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Offline Asid

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PCWORLD - Norbsoft interview: Gettysburg
« on: March 07, 2017, 02:03:29 PM »
Covering the Waterfront: NorbSoftDev on Scourge of War Gettysburg

By Matt Peckham

PCWorld | Oct 12, 2010 8:01 AM PT



Gettysburg: Scourge of War isn't a real-time strategy game for the masses. It has a perfectly functional interface, but you'd never call it "slick." It's more study-intensive than the comparably simplistic Total War series but yields commensurately higher returns. It tackles the mother of all Civil War battles with aplomb and occasionally startling historical verisimilitude, offering control of blues and grays from army scale down to regimental level. It's wargaming without apologies, designed by hardcore history buffs for hardcore history gamers.

This spring I spoke with the Scourge of War's creators, Jim Weaver and Norb Timpko. In part one, we talked about Gettysburg maps, canonical books, and how they got from Waterloo to Little Round Top.

Game On: We were hoping to get Larry Tagg in on this interview, but it sounds like he's had to take a rain check.

Jim Weaver: Larry had to bow out. I'd forgotten that in his day job, he's an English teacher. He's also this semester the drama coach, and it's the last week before the performance, so he's in the middle of, as he said, frantic rehearsals week.

GO: He sounds like he'd be a fascinating guy to talk to, just for the book on Lincoln that came out last year. Have you read it?

JW: I haven't read the Lincoln book, no. Actually I haven't even read his Gettysburg book, because my wife will probably shoot me if I buy more books on Gettysburg. I've got a stack two wide and three feet tall next to my desk just so that I can grab them when I have some arcane point of Gettysburg history to look up.

GO: The harried life of the grognard.

JW: When you're the lead designer, you have to cover the waterfront in terms of details. Most everybody else can specialize, but I've got to be able to cover the waterfront.

GO: Like fending off crazed wargamers complaining the details rendered on some farmhouse are off by one window.

JW: Oh yeah. We have one guy who...actually it was really useful. When we were developing the game, we'd post screenshots, and he apparently lived in a farmhouse that's in the game for a long time and spent endless amounts of time tramping the battlefield. So every time we'd put up screenshots, he'd look at them, and he would pick out little things that weren't quite right, and then go look up the historical sources to make sure he was correct.

It was quite useful, because that and a couple of stone quarries that we had missed, which are actually sort of 10-foot-across holes in the ground and sunk down a little bit, were the only things that we didn't have right on all three maps.



OOBs, exhaustive battlefield atlases, and Breakaway Games.



GO: How do you choose which historical "facts" to build from? Say there's dispute in the academic record.

JW: What I've tried to do, and fortunately Gettysburg is so well documented, is there are some reasonably definitive sources that you can use. So we picked one source for the OOB [order of battle] and the officer's list, and we picked another source for unit strength, and that's it. If you don't agree with it, well, okay, but we picked things that are regarded as pretty canonical.

GO: Like the Nafziger OOBs?

JW: This was the Eicher [John H.]. It's posted on the Gettysburg Discussion Group site. And we used The Big Book of Unit Strengths, which I'm just drawing a blank on right now.

GO: You've also recommended a book called The Maps of Gettysburg, which I noticed they just rereleased in a full-color edition.

JW: Oh my. Well if you're really interested in Gettysburg, there's a 400-something-page atlas by a guy named Phil Laino. It's on spiral bound, so it's really good for carrying around and flipping back and forth. It's probably three or four times as detailed as The Maps of Gettysburg.

GO: The Civil War equivalent of Esposito and Elting's Atlas of the Napoleonic Wars?

JW: Yeah, this is definitely...it's really, really good, because there are several places where he'll put up a map that shows it happening one way, and the next page, he'll put up another map, and say, you know, other people think that it actually happened this way. So places where things really are in dispute, he gives you map one and map two. Pick what you want.

But for people doing scenario design it's especially wonderful, because it's very detailed and tightly sequenced. Laino's maps position things down to the regiment, so it's a great resource for strange people like us who build wargames.

