Oh, Canada

[Shannon V. OKeets]

ORIGINAL: lomyrin

ORIGINAL: Shannon V. OKeets

And yet further east. I have trimmed the top 11 hex rows from these first 3 screen shots.

It is looking more and more likely that I will trim 15 hex rows from the top of the world map. There is nothing up there: no ports, cities, resources, rail lines, just a whole lot of nothing. Patrice is aghast, and I haven't mentioned it to Rob, who has done a lot of work creating graphics for the coast lines and rivers up there. This would change the dimensions of the world map from 360 hexes wide by 195 hexes high to 360 by 180. Nice round numbers, but what is really driving this is bitmap memory, ...

I would think you might shave off 12 rows in the north arctic and 3 rows in the south arctic all the way around the globe.

There are Norwegian items in the 14-15 th row from the north. I have not noticed any itmes in the southernmost 3 rows.

Lars

Trimming hex rows 0 - 14 (the top 15) removes 681 coastal bitmaps (5010 -> 4329). It leaves Scandinavia untouched and all of Iceland. Mostly what noticeably disappears is the northern 1/3 of Alaska. There are no hexrows at the bottom available to trim without cutting into South America, and I will not do that. Also there are only a handful of coastal hexes at the bottom, so removing bottom rows accomplishes nothing towards solving the problem.

[c92nichj]

ORIGINAL: Shannon V. OKeets

And yet further east. I have trimmed the top 11 hex rows from these first 3 screen shots.

It is looking more and more likely that I will trim 15 hex rows from the top of the world map. There is nothing up there: no ports, cities, resources, rail lines, just a whole lot of nothing. Patrice is aghast, and I haven't mentioned it to Rob, who has done a lot of work creating graphics for the coast lines and rivers up there. This would change the dimensions of the world map from 360 hexes wide by 195 hexes high to 360 by 180. Nice round numbers, but what is really driving this is bitmap memory, ...

I fully support to reduce the size of the map in not used areas, no units will go there and MWIF is a game, no offense patrice but your fascination with maps can be fulfilled with Google earth or something.

[Peter Stauffenberg]

Why is Juneau represented as a city on the map while the biggest Alaskan city of Anchorage is not?

The population of Juneau is only 31000 in 2000 so I can't imagine it was larger than 100.000 in 1940.

Anchorage has about 275.000 inhabitants now so I guess it had slightly less than 100.000 inhabitants
in 1940. But if the US player is supposed to place new units in Alaska I would guess they arrived
in Anchorange and not Juneau.

I know that Juneau is the STATE capital, but we don't use state capitals instead of the biggest cities.
We place COUNTRY capitals because they are different. The state capital of California is Sacramento,
but instead we place the important cities like Los Angeles, San Francisco and San Diego.

So maybe it's better to remove the city in Juneau and move it to Anchorage?

Or is Juneau added because someone in the MWIF project lives there? [:D]

[Froonp]

ORIGINAL: c92nichj
I fully support to reduce the size of the map in not used areas, no units will go there and MWIF is a game, no offense patrice but your fascination with maps can be fulfilled with Google earth or something.

I already do [:D] [:D]

[Froonp]

ORIGINAL: Borger Borgersen
Why is Juneau represented as a city on the map while the biggest Alaskan city of Anchorage is not?

The population of Juneau is only 31000 in 2000 so I can't imagine it was larger than 100.000 in 1940.

Anchorage has about 275.000 inhabitants now so I guess it had slightly less than 100.000 inhabitants
in 1940. But if the US player is supposed to place new units in Alaska I would guess they arrived
in Anchorange and not Juneau.

I know that Juneau is the STATE capital, but we don't use state capitals instead of the biggest cities.
We place COUNTRY capitals because they are different. The state capital of California is Sacramento,
but instead we place the important cities like Los Angeles, San Francisco and San Diego.

So maybe it's better to remove the city in Juneau and move it to Anchorage?

Or is Juneau added because someone in the MWIF project lives there? [:D]

In fact, none of Juneau and Anchorage should be cities.
Juneau has 4k inhabitants in 1940, 6k in 1944.
Anchorage has 2k inhabitants in 1940, 3k in 1944.
The WiF FE map supports this too, as none of those is a city, so I'll remove the city of Juneau and only leave the port.

[Froonp]

A question I have since I have reviewed the Canada part of the map :
This area (east of the border I drew) should be Labrador, part of Newfoundland Territory, not part of Canada.
All these hexes should be changed and owned by the Newfoundland Territory.
Should I make the change ?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labrador
Labrador only was part of Canada in 1949.

