Jump to content

Map of the World


Recommended Posts

I'm thinking of making a map of the entire world for SC2.

Here's a few Q's for the group:

1) Is it possible to make a map that horizontally scrolls all the way around?

2) I could use some input input on the scale of the map. If its the same scale as the main campaigns, then I figure it will have to be appx 4 X the size (twice as big in each direction). Do people think this would be unplayably large?

OTOH, If I tried to make it the same size as the current map, Europe would be awefully small in terms of number of tiles.

So I'm not sure what size to make it. Any input would be helpfull.

3) I'm not really up to the task of creating an entire whole world scenario, but I thought if I made this map it could be a starting point for others with more knowledge of the game system and the war.

Am I nuts? Is this an impossibly big project or will we end up with something where there are so few tiles as to make the game unplayable.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I think this is a great idea. I myself have been playing with that idea a long time (even before the game was out) but i dont have the time to create it myself. I could work on it when the map is ready, making it a playable experience for MP purposes. Others could then work on scripts. The regular fall weiss is a 139x37 map and the maximum for a custom map is 256x128. So a world map can be made, id say like 256x100 or so. I think it would be playable, although it would take some time to complete.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

1. Not sure.

2. I wouldn't worry about it being "unplayably large". In my opinion, in order to do a world map properly it's going to have to be big. Ideally you'd want the current european theater to remain at its current size, and expand from there. If it's "unplayably large" simply because most computers couldn't handle that big of a map size, then that's a different issue.

3. Personally I don't care for map work. I'd rather have a map in place and then I'd script over it, add simple stuff like resources/cities, etc. I think having a standard world map available will allow a lot of different people to use it for lots of different mods, not just a grand-scale WW2 game.

If I ever have the time and a map like that was available, it'd save me a lot of time working on a grand-scale WW2 game anyway.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I've also thought about another option:

What if the map consisted of two sections: European Theater and Pacific Theater.

The ET section would be very similar (if not identical) to the current campaign map and the PT section would be a same scale map of the PT.

Movement between the theaters could be accomplished by the 'Red Arrow' system currently used to go around the Cape of Good Hope.

We could add them for transport accross the US, through the Panama Canal, continental USSR etc.

This would cut out areas that saw little or no action like South America, Southern Africa, the central area of the Soviet Union and even the middle of the US.

I see this as a backup plan to the whole world map if that proves to be unmanageable.

Another option would be to have the western edge of the map be the Eastern US and the eastern edge be the West Coast of the US (not as complicated as it sounds) which would essentially remove the central United States, central Canada, and South America, again with a Red Arrow system to get through the Panama Canal and accross North America.

Anyway, I'm going to play around with it and when I have something, I'll post it for feedback.

Another thing that would be greatly helpfull is a large map of the World circa 1939 to use as a starting point.

Thanks for the input on size and any other suggestions would be greatly appreciated. If we all pull together, maybe we can pull this thing off!

Link to comment
Share on other sites

i think a total world map is a better idea.. The areas wher war wasnt raging could be set as neutral, with no country controlling it (like the game axis and allies).. otherwise how would you simulate the distances well? best way to do that is creating those distances, it would feel a bit weird to play on a map with america, europe and south-east asia next to each other.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I have now created a new map for my Fall Weiss 1939 scenario including all of Africa north of Belgian Congo/Kenya and East to Karachi.

It includes scripts for all of the Vichy and Free French territories such as French Equatorial Africa (Free), French Somaliland (Vichy), French West Africa (Vichy) and even Madagascar (Vichy).

It includes all Italian Abyssinia, Eritrea and Somaliland as well as British Somaliland, Northern Kenya, Anglo-Sudan and even part of the Belgian Congo.

Resources added include Khartoum, Addis Ababba, Karachi, Dakar, Casablanca, Aden, Jibuti and Mogadishu.

The scripts work and I have used red arrow naval loops to include South Africa as an off map hex.

You can't expect the AI to really work with these new territories as I have not scripted any AI stuff yet, just made sure that the event scripts work.

As soon as I get the terrain tiles all complte I will post the new mod to CMMODS.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

A full world map would be GREAT.

(it`s something i wisched since i first saw SC1)

Pacific should be right on the map with RED ARROWS to reach the US westcoast (left on map)

(i would use the original 39map and enlarge it, so u could save the work for the parts that still exist)

Frank

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Everyone seems to think that splitting the map in the Pacific Ocean makes the most sense. My only problem with that is that is going to really foul up all the Pacific naval battles.

OTOH, if we were to split the map at the Rocky Mountains it would work pretty well and here's why:

1) Realistically, there are very few points you can cross the Rocky's with an army. We could make just a couple of red arrow mountain passes to get back and forth.