GO: Let's talk about NorbSoftDev's history. Norb Timpko actually started with Breakaway Games, the folks behind Sid Meier's Antietam! and the Napoleonic games based on that engine.

JW: Yeah, and we probably want to ping this off Norb to make sure I've got it right, but basically Norb was working as a coder, working at Breakaway writing code. He didn't work on the Civil War games, but he worked on Waterloo: Napoleon's Last Battle.

GO: And Austerlitz [Napoleon's Greatest Victory]?

JW: I can't remember the exact sequence of how things went, because he left after awhile, but that's where he and Adam Bryant hooked up. Adam actually did pixel painting on sprites and getting all the uniforms in, which was mind-numbingly tedious apparently. They didn't render them off a 3D model, they just literally...I don't know the details, but the story is he spent a lot of time painting details in by hand, one pixel at a time. So eventually they decided they wanted to see if they could do something like this themselves. Norb had always wanted to code a game all by himself, and not just be one unit of a bigger machine.

They started out as a two person organization, started writing code, and eventually brought in a third person who'd been very active in the Austerlitz community to give them some player perspective. Then they brought me in for historical perspective, because being a scientist by training, I tend to cite chapter and verse of sources.



MadMinute Games and the Take Command series.



GO: What's your area of training specifically?

JW: I work at a government agency doing laboratory research, so it's a complete change of pace. I end up worrying about strange quirks of biology, how molecules and cells and so forth react to each another, and then at night I go home and try to turn a blinking cursor into history.

GO: So this new team, calling themselves MadMinute Games, starts working on a Civil War real-time strategy game.

JW: It was eventually named Civil War: Bull Run, and we added more people to the test team, but it was still a pretty small group of people. That was released commercially in 2004, and we were all like wow, we did it.

GO: And The History Channel picked that up.

JW: They were brought into it somehow by the original publisher and they basically lent their name to it for some reason or another, but that was all the contact we had with them as far as I know.

So then we went on, and after some back and forth, came out with Take Command: Second Manassas, which was well-received. By that Time, Norb and Adam had been working together for something like five years. I think it was just a case of too close, too long, and they had what amounted to a corporate divorce and went their separate ways.

Norb wanted to continue, but essentially we had to start...it was actually good in the long run, because rather than just continuing on, we had to go back and start over from scratch. Norb ended up recoding a lot of things somewhat differently and more efficiently.

GO: Had Norb coded the original games by himself, or had he and Adam split any of that?

JW: No, Adam is not a coder. He does other things, but he could hardly...as Norb said, he'd be strained to code a basic Do loop. That's not his strength. He was very good in other areas, but he doesn't code.

GO: So MadMinute dissolves.

JW: Norb went off, and the company he'd already formed for doing consulting work, NorbSoftDev, he just folded the wargame effort into that, and after some additional back and forth, he asked me if I'd take on the job of lead designer, which largely amount to being chief cat-herder. We had some people that we'd assembled as a team, and we brought in others necessary to produce the game, and all that culminated in Gettysburg, which came out this spring, to, so far, a pretty good response.
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Offline Asid

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Re: PCWORLD - Norbsoft interview: Gettysburg
« Reply #1 on: March 07, 2017, 02:08:24 PM »
In part two, we discuss the design process.

Building a Civil War: NorbSoftDev on Designing Scourge of War Gettysburg


By Matt Peckham

PCWorld | Nov 29, 2010



Game On: Why Gettysburg?

Jim Weaver: Because it's the 800 pound gorilla of the Civil War. The original plan with Mad Minute was to start at First Manassas and then go battle by battle through the war. That kind of fell apart, and when Mad Minute went out of corporate existence, or at least functional existence...I don't know what the legal status is...it was like, okay, what are we going to start with.

We knew from what we had with Second Manassas that we had a good framework that worked pretty well, but we wanted to bring in multiplayer, which has turned out to be a really great feature, though it was a tremendous amount of work.

