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screenies

I just need confirmation that the screens have been received. I sent them on Monday to both of Steel's e-mail addresses - but my e-mail service at work has been acting bizarrely since Monday afternoon. I didn't receive any messages from my server that the e-mail bounced back, so I assume it's gotten to the Steel.

Phil K, I've also searched around for the CORE e-mail section, and I haven't been able to find it.
 
Cairo_East said:
I just need confirmation that the screens have been received. I sent them on Monday to both of Steel's e-mail addresses - but my e-mail service at work has been acting bizarrely since Monday afternoon. I didn't receive any messages from my server that the e-mail bounced back, so I assume it's gotten to the Steel.

Phil K, I've also searched around for the CORE e-mail section, and I haven't been able to find it.
Click to expand...
Confirmed, I have received them and they will be in v0.7. Give me a few more days and you'll get the chance to verify I haven't messed it up :)
 
Cairo, first - I love your new screens, especially the Quit Game screen. Awesome.

The Email thread is on the first page of the Paradox CORE forum (maybe you went to the CORE website?) - here's the LINK
 
Yes, I darkened it just a little. I may do a better version soon. And they are the values in colorscales.csv

Anyways, you can use these values:

red;green;blue;index
235;230;218;0
223;215;196;17
203;189;158;40
40;35;20;64

If for vanilla HoI, apply it to the color Black; if for CORE, apply it to the color Orange.
 
Hi guys, after getting sick of trying to create interesting sprites, I have moved on to making the counters a lot better.

Currently, they appear flat and are restricted in difference by three colours, which results in a lot of fairly ugly counters due to necessity.

Here is what I am planning for (inspired from the Great-War mod as well as other counter mods and other computer games).

hoi_counter_GER.bmp


hoi_counter_CAN.bmp


I currently have the NATO symbols, aircraft and navy symbols applied, as well as the flag templates (as well as a large number of actual nations), but have just decided on adding roundels for the air units.
 
McNaughton, like I posted a while ago in the TGW thread, those are really cool. Are you using the process I described for the flags? If so, do you need the program I mentioned to turn raw rgb into ms-pal?

Oh, and I love the roundels-for-planes idea. Did Canada use British roundels?
 
Thos are wonderful counters (even though I love counters, I'm a sprites guy). Are you going to make a set for every country? Then again I guess you would have to.
 
Gwalcmai said:
McNaughton, like I posted a while ago in the TGW thread, those are really cool. Are you using the process I described for the flags? If so, do you need the program I mentioned to turn raw rgb into ms-pal?

Oh, and I love the roundels-for-planes idea. Did Canada use British roundels?
Click to expand...

Yes, I used your system which works great!

This is my template. I used PSP. The first half of the palette was easy, as I used one of the create palatte options. However, since I created roundels afterward, I had to manually edit the palette to add the last 100 or so pixels for the new roundels.

hoi_counter_strip.bmp


The RCAF used the British roundel, however, for the Canadians I will remove the yellow trim to differentiate between them and the RAF. The RNZAF and RAAF used a similar roundel without the red centre or yellow outline. It will take a long time to get them done, especially since I effectively doubled the work by adding roundels instead of just using flags for each counter. However, since the template is done, and many of the flags are done, it should be fairly easy, and maybe done in a month or so.

Thanks for the feedback guys! However, I would be nowhere without others, and Gwalcmai is the one who really figured out what you really can do with the counters.
 
Semi-Lobster said:
Thos are wonderful counters (even though I love counters, I'm a sprites guy). Are you going to make a set for every country? Then again I guess you would have to.
Click to expand...

Yes, a set per country. Primary goals are the majorly played nations, then nations who build very few units, then lastly revolters (like Russia, India, etc.) who probably won't appear. I have found roundels for virtualy every nation, I may have to use some post-war or even Great War roundels for some nations.

It gets really easy once you do a few nations, as many nations have similar flags/roundels so you just start with Canada and can easily create Australia and New Zealand by just changing a few parts.

I was also a sprite guy as well, primarily due to the fact that the counters looked so bad (not due to the great efforts of those who modded them, but due to the previous limitations, as you were forced to use some ugly colour combinations!). Hopefully a flashy set of counters will attract more users as they look better than the inconsistant sprites (some really good, some really poor) and give more information to the player than sprites. With the use of a band across the mid-zone of air units it is easy to see if a stack contains air groups among infantry groups (rather than to try and count those wavy flags!), plus there are new symbols for the naval counters so you can better see if a carrier group has aircraft, or a transport is loaded with troops, even in a stack.

Also, the game moves smoother with counters as you don't have all of those moving sprites slowing down your scrolling.
 
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Good lord - those are great. I can't wait to see that. First, I want to tip my hat to Gwalcmai for all the pioneering effort he did on counters and the file system. Obviously that is the cornerstone effort to all that follows.

I love the setup, McNaugton. Great colors there for Germany. A few points if I may, to consider when the time for each is appropriate. You've already touched on some of them.

1) Consider how you want to release the initial set of counters. Will it be just majors? If so, what will the minors look like? Will it be a handful of great counters juxtaposed against those that now look like pure crap? I'd suggest getting minors - the secondary and tertiary group of counters you are targeting for later - to a stage where they at least have their colors that they'll use in the game. Obviously those flags will come later. As you'll find out, coming up with some decent, somewhat unique colors is a task and a half when you consider the sheer number of nations you are looking at.

Which brings me to the second, related point.