This has no consequences on WiF FE or MWiF, just that a country that would want to invade here would have to be at war with Newfoundland, but as Newfoundland is part of the CW, as Canada is, Newfoundland is always at war with whoever is at war with the CW.

[Caranorn]

I also wouldn't see a problem with trimming the map down. The first thing I thought when I saw the first screenshots of Canada and Alaska was "beautiful, but no one will ever use that terrain, no railroads, no cities, no ports, no nothing...". And those 15 hexes (height) should make a big difference, if the entire map was hexes it would be roughly 7.7% of the bitmaps, considering how much is really ocean, and the disproportion of landmass to ocean in the north this should make an even bigger difference. Trimming in the south I expect would be impossible due to cape Horn which obviously should be included.

[Incy]

ORIGINAL: Froonp

A question I have since I have reviewed the Canada part of the map :
This area (east of the border I drew) should be Labrador, part of Newfoundland Territory, not part of Canada.
All these hexes should be changed and owned by the Newfoundland Territory.
Should I make the change ?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labrador
Labrador only was part of Canada in 1949.

This has no consequences on WiF FE or MWiF, just that a country that would want to invade here would have to be at war with Newfoundland, but as Newfoundland is part of the CW, as Canada is, Newfoundland is always at war with whoever is at war with the CW.

If made a territory, it will have a smaller notional, it can be counquered separately from Canada, and canadian reinforcements can't be placed there. It will also mean cooperation issues with minor countries aligned with the CW

[Incy]

I notice several ports that are iced-in in WiF are no longer iced-in. Particularily, in WiF, there are no icefree ports in Canada which are also a city, or which are connected to the rail network. This has a significant effect on how fast CW can bring in Canadian reinforcements.

(I'm talking about the americvan minimap here, don't know how things are with the AiF maps)

ORIGINAL: Shannon V. OKeets

This piece is due south of the last. You can see 1 hex of all sea overlap from Hudson Bay.

I can no longer run the Delphi debugger with the game - it fails when trying to load in bitmaps: insufficient resources. That's because the Delphi Integrated Development Environment (IDE) requires bitmap resources (I guess). I have an easy work around that let's me continue working on the code, but it is a very strong indicator that MWIF (when running stand-alone, not from within the Delphi IDE application) is close to tapping out the bitmaps resources. I have been anticipating this ever since Rob sent over the bitmaps for Japan, so I am actually really happy that we can load in all of Canada - 4320 coastal bitmaps.

There are two solutions, ...

[Incy]

For some reason the border does not show correctly between Prince of Wales island and Alaska.

ORIGINAL: Shannon V. OKeets

This is due west of the last screen shot. I will post some close ups of the more populated areas in the second half of this series of posts.

[Incy]

On the trimming debate, I really understand it it the hexes have to go, but I do agree with Patrice, the hexrows will be missed!

btw, I would much rather see the bitmaps for all the rivers go. In my opinion the huge amount of river bitmaps doesn't really add to the game, 95% of them could easily be replaced by a standard set of bitmaps, with a much better visual result. A lot of the newer river bitmaps are in my opinion drawn to loosely with respect to the hexgrid, to the point that less experienced players may have real trouble looking at the map and figuring out which hexsides have rivers.
(just my opinion, I do realise (and agree) this will not change..)

[Froonp]

If made a territory, it will have a smaller notional, it can be counquered separately from Canada, and canadian reinforcements can't be placed there. It will also mean cooperation issues with minor countries aligned with the CW

Yes, but there is no cooperation problem for Canadian units, who can be the only ones that can probably go there.
As it is a Territory, there is no cooperation problem anyway. Cooperation is a problem for entering minor countries and major powers, not Territories.
As it is a Territory without cities, there is no reinforcement there anyway.
There is only the "smaller notional", but anyway, someone who invade here won't go very far inland as there are no railway, so this is a very minor gripe.

Also, Newfoundland is already a separate Territory, member of the CW, but not part of Canada, so no need to create it.

[Froonp]

ORIGINAL: Incy

I notice several ports that are iced-in in WiF are no longer iced-in. Particularily, in WiF, there are no icefree ports in Canada which are also a city, or which are connected to the rail network. This has a significant effect on how fast CW can bring in Canadian reinforcements.