So Gettysburg was sort of...if you're going to do something with the Civil War, everybody knows Gettysburg. Every school kid's heard of Gettysburg. If they don't know any other battle in the Civil War they know that one. It's the easiest thing to sell even to people who might not be hardcore Civil War.

GO: How did you approach it coming off the Second Manassas technology?

JW: By saying let's take the concept that we put together and make it better. We wanted to make it the next generation. We wanted to make the A.I. smarter and harder to beat. We wanted to add multiplayer. But we were also looking at this as building a base. The engine is designed quite intentionally with an awful lot of versatility to it.

You could do the American Revolutionary War simply by changing the uniforms and a bunch of the files. You could actually mod it, if you had enough talent to put together a whole team and build the uniforms. The Revolutionary War could be built on a mod basis. It's a lot of work...well, actually you couldn't do all of it, because the maps are locked, but everything else could be done.

So it's designed to be a very versatile core engine that you could use for more or less any age of linear warfare, at least involving firearms. I'm not going to say you could use it as-is for Roman battles.



GO: When you were trialing new features, who tended to lead? Creative or developmental?

JW: It's never quite that obvious or smooth, and it's also more than just me in the role of the lead designer. There's a tremendous amount of contribution from everybody on the team. Norb isn't historically minded, so this is essentially a way to give him some real challenges in coding. And it's a really cool thing to do, to take something like this and turn it into real American history.

But the whole team's involved throughout. One person might throw an idea out and it'll ping-pong back and forth in email for a bit, and if it looks good we'll put it in as an official feature request in the tracking system. At that point Norb will look at it and determine how implementable it is. Sometimes he'll rotate it 30 degrees and tilt it a little bit to make it work, then put it out there for the team to test, leading to more back and forth until its refined and ready to go. So there's a lot of dialogue between various members of the team, you know, the map people want this, the scenario people want that. I get to make the final call if we're stuck on something and have to make a decision to keep the ball rolling, because you can easily get bogged down in the details here. This is a long process, and we're all doing it because it's a fun thing to do, not because we're expecting to get rich off it.

GO: Speaking of profits, the wargames market's never been where you stick your retirement portfolio. Why develop a game for such a niche audience?

JW: We're not corporate. Nobody's doing this as their day job, and we're publishing ourselves, so our timelines are our own. They're all self-imposed. We're not like Microsoft. We don't ship on a calendar. We ship when it's ready to go out the door and clean enough. We take a lot of pride in shipping virtually bug-free games.

Of course something as complex as Scourge of War...we find that as we go from six people playing it to hundreds of people playing, a lot of things that we never thought of doing, somebody else tries it and says hey, you've got a problem here. So there's always that process to be mindful of, but we've already rolled a few patches out and we're down to pretty minor stuff in terms of fixing apparent bugs.

GO: Did you spend much time at the battlefield gathering intel with the game in mind?

JW: We actually started an annual tradition of having a get-together on the battlefield for everybody on the team that could make it. Not everybody can, of course. The guy who did most of the uniforms is in England. The guy who's our wizard of CSV [comma separated value] files is in Germany. We opened it up this year to anybody who wants to show up who's a player.

We had one guy who did the historical scenarios, and he's been to the battlefield like 50 or 60 times. He leads a tour around for anybody that wants to go. Last year we supplemented that with the first open test of the multiplayer, where we rented a little conference room at a nearby hotel.

But a lot of going to the battlefield was just kind of to...you know, we've looked at it onscreen and looked at the maps and looked at 10 different kinds of maps. So going to the battlefield's really just to get a feel for seeing it in three dimensions, in spite of all the tourists and monuments cluttering up the battlefield. That stuff's appropriate to a certain extent, but we're used to looking at it in 1863 and not 2010. So yeah, it's kind of cool to go up and see it in person and gauge how good a job we did.

