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Offline Asid

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Re: Military Operations
« Reply #15 on: April 27, 2018, 02:20:32 PM »
[DEV] Update for 4th week of April
posted by Grecco on April 27, 2018



This week was dedicated to creating a scenario to use as a 'backdrop' for the benchmark. We want to have a more or less realistic setup so we can benchmark the engine under typical conditions.

We decided on modeling the situation in northern France on May 17 1940. Panzergroup Kleist has broken through the French lines and the French are trying to plug the gap with counterattacks and the situation is very fluid.

The above image shows the current state of the level and is based on combined information taken from German and French situation maps shown below:





Using our engine, we can accurately replicate these dispositions in WYSIWYG fashion.
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Offline Asid

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Re: Military Operations
« Reply #16 on: April 29, 2018, 06:37:20 PM »
MilOps Blog: Camera behaviours
2018-04-27 BY Serge




Games are a visual medium. So how it looks is important. But also how you look at it.
For a game using a first-person-perspective, the behaviour is mostly determined. For a RTS game the camera behaviour is less pre-defined. For Military Operations it is even worse since in MilOps zooming is an integrate part of game-play because of the unit hierarchy and the fact that the game is situated on an actual spherical terrain (planet).
Behaviours in MilOps

At the moment we have 3 different situations for the camera.


Free roam camera
Here you move in spherical-space, aligned to the curvature of the planet. You either follow the terrain with a constant clearance, at a constant altitude or always in the direction the camera points.
What behaviour the camera will adopt depends on the situation (close to the terrain or high up) and the settings the user selected (Orbit or Airplane).




Follow a troop camera
The camera is attached to an object in the scene. When the object moves, the camera moves. The user can control how close the camera follows by zooming in/out using the mouse scroll-wheel.




Move to a unit camera
A transition behaviour. When you alt+click on a unit-icon, either in the 3D environment or in the 2D UI, the camera transitions to a new position that matches the size and location of the unit.




In stead of handling each situation separately, we try to design a camera that suits all requirements and smoothly transitions between behaviours.
For example, when you at+click on an icon, the current orientation is maintained, but the camera altitude and position is changed so that the whole unit is visible and centred on screen. This way the user can tweak his favourite view angle at any time without changing any settings.

The current camera options feel smooth and convenient to us, but we acknowledge that camera controls are very personal, so you may not agree. Therefore we expect that for the final game, camera behaviour will probably have had additional changes and tweaks. Your feedback from the MilOps-Benchmark application will be welcome and help us improving camera behaviour until it supports enough customisation to make it suit your taste.

Comments and reactions to this blog entry can be made on official forum.



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Offline Asid

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Re: Military Operations
« Reply #17 on: April 29, 2018, 07:35:16 PM »
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Offline Asid

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Re: Military Operations
« Reply #18 on: May 03, 2018, 02:29:27 PM »
Details, more details...
2 MAY   - TREESONG

For the curious among us, who like to get more information about the upcoming Benchmark application now...

The Quick-guide has been available for some time now on the Store-page .

It reveals details not available elsewhere.


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Offline Asid

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Re: Military Operations
« Reply #19 on: May 03, 2018, 02:32:18 PM »
Website update
3 MAY   - TREESONG



We added a new page to our website

It highlights some of the invaluable sources of information and inspiration we could not do without while developing MilOps. We recommend you  take a look at these
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Offline Asid

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Re: Military Operations
« Reply #20 on: May 11, 2018, 08:11:28 PM »
[DEV] Update for the second week of May
11 MAY   - TREESONG



We worked on two main topics since the last update:
1. Polish and UI tweaks for the Benchmark release next month.
2. A fancier OOB file format that supports a number of new features.

The first one isn't that exiting.
The second one is!

For saving game-play progress we use a normal, binary dump that contains everything. It makes an exact recreation of the game state possible.
Exactly what you want for a safe-game.

For OOB editing however, you want something else. You want to benefit from any improvement of the simulation and unit-Database without any additional integration effort.
So we devised a "recipe" file format. It contains not exact binary data, but a description of an OOB/scenario.
When loaded we can instantiate that description using what ever the recipe ingredient-state is at that time.
So if we change an ingredient, we automatically benefit from it when we load the recipe.

