Crusader Kings II - Dev Diary 5 - The map

[King]

The first 2 Total War games had really good maps (Shogun and Medevial Total War), of course thoese were 2d. Rome: Total War's map, not so great.

To be quite frank we are going to ignore calls to go back to a 2D map. Not out of spite but for a very solid reason. First please read this article http://tleaves.com/2010/12/31/a-battle-lost-through-attrition/

We've all read that there is not a huge market for historical strategy games, this is a small niche. Yet think how people watch the history chanel for example. There is a huge interest in history but not in historical games. The article I linked gives you a very clear reason why. Historical games in look and interface a very poor mainly throughtrying to please there existing fans and not reaching out to new ones. We need to embrace new technologies and concepts in order to keep our games looking current and reach out to new players. New players is good news for you, because if we sell more we get bigger development budgets meaning we can give you, our existing fan base, more AI, more features, longer testing all for the same price we charge we now. We want to give you better games and if a 3D map is the way to do it then we will ignore your call for a 2D map for your own good.

 

[Darkrenown]

Will it lag? Performance is more important than appearance. You made DW map cute but majority of players can't play the game unless they are zoomed out so this new graphics isn't used at all. Please keep that in mind.

No, I think you'll find the majority of players can play DW just fine.

 

[Tegus]

Do the devs have any plans to make the sky blue???

We'll see what kind of background we'll end up with, but it won't be solid black in the final version at least.

 

[King]

3D isn't the problem per se. If I would like the map and the world it reflects, I could care less if it's 3D or 2D, if I can rotate it or not.
But the point is, your current teasers and screens look outright as ugly as EU3 did at its very first days. You remember how thankful everyone was when the first improved map mods arrived?
There had been several EU1 and EU2 veterans among my friends, who bought EU3 blindly and droped the game after some few attempts to enjoy it. Their major reasoning: not the lack of historic events etc., it was just too damn ugly. And just when it seemed that you finally improved in this regard, as proven by Vicky 2 and DW, you offer us CK2 which seems to be a major step backwards.

So the article that you linked is all about the barricades that a clunky interface creates, that prevents a direct access to all the fun the hardcore games can deliver. So true - and PI did quite well with constantly improving its UI.
But what part plays 3D in this? Whatfor do I need to see the underwater topology? In other words, I miss any relevance of what you said that you want to achieve and of what you actually do. All that we see is an unnecessary technical option with no gameplay value, that costs us flair. And if there is something that you shouldn't underestimate, than it is flair.

Maybe I can't imagine yet what intentions you have to improve UI and accessibilty by this steps, who knows maybe I'll be in for a huge surprise. Maybe the map is pre-alpha and will indeed look so much better at the end. Just ... I doubt both.
I've been here long enough and never ever did the final game differ too much from the first screens and teaser you offered. The only reason why I might believe that it's different this time, is the enhanced development period.

You have not read to the bottom of my post. I am going to ignore your post for your own good.

 

[Darkrenown]

But the point is, your current teasers and screens look outright as ugly as EU3 did at its very first days. You remember how thankful everyone was when the first improved map mods arrived?
There had been several EU1 and EU2 veterans among my friends, who bought EU3 blindly and droped the game after some few attempts to enjoy it. Their major reasoning: not the lack of historic events etc., it was just too damn ugly. And just when it seemed that you finally improved in this regard, as proven by Vicky 2 and DW, you offer us CK2 which seems to be a major step backwards.

If you think the CK2 map looks ugly I don't know what to say. Maybe it's because I've seen it in motion rather than just a screenshot, but the map is gorgeous and I have no idea how you can say it looks like EUIII.

 

[King]

That is because I rather follow the spirit of his message and not the exact words

There are several known facts:
A/ People are interested in history
B/ People are interested in games
C/ Oddly enough, people are not interested in historical games

So that is the problem. Games must do something wrong, when they aren't able to attract that many people. The one exception with massive popularity (despite being quite bad!!) is the TW series. So logically by using what makes these games so popular, should make your games more popular too. And it seems like King is convinced, that the answer is in the graphics and UI. I am not that sure, but on the other hand I can't see any better answer, so I would most likely do the same.