GO: Speaking of battlefields, I like that Norb started with Manassas. After touring it myself, it's probably the easiest to take in and wrap your brain around and game without getting lost in the details. Gettysburg on the other hand...I mean, Antietam was crazy enough. I'm still getting my head around that.

JW: Oh Antietam...that's some of the most deceptive terrain I've ever seen. It's so sneaky. You look at it and think oh, little rolling fields, big deal. Then you go out and walk it and realize how easy it'd be to hide an entire division behind some of them, which of course is exactly what happened.

GO: Standing up in the observation tower you can't even see Bloody Lane because of the way the terrain slopes.

JW: Yeah, it's extremely deceptive. It must have driven the commanders nuts to fight a battle on something as sneaky as that.
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Offline Asid

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Re: PCWORLD - Norbsoft interview: Gettysburg
« Reply #2 on: March 07, 2017, 02:16:20 PM »
In part three, we dig into the game itself.

Gettysburg Unplugged: NorbSoftDev on How Scourge of War Gettysburg Thinks


By Matt Peckham

PCWorld | Nov 30, 2010



Game On: Do you know The Southern Grays? The living historians?

Jim Weaver: Not familiar with them, no.

GO: They ran a demonstration of artillery canon fire at Second Manassas, over by Brawner's Farm, and one of the things they talked about was that Jackson had a sort of philosophy where if he ever caught any of the guys riding on the limbers, he'd have them shot.

So I was playing around with the artillery in Scourge of War, and I see three guys get up and sit on the limber as I'm moving it around, and was wondering if the Jackson story was apocryphal, or is that a level of detail you're not as concerned with modeling here?


JW: Well, it would depend...on the battlefield, riding on the limbers, they could get where they were going in a hurry. But on the march, they would walk, because it reduced the load on the horses. And the Confederates, being short of horses, had to take care of them to the greatest extent that they could. The Confederate artillery teams almost exclusively had four horse hitches, whereas the Union artillery had six, which gave them a little better mobility and speed over the ground. But they had the horses to spare where the Confederates didn't. So I can understand where Jackson would be saying, on the march, you know, get down and walk. Although he was probably less polite than that.

GO: When you're modeling the different regiments and their how they interact, how do you model and calculate the formation physics? Does the computer see big blocky rows of guys, or discrete bodies? Are the gun ballistics modeled individually, or is it more of an abstract firepower aggregate?

JW: The formations are actually set by sprite. We have a whole file that's nothing but laying out all the different formations and subsets that we've included in the game. There's a lot we left out, of course, because we don't want everyone to have to learn a 300 page drill manual just to play the game.

GO: You mean those little pocket-sized drill guides I saw in all the battlefield museums? The 1863 U.S. Infantry Tactics guide?

JW: Yeah.

GO: I picked one up at First Manassas and thumbed through it. It's kind of flooring. I mean, you've got three hundred pages devoted exclusively to complex formation drilling. Did these guys back in the day really have all that stuff down pat?

JW: The average infantry unit would drill, weather permitting, four hours a day, every day, because the drill was so complex. It had to be learned to the point of being spinal reflex, because you had to do it on the battlefield when all hell's breaking loose around you and artillery's going off and people are getting shot and there's noise and smoke and chaos. When the colonel says wheel left, the feet need to do it without thinking.

That's how you win battles, being drilled to that level of being able to do it without thinking about it, because you've got enough to do with loading and firing and filling in the gaps as casualties are taken. You had to know how to go from one formation to any other formation, and how to get there without ending up in a big rugby scrum in the middle of the field, which certainly happened a lot with green units.

GO: How cohesive were these formations under fire?

JW: It depended on...there's a famous quote from I forget which southern general who basically said Confederate units were never in straight lines, that every soldier aligned on himself and marched at his own speed. So the formations were general approximations, but they were never as pretty as the drill manuals made them out to be.

The Union troops tended to be a little better, but it wasn't like on the parade ground, because you were marching across some farmer's field with rocks and woodchuck holes and places where an artillery shell had just landed, so the ability to keep even reasonably close formations was a trick. Keeping your formation organized and lined up allowed you to concentrate firepower down range, and that's what...being able to put rounds on the target won the battle.