2) Remember that we will be limited to a mere handful of mapcolors that we can use. These will have an overall effect on how your counters look from the standpoint of contrast, be it good or bad. Those German counters look sweet; I kind of want to pick them up off the screen and toy with them!! Surely you don't want to use them on some rubbishy mapcolor as a background because it would clash and lose that overall impact. Easily done, for Germany. But what about all those other secondary countries, like Norway, Sweden, Finland? So try to bear all that in mind if you can. Recall that we can also create our own custom colors for mapcolors (there are only so many that you want to do that for, but there are options). So that is there as a method of working things in a complimentary fashion.

To me, a huge part of the overall appearance is the way things work together just sitting there. Clashing colors (like the current German unit on, say, China's orange mapcolor!) just are a turnoff and detract from that polished look. Terrain colors - eh, all counters will look pretty good with that, but it will be on the political maps that your counters will shine.

Your counters are worth the ultimate effort in coordination.

I am really looking forward to them.
 
I wanted to mention that I really like the design of the symbol background stripe going all across the counter. This looks great.

One thing I'd like to see - the aircraft, but particulary the ships need to be somewhat larger or even different images. Check the 'Work in Progress' WIKI page to get the update for CORE v7 counterstrip and see if you can use any of those ship images (if you care to and they aren't too large already) because they are very easy to differentiate between on the map.

I think I'll bump up (or is it bump down) to using 800x600 for these counters!!
 
#1.

I will probably release it in one large pack, containing all starting nations, and all likely nations (the unlikely ones like Russia, Ukraine, etc. will come later).

#2.

I am basing the counters off of logical nation colours, as well as colours that match map colours. I have tested them, and the ones that I have currently modded look ok against the existing map colours. It is easy to tweak, so if there are problems this could be fixed fairly quickly.

#3.

I was unable to find the counterstrip on the WIKI. I have been planning on modding the ships, plus spread out some info on aircraft (i.e., the anchor for Naval bombers, bombs for tactical, strategic and close support, etc.. will be spread out from the main aircraft.

Semi-Lobster, I have a lot of info on the major nations, but not too much for many of the very minor nations. Whatever you could provide would be great!

PS. Adding roundels was fairly easy. It took significantly less time and effort than the flags.
 
BTW, McN, you might want to take a look at gfx\interface\select_counter.bmp, if you haven't already. I think you increased the counter height by 1, didn't you? Also, maybe clipping the corners there too would look good.
 
McNaughton said:
#3.

I was unable to find the counterstrip on the WIKI. I have been planning on modding the ships, plus spread out some info on aircraft (i.e., the anchor for Naval bombers, bombs for tactical, strategic and close support, etc.. will be spread out from the main aircraft
Click to expand...

I am totally for the info, whatever it may be.

Keep in mind that there needs to be an area for the 'little man' and 'little plane' when CVs or TPs are loaded. It could always just appear straight over something light-colored, like if the flags were in the lower righthand corner. Just a thought.

Check the GFX Mod page from the main area (not v7). It also might be incorporated in the current rc7 build; I can't recall. If so, it is the one where the motorized infantry unit is the first-generation NATO style (little wheels on the bottom of the image as opposed to inside the image).

Well, I stand ready to work out any mapcolors you might like if you'd like - just give me a headsup. Last CORE graphics thing I want to do - before I ride off into the sunset and the next generation runs over my grave - is change the Italian counter and map colors to the actual grey-green that was in AH's Third Reich (grey-green with the black inner section) rather than the light mintgreen we have at this point. Then I am outta here.
 
Counter Suggestions

Very nice counters, McNaughton.

In looking at what you posted, I had a couple quick ideas. Right now your air and sea units are differentiated from the land units by the pale band in the middle of the counter. For one of those groups (either air or sea units), you could make the band dark and the silhouette pale. An air unit, for example, would then have a dark band with a light-colored airplane in the middle: Bingo! air, sea, and land units are all distinct. Secondly, unless everyone is wedded to the idea of keeping the old military symbology (i.e., rectangle with an 'x' in it equals infantry), it wouldn't be too much trouble (and by that I mean I might be able to do it, if you don't want to) to come up something more realistic - say, the silhouette of a little guy with a rifle for infantry, the silhouette of a tank for armor, the silhouette of a halftrack for mechanized infantry, and so on. If you were absurdly ambitious you could even make the tank silhouettes slightly different for the majors (USA looks like a Sherman, Germany looks like a Panther, etc.).

Anyway, no criticism from me. What you've come up with there is light years better than vaniller.

P.S. - I remember once seeing an interesting photo of the roundels on a Nazi-allied Croatian Bf.109. They were the like the standard German cross with white on the outside and black on the inside, but the black part in the middle had wedges taken out at the tips so it looked like a leaf.
 
To be honest, the idea of counters (except for Strategic Command, which isn't a classic) is to have symbology like the crosses and so forth. It's so you can easily tell what is what.

Additionally, unless we play this in 800x600, seeing those little figures will be impossible. Unless you play at something like Very Slow speed. Nice ideas, but kind of outside the 'grognard' counter thing. Which, may I add, all HoI counters would still give most diehard grognards the willies. No offense to you, McNaughton and Gwalcwai - yours are truly awesome. It's just that grognards are real info and tradition freaks. Too much for me, but...

What I really need - doing AI tweaking - is the ability to look at a stack and have a feel for what it there. The little infinity (I think it's supposed to represent a propeller) is very helpful in that, as was someone's little 2- and 4-dot corps/army markers on the RH side of the counter. Doesn't really give too much away in a game since an army in HoI could be 3 or 30 divisions.

As I am testing, I keep thinking about those counters and their date of delivery. Damn you, McNaughton!!! ;)
 
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