It's not just Total War games. Let's think about another genre the RPG. When you look at the RPG and the strategy game they both made the jump to computing and both offered the existing players something better. Like the ability to save and load, no need to gather lots of players or take over a room in the house etc. etc.. Both were very popular genres, who here does not love Eye of the Beholder? If we look now the Strategy game is pretty much condemend to some wierd niche while the RPG genre is huge. Not just MMOs, look at the success of a game like Dragon Age for example. The thing is the RPG genre has embraced the graphic technologies and tried to keep its look current, while the strategy genre (if forums are to beleived) is still not sure if 3D is really the answer. Why should I ignore the lessons of a successful genre like RPGs?

 

[Tegus]

Which arguably is not a whole lot since they've based the graphical part of the game on EU:Rome which also had the feature, as stated in the diary.

Exactly. The exact amount of development time spent on the camera system is actually 0 days, 0 hours, 0 minutes and 0 seconds, since we already had that in Rome.

 

[Tegus]

Tegus, do you plan on having the map names in this game, i.e. England written across England, and so on?

Yes, hopefully we'll even have some time to improve them as well. I really like the map names and since we have them in all our other games I think it would feel empty without them

 

[Tegus]

No more English England then?

That is one thing I'd like to get rid of. The problem is that we look at cores to determine which "territory" you are in. The root of that problem(using EU3 as an example) is that we have the continents defined for all provinces, but not much more than that. If we have time to add sub-regions(which don't have a gameplay effect) we could add Iberia, Anatolia etc, and then you could spawn names from that.

 

[Tegus]

Cool... hopefully they can be more tied to regions and less to cores os we get less 'Polish Golden horde' etc... I was very skeptical about the whole concept when it first came about but actually it's really cool. Maybe you could use the dynasty name instead of the country's? So 'Habpsburg Bohemia' instead of 'Austrian Bohemia'...

EDIT: Lying on the floor covered in Emu feathers

The country name algorithm is fairly fast, so we could probably do some nifty things depending on what mode you're in. So if you view entire realms, we print country names. But if you view your demesne, maybe we could print dynasty names or the actual holder's name. I think it would be fun to play around with it and see what we can come up with.

 

[Tegus]

There is a localisation problem in EU3 thus.
It show [owner adjective] [part of world]. While it work in english without problem, it's not the case of all languages (and it don't work at all in french, where the owner adjective should be after the part of the world).
If possible, it could be good if the map labels where put on localisation csv files under $country_adj$ $region$ format, so whe could use appropriate grammar for others languages (MAPLABEL;$country_adj$ $region$;$region$ $country_adj$; etc. so it would perfectly work in French).

Thanks in advance.

Noted, shouldn't be to hard to fix, thanks!

 

[King]

I had the misfortune to waste some my life reading more posts wondering why we aren't making the map 2D. 3D maps are not a fad and not some thing that is going to go away. If you are of those people who a more interested in graphics rather game play, who values a 2D map so highly then I am sorry CK2 and future Paradox games are simply not for you. Please do not buy them because I don't want to have to deal with your disapointed posts afterwards. If we are showing screenshots of a 3D map and publically posting that we feel that for the very future of the genre we must embrace new graphic technologies then no ammount of posts by you will cause the map to go 2D. Now my patience with this is comming to an end. It is now reaching the point where you are spamming up this thread and preventing people with questions other than why don't you make your games like you did 5 years ago because I am some sort of Neo-Luddite and very soon I will be treating further posts on this issue as spam.

 

[Darkrenown]

You don't understand only last small thing. If someone from this discussions say that he likes 2-D (not me). It only means that hard-worked high-quality 2D with a human souls is much more better than 3-D (or 100-D) with the dirty and ugly graphics and with terrible soldiers miniatures. That's it.

I'm sorry it's shame to post this in 2011 year with such pride like in the 1st post, and telling about innovations. I'm sorry it's true. Its 8-bit gameboy zombies strikes from the swamps.

And YES. I like 3-D very much as you too.