Artificial intelligence and historical stupidity


GO: You have scripting dictates in some of the scenarios to establish a certain amount of historical authenticity. What kinds of choices is the A.I. considering when it's not on script?

JW: We tell it what it ought to do, and then Norb figures out how to write the code to make it happen, and that's part of his genius as a coder. We can tell him the troops need to do this, and he'll translate that into lines of code.

That said, the A.I. was really designed to react to some extent unpredictably, and to react dynamically to what's happening. That's part of why it's such a resource hog, because it's doing a lot of thinking about things and checking things and looking around. As we've worked on it, we've made it smarter and smarter, although as somebody pointed out, even when it's acting stupidly, that's historically accurate. You can find historical examples of real generals doing some remarkably boneheaded things.

GO: Like Burnside at Fredericksburg.

JW: Right. We designed it to read in the personality characteristics of the various generals, from the OOB [order of battle] files, so that this will tend to...if a given general was historically not very aggressive, that's the way we want him to act as sort of his base, around which behavior will oscillate with a degree of randomness. And if somebody else was really aggressive and you put him on defend, chances are he's still not going to stay there and he'll go out and attack anyway.

We're thinking to be really good at this game, you want to look at your generals and know who would be a better defender or attacker. I'm not sure how many people get into it at that level of detail, but the capability and functionality are in there.

GO: You'd think that would be the primary draw for Civil War buffs, to be able to go in and almost role-play the battle. You know, stick the game in grognard mode [which locks your visual and command ability to one person, including having to issue orders by courier dispatches].

JW: Yeah, from the player's perspective, that's the hardest mode to play in, that pure historical mode where everything goes out by courier. We're still pinging back and forth about that mode, because the interface wasn't originally designed with it in mind. It was designed for the general 200 feet up, who can see the ground from that privileged decidedly unhistorical aerial point of view. We're still feeling our way around what else we could do to tweak the interface to make it more practical to play when you're tethered to the level of the general's head.

GO: It actually threw me at first. I installed the game, loaded it up, saw the difficulty settings, you know, easy, normal, veteran, grognard, and thought "well grog, of course." So I click grog and launch a battle...bear in mind I haven't read the manual yet...and then I'm sitting there on the back of the horse, wondering if the camera's broken or I accidentally zoomed in or something. And then I pulled out the manual and read about the feature and thought that's brilliant, they've managed to make the game accessible to general players while solving the age old "desktop general" battlefield intelligence issue, all while folded into the same game engine.

JW: Yeah, it was actually a mod from Take Command Second Manassas that a guy on the forums made and the response was pretty positive. It's hard, yeah, but for people who really want to understand the challenges of the real Civil War command experience short of actually getting shot at, that's where we were aiming with that mode, to make it as completely realistic as possible.

It's one of the things Larry Tagg has been a strong advocate of, and there's a community that's already formed around playing in that mode.

In part four: Wargames versus real war, scenario design, and balancing fun against historical accuracy...

Note: I have not found part 4. Not sure if it was ever published
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Offline Asid

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Re: PCWORLD - Norbsoft interview: Gettysburg
« Reply #3 on: March 07, 2017, 02:17:06 PM »
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Offline Beef

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Re: PCWORLD - Norbsoft interview: Gettysburg
« Reply #4 on: March 08, 2017, 03:11:39 AM »
Great posts Asid, thanks. I hope you find Part 4.

I especially liked the map book by Phillip Laino referenced on the article. It is available on Amazon for $50 (There is a $299 used version for some reason) smile.amazon.com

I know the image below is displaying huge; however, it shows great detail. The "20MA" unit is, I believe without having the benefit of the book, the 20th Maine commanded by Joshua Chamerlain--depicted in the movie Gettysburg.

Cool stuff. I love maps and am really considering getting this book!




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