It is like the MIDI format. MIDI is a description of audio. It uses the described characteristics of audio to recreate analogue sound.
It is not an exact reproduction, and the quality depends on who is doing the interpretation of the audio description, but is very flexible.

We are very pleased with the results and exited about the possibilities.
It is ideal for modding without breaking compatibility when updating the engine.
This brings proper modding support so much closer!
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Offline Asid

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Re: Military Operations
« Reply #21 on: May 18, 2018, 09:50:41 PM »
[DEV] Update for the third week of May



This week we continued our work on the new OOB database format:

The information in the OOB database format we now have created has been completely separated from the representation in the game's code, in effect making it a generic format.

Our load code now transforms this into the specific data used by the engine and if the engine changes we need to change that code, but the information gathered in the OOB database can remain the same.

We felt this was needed since the OOB's are the result of historical research and thus represent some kind of "ground truth" and we don't want this effort to be wasted or require massive modifications if we change some detail inside the engine.

So we went the extra mile and separated the OOB format from the engine format and wrote a new loader for the engine. This separation will allow us to work on OOB's and engine features in parallel without them interfering with each other. This also means we can add more information to the OOB than the engine currently uses but might incorporate in the future.

In parallel we added more features to our OOB editing UI so we can create and edit OOB's a lot faster than before.
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Offline Asid

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Re: Military Operations
« Reply #22 on: May 25, 2018, 03:30:54 PM »
[BLOG] New BLOG entry about content in MilOps

The World Is Enough
2018-05-25 BY george



Crafting or Computing, That is the Question

Huge game worlds are not very common in gaming since they are hard to do both from a technical perspective and a content perspective. There are 2 extremes in creating a world in game development:

The first option is to hand-craft every piece of content inside your game. If you have the manpower, money and organization, you can create incredibly detailed and huge game worlds. You only have to look at GTA 5 to see what’s possible in that respect.

If you are short on artists but have very clever programmers, you can try and go for the other extreme: procedural generation. Here the computer itself runs through all kinds of sophisticated algorithms to calculate what the game’s content should be for a particular time and place in the game world. This approach is what allows a game like Elite: Dangerous to offer its players a huge universe of 400 billion star systems to fly around in.

GTA 5’s hand-crafted game world


Elite: Dangerous’ procedurally generated Milky Way


In Military Operations we want to have maps that show a a large amount of detail and are historically accurate. For a small independent developer like us hand-crafting all these maps ourselves at the detail level we desire is not an option. It would take too long and cost too much money.

The option of procedurally generating the maps is not feasible either. Procedural generation is a great way to produce a lot of content quickly, but coming up with procedural generation techniques that would produce historically accurate maps is very, very hard, if not impossible. Procedural generation can produce detailed maps that would not be very accurate, which is great for tactical games where you fight for control over a small patch of terrain, but it doesn’t work for an operational game like Military Operations where we want cities, rivers and other major geographic features to be present in the correct locations.

The solution to our problems is to do a bit of both: we start out with accurate map data and use procedural generation techniques to fill in the details. Where do we find this map data? The answer can be found here: the OpenStreetMap project.


Read on here
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Offline Asid

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Re: Military Operations
« Reply #23 on: June 02, 2018, 02:40:17 PM »
[DEV] Update for fourth week of May
2 JUNE   - GRECCO



The benchmark's release date is approaching rapidly and there are still plenty of things to do.

Work is now focussed on testing the application and tweaking the content. Besides fixing several bugs, enhancing performance and improving the UI, we also spent time this week on researching and building the French side of the OOB.

While there is quite some information avaible about the German Army for that time period, finding detailed information for the French Army - in 1940 considered to be the world's strongest army - is a lot harder.

But digging deep enough has yielded some very interesting websites with tons of details on French equipment, OOB's and unit TOE's.