2) A line going through the Rocky's would actually lay WEST of South America (its further east than most people think. The area of ocean it would disrupt saw very little if any action in WWII.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

OK, here's what I did so far:

First of all, since it seemed like a daunting task to manually create a tile map of the world I decided to write a program to do it instead.

I found the largest map of the world I could that didn't have a lot of extra detail (words) on it and cleaned it up so it was only 2 colors. One for land and one for sea.

Then I wrote a program that went through the map and overlaid a diamond shaped mask over each area and then used pattern matching to find the most appropriate SC2 tile for that location. It also did some analysis of the SC2 tiles to make sure it used tiles that fit together right.

Then, it exported a humungous bitmap which is made up of 255 x 64 SC2 tiles. This final bitmap btw is 16,000 x 3968 pixels!

Anyway, the final result looks pretty good. It has some problems with Florida and Itally and some land bridges that will have to be dealt with not to mention the fact that my source bitmap of the world was missing the Great Lakes for some strange reason. Also, it didn't pick up a lot of the islands so I'll have to play with the algorithm to make it choose land over sea where appropriate. Hawaii ended up only 1 tile.

But its pretty close and the rest of the details should be something that can be dealt with in the editor.

Now here are the real issues:

1) Europe is a little smaller than in the standard scenario. There is really no way around this if you're going to have the whole world in scale since we are limited by the max size of the maps in the editor.

This does make a case for a sort of 'split world' map where we have the European Theater and Pacific Theater in two halves with red arrow connectors. I guess the jury is still out on that one.

2) There is no way I know of for me to directly import the result into the editor. It would have been nice to be able to generate a table of tile numbers and import them which is what I thought the import / export feature was but I was wrong. So at some point, I'll have to manually enter the data which will take a while.

3) I'd love to show you guys some samples but I have nowhere to host the pictures at this time as I'm out of disk space (as usual) on my web sites.

Anyway, I'd be happy to send the final bitmap to someone who can host it for others to look at but I warn you, even though the jpeg is only 5 megs, it expands to something like 139 megs in memory so you better have a pretty good PC to look at it.

Remember when you look at it, this is far from the final product. The idea was to get all the major land masses right and then have a human go back and hand tweak the critical areas like Gibralter, Suez Canal, etc.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

@Haiku - its on its way, thanks for the help!

@John DiFool the 2nd - I would love to share my program at some point but there are a couple of issues.

1) Its written in Python. Why does that matter? Because in order to use it, you must have Python installed on your machine including the PIL (Python Imaging Library). So its not something you can just download and run without some setup first.

2) It was hacked together in a matter of hours and is hard wired to a specific source bitmap name in a specific format and a specific color value to identify water. Before it would really be useable I will have to add some command line options to allow some flexibility.

3) For large maps like the world, it requires massive processing power and memory. The source bitmap I used was 3,000 x 3,000 pixels and the resulting bitmap is something like 181 meg in memory. Of course for smaller maps, this wouldn't be as much of a problem.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Update -

I have just acquired a much better source bitmap for the world map that among other things is larger actually includes the Great Lakes along with a lot of other missing major waterways. This should produce a better map.

It will take me a little while to clean up the source bitmap and get it into a useable format but when it does, I'll post an update on how it looks.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

If you look at the small world map that Haiku has kindly hosted you can get a good overall picture of the full map. As you can see, it is pretty close to scale and has all of the major land masses fairly well laid out.

The Europe Map will give you an idea of the scale. Don't be put off by the land bridges, those can all be easily cleaned up. Some will be taken care of when I use a better source map. As you can see it is significantly smaller than the current map in the 39 scenario.

Here's the thing. The world is a very big place. And even in WWII, the largest and most epic war in history, the actual fighting took place in a fairly limited area.

If you want a map of the whole world, Europe can only be so big.

Also, islands are a big issue. There are literally thousands of them scattered accross the Pacific. Some important ones like Midway are so small that we only even know of its existence because of the battle that bears its name. Its a postage stamp in the middle of the Pacific.

Iwo Jima likewise. So its going to take someone far more knowlegeable than I about the Pacific Theater to try to figure out which islands to include. We can't possibly have them all. We also can't use land mass as a guide because that would eliminate some of the historic islands like Midway which was actually a very strategic location.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I'm still trying to figure out how an amphibious

invasion of a one-square island can happen.

Hmm off to mod Malta as a non-fortified island and

see how long it takes the Italian fleet (with a

CV or two added) to kill a corps stationed there.

If the island is just regular terrain then BBs/CAs

can easily damage it, but if it is a city then the

big guns will damage the city and not the unit.

I believe there is an island near Riga which I can

also test... BRB...

