Hasty Mod - test

[vonRocko]

ORIGINAL: sbdb

All the suggested NATO designs are butt ugly. Sorry, I'm just giving my honest opinion as an experienced designer, none of them come even close to the excellent work of the person who designed the GUI and graphics of this game, heck they even seem to be totally out of place, since the designs don't even match the overall look of this game.

I never understood this ultimate need for NATO symbols anyways, they're not aesthetically pleasing to begin with and just confusing to people who are new to this genre and who often don't even buy the game because of that. Oh well...I guess some people want to avoid losing respect in the community of die-hard old-timers, after all it seems to be blasphemy to them to move heads instead of NATO symbols! It reminds me a lot of web designers who want to sound professional by claiming that they only use "notepad", while funny enough a more professional code editor like PhpED would save them a lot of time or offer numerous other advantages! [:D]

Well done 2x2 games for dumping these ugly NATO symbols and not creating (from a graphics design point of view) yet another boring looking Gary Grigsby’s War look-a-like, those who want the symbols will get them anyways, since even a child can make those. Now you present yourself at least to potential customers as a "new kid on the block", you sure got my attention because of this, that eventually resulted in buying this game.

What's your affiliation with this game sbdb? You clearly have some agenda (imho). You accuse someone, in another thread, of piracy. You post here calling everyones work "butt ugly", and put down gamers who were probably gaming before you were pooping in diapers. What's your angle?

[UTF]

Modifications look nice and get player back to the old school style of war gaming (thought as a complete nub and mass culture victim I prefer 3D graphics). I would like to discuss another issue here which seems to be more important if we speak about realistic war modeling. Today I had a discussion on 2X2 forum when pointing to the fact that you can not actually concentrate forces by placing more than one unit in one hex. Developer said basic logic denied that idea. What do you think about the influence this feature has on the game play? Is there any JAVA developer [&o] around who can point to basic logic file of the game (dll?) and can say whether there is a chance to alter this feature?

[UTF]

ORIGINAL: sbdb

none of them come even close to the excellent work of the person who designed the GUI and graphics of this game,

sbdb - with all the due respect to the game designer who did a good work, can you evaluate how relevant are those graphic representation to the actual look of WW2 uniform? Have any idea how, say, Red Army uniform looked? Thought the representation is fairly good it lacks at least proper color. But that is aesthetical preference. What is actually good about those "ugly" NATO designations is that you don’t need to "design" them; they are universal and quite obvious to everyone paying 5 minutes to manual. You will definitely need same 5 minutes to learn all the styles of uniform presented in game.

[Redmarkus5]

ORIGINAL: UTF

Modifications look nice and get player back to the old school style of war gaming (thought as a complete nub and mass culture victim I prefer 3D graphics). I would like to discuss another issue here which seems to be more important if we speak about realistic war modeling. Today I had a discussion on 2X2 forum when pointing to the fact that you can not actually concentrate forces by placing more than one unit in one hex. Developer said basic logic denied that idea. What do you think about the influence this feature has on the game play? Is there any JAVA developer [&o] around who can point to basic logic file of the game (dll?) and can say whether there is a chance to alter this feature?

I don't know about the JAVA limitations, but the lack of stacking (you can't even pass a unit through a hex containing another) removes much of the realism. This design decision needs a re-think, IMHO.

[Redmarkus5]

ORIGINAL: pzgndr

We won't be adding the counter option anytime soon. However, I'd love to see a well executed nato mod. As already demonstrated - this is fairly easy to do technically. It doesn't involve a lot of physical work because the total number of different unit icons is relatively small.

While I agree that this is technically pretty easy to do, I tried making a few counter mods yesterday and found the total number of .png icons is not exactly small, nor is it intuitive how to get counters centered just right for best display. Also there's like 60 different rotational images for each unit icon that all need to be modded and I couldn't seem to get this to work well. [&:]

As a modest request, could we maybe get a blank template for a properly centered square unit counter for the different image directories? There's a difference between what's shown on the map and what's shown on the Info Sheets. We don't need all the different units, just a few templates to edit. That would be helpful. Thanks.

Perhaps redmarkus4 has already figured this out and could post something for download. The counter size in post #25 above looks good. [8D]

If you are doing a counter mod, that doesn't require the animations. So, just save your first image over the remaining 59 ('Save As') and when the game plays the 'animation' you will just see a static counter there. You don't need to draw 60 separate images - one is enough.

[Redmarkus5]

ORIGINAL: sbdb

All the suggested NATO designs are butt ugly. Sorry, I'm just giving my honest opinion as an experienced designer, none of them come even close to the excellent work of the person who designed the GUI and graphics of this game, heck they even seem to be totally out of place, since the designs don't even match the overall look of this game.

