Laryngoscope

There will be a limited map editor available which will allow some map mods, for example moving around trees, houses, fences, etc. However if you want to change the underlying terrain topology you will need 3dsmax.

SlapHappy I sent you an email

OMG Deja Vu... Having just written my own random battle generator for Panzer Command Kharkov, that does pretty much everything you wanted (+ a little more ) may I suggest the following Write it in javascript as part of a MS HTA (HTML application). The advantage of this is that you can use the power of dhtml for UI elements and the ease of javascript for the core logic. Given that the MS xml tools are built in, it makes it oh so simple. I managed to write one from initial idea to finsihed product in about 7 days including all of the UI elements. The HTA part allows you to wrap it all up as a nice application. The only downside is that IE must be installed on the target machine, but who doesn't have this? All you need is notepad! Oh I used the concept of a template to get the whole thing to work. Essentially a template is tied to each map. The template designer sets out the potential positions of a multitude of platoons on each map in such a way that they make tactical sense (eg infantry in tenches, tanks behind a ridge line, ATG in trees etc). Then the generator engine picks randomly from each template platoon (varying squad #s and unit types) to a user selected points total. If you have an enourmous number of platoons with which to choose from initialy, then you will never see the same game randomly generated game twice Anyway it worked well for my purposes for PCK. [ July 09, 2007, 11:56 PM: Message edited by: Laryngoscope ]

That was fantastic. Great job, very cinematic!

The "stop" represents time a unit must take to "digest" a new order. So this problem and lack of WPs goes hand in hand. Hopefully once we get the later it will fix the former.

My Athlon XP2600+ with 1.5gb 7600GT on Vista with medium details runs fine for the tutorials. However it chugs like a druken frat boy on the demo Seelow battle Shame ...

To perform real-time LOS through trees/bushes for more than a small handfull of units is very computationally expensive. For a game like CM where the obstructions to LOS were abstracted into "tiles", it still required a "turn" to process. I don't know how TOW does it, but it is clearly not a tiled based game and I suspect that LOS may be highly simplified to keep the processing cost down.

"Trick Shot" 'Nades Cool... What about "Rocket Jumps"?

DOW first intro ... Best. intro. ever. No, seriously no other intro to any other computer game has ever hyped me up so much to play the actual game. Everying was just nailed in that intro; story, characters, graphics, physics (you can feel the weight of impact of the ork ammo hitting the sarge at the end sequence), sound & music. If those guys ever did a full movie in the WH40K universe I would be waiting in line now ... In terms of the TOW intro ... Eck, given the target audience (any audience), I just don't see why? No intro is better than a crappy one. It insults the grogs (presumably the target owner population) and I can't imagine would do anything for the gamerz class of 2007. I see this a lot with all the new wave russian games. The game itself is ok to good, but the intros are almost all hopeless (execept the Space Rangers 2 intro which was so bad it was vaguely humourous)