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Originally posted by John DiFool the 2nd:

Well, it took two turns to kill a corps which was on

an unfortified island, no surprise there. One in a

city may prove problematic, since it can only take

damage from CVs and tactical air groups.

Good info JDF2. Sounds like the navy will have a lot bigger impact in the Pacific!

Here's some issues I see with Pacific Islands:

1) If they are only 1 tile, we can't have both air and land units on the same island. However, the whole point of taking most of these islands was specifically to post air units on them and use it as a bombing platform. We may have to make all the islands 2 hexes.

2) Pearl Harbor. I think we'll need at least 3 US BB groups stationed at Pearl in order to make the impact of a PH attack significant. Otherwise it won't make much sense for Japan to attack and bring the US into the war. Pearl will have to be fairly large. Possibly 2 ports and room for at least 1 air and a couple garrison units, IMHO. This is much larger than Hawaii would naturally appear on the map.

Here's an idea:

On the original map, make all the relavent islands 1 tile. That way, at least their correct physical location will be determined. Then, the scenario designers can pick and choos which ones they want to expand for purposes of that particular scenario.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Thanks LampCord,

I've got one question, how does "Red Arrow" works?

Does it automaticly tranport units to another map?

And how to change between two maps in one campaign?

Or PT and ET are just two campaigns?

Originally posted by LampCord:

I've also thought about another option:

What if the map consisted of two sections: European Theater and Pacific Theater.

The ET section would be very similar (if not identical) to the current campaign map and the PT section would be a same scale map of the PT.

Movement between the theaters could be accomplished by the 'Red Arrow' system currently used to go around the Cape of Good Hope.

We could add them for transport accross the US, through the Panama Canal, continental USSR etc.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

An idea on Pacific garrisons, after some thought:

they will basically have to be hybrid air/ground

units. All Pacific garrisons virtually without

exception had at least one working airstrip along

with ground troops. I believe the editor would be

up to snuff in creating such a unit-not as strong

as a regular corps or air fleet is now, but capable

of double duty. With the 5 supply limit (except

for major ports like Truk and Pearl), they should

be fairly easy to kill with concerted effort.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Originally posted by qy_panzer:

Thanks LampCord,

I've got one question, how does "Red Arrow" works?

Does it automaticly tranport units to another map?

And how to change between two maps in one campaign?

Or PT and ET are just two campaigns?

It would work as follows:

The map would have 2 halves.

The left half would be the Pacific Theater from the east coast of China to the west coast of the US.

The right half would be more or less the current map but it would go further south to account for the size of the Pacific map.

You would not be able to move units directly from the edge of one section to the other, instead you would move them to 'Red Arrow' points where they would go into transit for an appropriate amount of time to an arrow on the other side. This would apply to naval units. Ground units could be moved operationally.

This may sound cumbersome, but the fact of the matter is the two theaters were practically seperate wars with the exception of some ship shuffling by the US and UK and some troop shuffling by Russia (all of which this model would support)

The alternative is to play on a map in which Europe is so small as to make the battles for France or Italy a little too simplistic for most wargamers.

The US would be split but still behave as one country. Some rules would have to be put in place for occupation of one coast. Perhaps a sort of 'Vichy US' where if Japan successfully invades the West Coast, the East Coast breaks off and becomes a neutral country as part of the peace deal. Ditto for a German invasion of the East Coast.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Originally posted by John DiFool the 2nd:

An idea on Pacific garrisons, after some thought:

they will basically have to be hybrid air/ground

units. All Pacific garrisons virtually without

exception had at least one working airstrip along

with ground troops. I believe the editor would be

up to snuff in creating such a unit-not as strong

as a regular corps or air fleet is now, but capable

of double duty. With the 5 supply limit (except

for major ports like Truk and Pearl), they should

be fairly easy to kill with concerted effort.

I think that's a great solution. Basically an AF unit that has above average soft defense so it can act as a garrison and in addition execute the kind of missions (recon, naval support, strategic and tactical bombing, etc.) that was the essense of island control in the PT.

Also, I think we'll need some kind of Marine unit.

This unit would be particularly effective in island invasion.

What I would envision as a standard invasion would go something like this.

1) Massive air and naval bombardment

2) Marine unit assaults and secures the island

3) Marine unit is removed and replaced by an 'Air with Garrison' unit.

This means the Marine unit would need the ability to become a transport on a deserted island with a very low grade port.

If those two units can be made in the editor, I think we can pull this off.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Join the conversation

You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.

Guest
Unfortunately, your content contains terms that we do not allow. Please edit your content to remove the highlighted words below.
Reply to this topic...

×   Pasted as rich text.   Paste as plain text instead

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.

×
×
  • Create New...