I fear it's you who doesn't understand. The purpose of that shot is to show the new tabard system. Nothing else is done. ALPHA screenshot etc.

 

[podcat]

I can't say I'm a fan of the rotating map even though I do like the map itself even if it is a bit featureless (despite topography). The rotation function seems a bit pointless and I never used it in Rome (after trying it). I couldn't see any practical use for it.

it was very useful for our artists to be able to look for map bugs or lighting bugs on units. a fixed camera is harder to work with during development.

anyway, I used the camera quite a bit during playing depending on where I was playing I would tilt it in a different direction. Southward if playing somewhere in Germany and eastward etc watching out for the seleucids etc.

 

[podcat]

How low exactly will you be able to go? It looks in those screenshots like you are almost on the ground... how will FoW work? Will we be looking stright into a wall of fog?

interesting idea. in other games like rome we have made the ground grayed out and darker only.

 

[Tegus]

I hope it won't be too much more taxing than EU Rome (which runs pretty well) or the later expansions of EU3. Tegus, do you care to comment on performance testing? Thanks.

It's a bit too early to talk about what end spec it'll require. The new map is a lot less costly on the CPU-side while it will probably cost a bit more on the GPU-side. I haven't done any extensive graphics profiling on our older titles, but I'd guess many of them struggle with the graphics CPU-wise.

So, what does that mean for end users? If you play the game and find that you have a slow framerate, then if you are GPU-bound you can simply lower the resolution to get a better framerate.

But that's not the only solution. We are discussing light-weight graphics mode(s) for users with low-end graphics cards as well, but how these mode(s) will look and what they'll include is not decided yet. I think it's fair to assume that we'll include at least one light-weight mode.

This answer is a bit vague, I know, but with graphics programming you usually implement most of your graphics code first, then optimize it(because it's often fruitless to optimize at the same time you're trying to achieve a visual effect).

For those of you that are into graphics hardware, so far CK2 high-end mode will require your hardware to support shader model 3, instancing, vertex textures and two-sided stencil. These might all change during our continued development.

 

[Darkrenown]

I think we can go on with that "no, it is YOU who doesn't understand" for eternity.
If you tell us that it will look completly different at the end - okay, guess we have no other option to trust you and wait & see anyways.

No, really. He said:

I'm sorry it's shame to post this in 2011 year with such pride like in the 1st post, and telling about innovations.I'm sorry it's true. Its 8-bit gameboy zombies strikes from the swamp

He was saying the graphics look dated so there's no "innovations", but my point was the innovation shown there isn't the general graphics, it's the tabard system where troops wear the tabard of their liege. That was the part he didn't understand. It's utterly pointless to comment on their other graphics as if they are final as they are (almost?) all placeholders or works in progress.

 

[podcat]

I noticed a mistake in your second developer screenshot, so I took the liberty of fixing it.

the portrait system actually supports scripting in the Ulm guy as ruler of ulm looking like that (and make his descendants look like him too) so I hope someone does that if we dont (actually you can even make him pop out different speech bubbles using triggers when stuff happens to his country).

 

[podcat]

Speech bubbles? I think this could get rather dangerous!

I can already see the bubles of profanity in my head on revolting vassals

just to clarify, we dont actually have speach bubbles in CK2, but it would be possible to mod it into the portrait system for ulm etc. figured it might be a good idea to point this out before the rumor-mobile kicked into 2nd gear.

 

[podcat]

Maybe you (paradox) can "mirror" the animation so its only a copy of the original. Nba 2k games (lika nba2k) have the stadium`s crowd like this. A lot of viewers are doing the same, are the same model, but when playing, you didnt care, and its a very nice effect.

example:
http://www.monodetrescabezas.com/wp-content/gallery/nba2k10/nba-2k10-2-large.jpg
http://nba-live.com/jaosming/nba2k10 2009-10-26 07-38-02-67.jpg

Sorry, i could not explain better with my current level of english.

this type of stuff (crowd simulation) requires nice graphics hardware or it will be heavier than just rendering a single guy. and those examples are 2d spirites which makes it a lot easier.