help them with e.g. entrenchment, but mostly they can fight alright. Overall, I feel this new system works and feels better than any sort of tedious OOB-accounting we might have put in its place.

Odds and Ends

I haven’t forgotten the people who hate squinting at tiny fonts, and so the UI scaling shakedown continues. Parts of the UI where this works look glorious when zoomed-in, the ones that don’t (yet) keep shrieking at me menacingly. The work continues!

We’ve added core localization support, with an eye to supporting not only our own content, but also community scenarios and mods. A few tests were run to confirm that, at least, cyrillic and chinese scripts work and don’t break anything major.

We’ve added and/or tweaked many of the in-game icons in our perpetual quest for readability: in the main screenshot you can see the new objective markers (red), and an improved version of the road-blocking stragglers icon. Every little thing makes a difference.

The team is quietly winding things down for the year. There’s a good feeling all around, especially when we consider the progress we’ve made – as can be seen simply by comparison our December ’17 dev diary.

We wish you all a Merry Christmas, and to ourselves, a release date in the coming year ?

Best, Tomislav ?