(I'm talking about the americvan minimap here, don't know how things are with the AiF maps)

The latest america minimap ((c) 2000) has Halifax who is a city, major port, and connected to the railway network of USA / Canada.
On the AiF map (Pacific scaled), Halifax is only a Major Port, and no more a city. It's 1940 population is 59k (1944 population is 77k, showing it was fast growing city), which may be judged not enough to warrant a city, but other cities in Canada have had a "city status" with a lower population (Saskatoon with only 42k population in 1940 / 43k in 1944 for example).

I think that Halifax can stay a city, given its WWII growth and overall importance.
Edit : The latest American Minimap was released in 2000, and the AiF American maps were released in 1998, so I take it that Halifax GAINED city status between both, so that it is ADG's will to have it a city in the game.

Are there other ports that are not iced-in and that should be ?

[Froonp]

ORIGINAL: Incy

For some reason the border does not show correctly between Prince of Wales island and Alaska.

Gloups [X(]
This is because the label was wrong, this Prince of Wales Island is part of Alaska, so I renammed it from "Prince of Wales (Can)" to "Prince of Wales (Alaska)".
Thanks for that !

[Froonp]

ORIGINAL: Incy

On the trimming debate, I really understand it it the hexes have to go, but I do agree with Patrice, the hexrows will be missed!

btw, I would much rather see the bitmaps for all the rivers go. In my opinion the huge amount of river bitmaps doesn't really add to the game, 95% of them could easily be replaced by a standard set of bitmaps, with a much better visual result. A lot of the newer river bitmaps are in my opinion drawn to loosely with respect to the hexgrid, to the point that less experienced players may have real trouble looking at the map and figuring out which hexsides have rivers.
(just my opinion, I do realise (and agree) this will not change..)

In fact, technicaly, the River & Lakes bitmaps are not bitmaps.
They are coded in a proprietary format that Steve created (must be some kind of JPG that only handles 2 or 3 colors), and are not loaded in the game as "bitmaps", so they contribute to nothing in the bitmap problem.

Edit : Forgot to add that I for one love to see how the rivers flow naturaly, and not mechanicaly, between hexsides. While I agree that in some places it can be awkward to really know where the river hexside is at first glance, but I think that it is quite natural and logical to understand it easily on the second look.

[Froonp]

ORIGINAL: Incy
On the trimming debate, I really understand it it the hexes have to go, but I do agree with Patrice, the hexrows will be missed!

About this trimming, I just have had an idea.
Why not having the presence of the rows #0-14 (the 15 top rows) optional in the game ?

That is, you could keep all the data in the directories of the game, but only display the map from the row #15, so that we would still have the possibility to go back to the full map if future MWiF products makes it useful.

Or, you could add a "game option" to the game (or a commutator that modify how the MWIF.EXE executable is lauched) : If that game option is selected, the game has the top 15 rows trimmed, if the game option is not selected, the top row's bitmaps are paginated, and only loaded on demand. The map is not trimmed, but the useless area of the top of the map will only load on demand, with other parts of the world unloaded (South America ?).

[Peter Stauffenberg]

ORIGINAL: Froonp
In fact, none of Juneau and Anchorage should be cities.
Juneau has 4k inhabitants in 1940, 6k in 1944.
Anchorage has 2k inhabitants in 1940, 3k in 1944.
The WiF FE map supports this too, as none of those is a city, so I'll remove the city of Juneau and only leave the port.

That is fine with me. [:)]

Is it possible to show the uppermost 15 hexrows of the map from west to east so we can see which hexrows are
intended to be deleted from the map? I feel it's hard to say OK to delete them or not without seeing what is going
to be removed.

[Froonp]

ORIGINAL: Borger Borgersen
Is it possible to show the uppermost 15 hexrows of the map from west to east so we can see which hexrows are
intended to be deleted from the map? I feel it's hard to say OK to delete them or not without seeing what is going
to be removed.

I'm preparing screenshots to let you see those 15 top hexrows right now.

[Klingon]

Would it be possible to allow the full map as an option? Let players who don't want it run without it, and let the map enthusiasts use it? Could be someoe's got a strategy that involves a serious end run, and playing around in the Canadian wastes.

[Shannon V. OKeets]

ORIGINAL: Klingon

Would it be possible to allow the full map as an option? Let players who don't want it run without it, and let the map enthusiasts use it? Could be someoe's got a strategy that involves a serious end run, and playing around in the Canadian wastes.

"End run?" Most of the terrain up there is such that it would take the entire game just to move 1 unit across the wasteland. And it would be out of supply for almost all of that journey.