Our latest addition to the OOB is the French Armored Division or "Division Cuirassée", a small part of which is shown in the screenshot above. On situation maps these units were shortened to "DCR" where the "R" stands for "Reserve" because they were in reserve when the Germans started their attack.
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Offline Asid

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Re: Military Operations
« Reply #24 on: June 12, 2018, 12:13:15 PM »
Release date postponed
Military Operations: Benchmark - Treesong



We are ready to release! But Steam isn't.

The Steam review takes much, much longer than promised. There isnothing for us to do but wait.

It may be related to the nature of MilOps and its use of non conventional tech. But judging from the forums, this seems to be a new and recent problem that more developers suffer from.

Since we're completely in the dark, we will postpone the release date by a week each time (yes it may take several weeks). We're realy sorry for this delay. We 'll keep you updated. Fingers crossed!
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Offline General Sandman

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Re: Military Operations
« Reply #25 on: June 13, 2018, 09:55:26 AM »
This is actually the concept for a wargame I am dreaming of since a very long time. A symbiosis of Grigsby´s War in the east/west, Hearts of Iron over to the Command Ops - series and Combat Mission - series, Theatre of War - series.  :drool

Lets see, how well the project gets realized.  :pray
« Last Edit: June 13, 2018, 11:21:55 AM by General Sandman »
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Who we were

“We were the ones who knew but did not understand, well informed but without insight, overloaded with factual data but poor in experience and wisdom. So we went, not stopped by ourselves."

Based on Roger Willemsen R.I.P.

Offline Asid

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Re: Military Operations
« Reply #26 on: June 15, 2018, 04:11:42 PM »
Military Operations: Benchmark

We are cleared for release!
15 JUNE   - TREESONG



Yesterday we received a response from Steam
on our inquiry what is holding up the review. It seems there was no issue after all and we have a green light for release. No additional details were given, so we have no idea what caused the delay.

We now have a decision to make. Do we release immediately or do we keep the new release date? We think it is best to keep the new date to prevent confusion.

To ease the wait, we added a new blog entry to our website in which we make a start in uncovering more about MilOps the game. It is our intension to dedicate future blog entries to each feature mentioned, explaining in detail what you can expect.

We encourage you to use the forum for discussions and asking us any questions.

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Offline Asid

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Re: Military Operations
« Reply #27 on: June 19, 2018, 06:52:51 PM »
Some useful tips
19 JUNE - TREESONG



Now that the wait is almost over these pointers may be of interest

•   To prevent disappointments, please check the minimal system specs first.
•   The first time, MilOps will take longer to start. This is because it optimizes the GPU specific code for your system. Subsequent runs will be fast.
•   The QuickGuide contains an explanation of the benchmark-run results if you're interested.
•   The interaction possibilities during roaming are also explained in the QuickGuide .
•   In case you encounter a problem, our support page will be your quickest way to a solution.







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Offline Asid

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Re: Military Operations
« Reply #28 on: June 20, 2018, 10:32:16 PM »
Military Operations: Benchmark
Announcement

Benchmark Facts & Figures



The full earth-covering base map
contains basic land mass geometry and height information for the entire Earth in 1 million tiles, containing 400 million height samples, with each sample describing the height for a 2 km x 2 km area.

For Europe we include a low-detail land-use database
West to East stretching from the UK to the Ural mountains and North to South from the North Cape to the Sahara desert. This database contains features sized 150m across or larger.



The highest detail map covers the following parts of
Belgium, France, Germany and Luxembourg. It includes elevation with a resolution of 30 m x 30 m per sample, building geometry and geographic features as small as 3 meters across.
It also includes a full navigable road network as well as railways and waterway geometries such as canals and streams.



The simulated armed forces in the Benchmark
consist of over 50000 men, 3000 tanks and other armored vehicles, 7000 motorcycles, 12000 soft-skinned motor vehicles, over a 1000 guns and 4000 horses in over 6000 units.
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Offline Asid

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Re: Military Operations
« Reply #29 on: June 21, 2018, 12:18:47 AM »
Military Operations: Benchmark, release trailer

To accompany the release, we created a new trailer.

It gives an overview of what the "roam" feature in the Benchmark has to offer.




Published on Jun 20, 2018

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