I never understood this ultimate need for NATO symbols anyways, they're not aesthetically pleasing to begin with and just confusing to people who are new to this genre and who often don't even buy the game because of that. Oh well...I guess some people want to avoid losing respect in the community of die-hard old-timers, after all it seems to be blasphemy to them to move heads instead of NATO symbols! It reminds me a lot of web designers who want to sound professional by claiming that they only use "notepad", while funny enough a more professional code editor like PhpED would save them a lot of time or offer numerous other advantages! [:D]

Well done 2x2 games for dumping these ugly NATO symbols and not creating (from a graphics design point of view) yet another boring looking Gary Grigsby’s War look-a-like, those who want the symbols will get them anyways, since even a child can make those. Now you present yourself at least to potential customers as a "new kid on the block", you sure got my attention because of this, that eventually resulted in buying this game.

1. That's your opinion but that doesn't make the rest of us wrong. It's a mod discussion, not a change to the base game. If you don't like it, don't download it.
2. A lot of players (mainly ex-mil or old school war gamers I suspect) prefer the NATO symbols because they say more to us than a 'head'. After 40 years of army service and war gaming, I would like to stick to what I know. If a sizable segment of the potential customer base feels that way, then a smart developer would cater to it.
3. Most everyone posting here said quite clearly that they were just playing around with the graphics files to see what's possible.

[pzgndr]

If you are doing a counter mod, that doesn't require the animations. So, just save your first image over the remaining 59 ('Save As')

That's what I'm doing. It's easy, but 59 save-as's takes time. But hey, once a hard-headed grunt, always a hard-headed grunt... [:D]

What's your affiliation with this game sbdb?

I kinda wonder about this too, but frankly I don't care. There's a springbutt in every crowd on these forums. Start a discussion about modding anything (which the developers clearly emphasize about the game being easily moddable?) and some yahoo has to step up and talk smack.

Ditto for saying anything about playing against an AI and not a real person. Although frankly the UoC AI is very good and we haven't heard much from the yahoos yet about that. Regardless, we're all gonna play our games the way we want to play them and no amount of bullying is gonna stop us. [:-]

[nenad]

ORIGINAL: pzgndr

If you are doing a counter mod, that doesn't require the animations. So, just save your first image over the remaining 59 ('Save As')

That's what I'm doing. It's easy, but 59 save-as's takes time. But hey, once a hard-headed grunt, always a hard-headed grunt... [:D]

No need to do this manually. It can be easily automated via scripting.

Here's a quick batch script that will copy a *_00 file over remaining 59.

Some directions:

1) save the script into unit_rot directory
2) open the command line shell (start>run>"cmd")
3) type "cd [your_unit_rot_directory]" <enter>
4) type "ucopy [filename]" <enter>

[filename] should be the name of your source *_00.png file without _00 suffix and without .png extension, for example; to copy ger_geb_42_00.png type "ucopy ger_geb_42"

Hope this helps.

[pzgndr]

Here's a quick batch script that will copy a *_00 file over remaining 59.

Now THAT is slick. I'll be updating my butt-ugly icons at warp speed now and getting on with the game. Thank you! [&o]

[TomBombadil711]

May I ask if one of you fine modders will share what he has created? Thanks in advance.

[Terrific T]

sbdb,

I agree with you on the well graphic design of this game; there are so many wargames that come with poor graphics (map, interface,... )... Fed up with these ones who think that a wargame don't need to be pleaseant to the eye. Sure it's not the key point for this kind of games, but when I see people arguing not buying this game because it 's not in their "standard design", it makes me laugh [:D]. I just want to say THANK YOU to the developpers for their very good work.

however, I don't see any trouble in modding this game with NATO symbols, even if I think it 's not so difficult to understand that a head symbol is used for infantry.

Taking more of age, the less open to change... just hope it's not an evidence that the wargaming community is getting older and older...

(please be kind with my english... [;)] )

[Kipper]

Taking more of age, the less open to change... just hope it's not an evidence that the wargaming community is getting older and older...

Quite the opposite. I was 78 when I started wargaming and now I am in my forties.

[Skeleton]

I love the counters in the first post; any chance of uploading them for use?

[Skeleton]

*BUMP*

redmarkus4, any chance of getting the silhouette counters? I think they look excellent and prefer them over the standard NATO counters. I have to say, anyone put off by the busts (as I was) they do grow on you. Thanks in advance!

[Richie61]

I too would love to get these counters[:D]

ORIGINAL: Marcus the leper

*BUMP*

redmarkus4, any chance of getting the silhouette counters? I think they look excellent and prefer them over the standard NATO counters. I have to say, anyone put off by the busts (as I was) they do grow on you. Thanks in advance!

[gunnergoz]

Any progress on the Nato counters? I'm interested for sure.

[Redmarkus5]

Changed my mind...