Scourge Of War Gettysburg Remastered

[Asid]

Gettysburg Store Page is Live
Fri, 9 August 2024



GB Finally Gets Steam

STEAM Page


The store page for GB has just gotten approved this morning and it's now live. This is the original GB offered again on Steam with the performance enhancements and Steam integration as Remastered. Our goal is to eventually have only one engine driving the gameplay for all of our games. It's a big project, so we wanted to get GB out there in the mean time. We've had a ton of requests because GB has never been on Steam. One thing we do promise is that our games for a battle will cost the same as the DLC for the battle. So whether you buy GB as a game, or wait and buy it as a DLC for remastered, you'll pay the same price and get the same great features.

The Scourge Of War series has enjoyed an awesome community on Steam and the entire team is very excited to bring more great new features. Steam has been excellent for development and we hope to integrate everything that makes sense.

NorbSoftDev is an indie game company that has been creating wargames for over 20 years. The team is from all around the world and none are full time game developers. They are wargamers from all walks of life and just share a love for the type of warfare from another time. Scourge Of War is a game engine specifically created for regimental based warfare and completely moddable and unlimited as to what you can create by only your imagination.

[Asid]

Scourge Of War - Gettysburg



Welcome to Scourge of War, a real-time 3D computer game/simulation developed by NorbSoftDev, the company headed by renowned game designer Norb Timpko, designer of Mad Minute Games' acclaimed Take Command series. Scourge of War is the epitome of historical command simulations.

STEAM Page


About This Game
Welcome to Scourge of War. We hope you are ready for a fight. This game places you in command of the units of armies and allows you to refight the many historical bloody clashes during the age of regimental base warfare. This is a type of wargame that we call real time command simulation. Real time command simulation combat begins with Sid—as in Sid Meier, who released the now legendary wargame Sid Meier’s Gettysburg (SMG) in 1997. This game established a new genre, freeing players from the confines of the earlier wargame conventions of the hex grid and dice roll. It placed the units on a 3D battlefield and lets the player/commander move units around. There were no turns—combat happened in real time and could be interrupted only by putting the entire game on pause. It also included a multi-player (MP) feature that is still in use today. Then came Sid Meier’s Antietam in 1998, an evolutionary release that introduced players to the deceptively rolling terrain outside of Sharpsburg and included other battles in the Antietam Campaign at South Mountain and Crampton’s Gap. The next step in the evolution of the genre was Breakaway Games’ transfer of the game engine to the Napoleonic Wars with the release of Waterloo: Napoleon’s Last Battle, in 2001. The final chapter for the Sid Meier engine was Austerlitz: Napoleon’s Greatest Victory, released in 2002. A new chapter in black powder era combat simulation opened in 2005 with the release of Civil War: Bull Run by Mad Minute Games. This game is built on the traditions of the Sid Meier games but was an entirely new generation. It was noted for its highly capable Artificial Intelligence (AI) opponent and careful attention to historical detail. The second and final game from this very small company was Take Command: 2nd Manassas, appearing in 2006. This release also included the battles of Cedar Mountain and Chantilly, the bookends of the campaign. Both games received multiple awards reflecting the historical accuracy and intensity of the real time command experience.

Then came the start of the Scourge of War series. Recreating Gettysburg and Waterloo in the same fashion. It's been many years since those initial releases and old men need something to do in their twilight years. So, we figured we'd take our time and fix some issues, rebrand the game, get on Steam, upgrade the art, and see what we can do to improve performance. There are improvements to the graphics engine and a large number of next generation art assets. The AI has improvements that build on the experience from previous games. The AI is smarter, meaner, and more likely to run you off the battlefield unless you are a skilled wargamer. This game now uses the Steam multi-Player features to allow you to match your skills against human opponents anywhere in the world the AI or both at once. So, make sure your guns are clean, your powder is dry, and get ready for battle on the legendary battlegrounds of history!


Screens are a work in progress and not final

[Asid]

Gettysburg Is Released
Mon, August 26, 2024



We have brought the GB store online and uploaded SOW Gettysburg and it's now for sale! This was a little change of course for us and it took a while to figure out how to make everything work. I think we have it finally.

When we brought Remastered for sale, there were many fans that asked for Gettysburg. They had no interest in Waterloo, and just wanted the ACW and wanted it now. Gettysburg has never been sold on Steam before, so it all made sense. We just had to figure out how to do it with our goal of moving to just one game engine that can run everything.

Gettysburg differs from Waterloo in the handling of AI, the user interface, and many of the file formats are different. So the full conversion to the remastered engine will take some time. So this is a step along the path, but know that if you are an ACW fan, GB is not done. We will continue with improvements and will be eventually using the same engine for both games.

As a little taste we did bring some of the upgrades into the older engine. A big performance boost as well as Steam multiplayer. We also got it out as soon as we were able which was what we heard time and again.

Thank you again for the great community support! It is a huge commitment upgrading these games with such a small team. Thank you!

[Asid]

Dev Update 08/29/2024
Fri, August 30, 2024



Wanted to just give everyone an update as we've made some promises and we're doing our best to make sure that we get everything covered. We released GB early for those that could not wait. It's basically the old version with a few critical upgrades. There will be continued work on GB as we get to the point where we can use the remastered engine and can also release GB as a new DLC.

It's all confusing, but no matter what path you follow to get the games, we'll do our best to make sure that your faith in our small team is not misplaced.

Currently I am working on a form of MP saves. A while back Mitra designed a sort of a hack to get something working. It does work! But it's a pain to get working. I'm working on taking his idea and making it easier to enact. In it's simplest form, it adds a saved game with the scenario that is sent to all the players. So everyone loads the scenario, then the saved game, and hopefully we'll have the ability to restore MP. We'll have to see if we can get some sort of autosave in there as well so that in the worst case where the game fails, you can recover. It really sucks to play and setup for hours and then lose everything.

The biggest issue we see right now with MP is having different mods enabled. This is also something I'll be taking a look at. Many mods don't matter, it's trying to understand which is which that causes issues. If you like using a modded toolbar in your MP games, you should be able to use it. But we cannot allow anything that can upset the balance of the game. It's always a balancing act trying to figure out which is which and we know (based on feedback) that we do not have it correct yet.

After these items are complete, I'll move to the GB AI and converting it to the dll format of the remastered version. The rest of the team is working on updating the maps and the screens. It's a large project, but when it's done GB will be remastered as well. Yes, a campaign map for GB too!!!

We hope to have this done by the end of the year so that we can join the end of year sales and have two products that are indicative of SOW Quality. We hope that by joining the sales we can get some front page time for increased exposure to more of the wargaming community.

Currently we are getting the other two DLCs for Waterloo finished (Wavre & Ligny). Gettysburg workshop will have to wait until it's using the new engine as well as it's various DLCs.

We are also working on translations for everything! English, Italian, German, French, Spanish, and Chinese. We have some issues with the way we save some items and there are fixes that need to be made in order to support these features correctly. I made the same mistake in languages and in the resolution. Rather than save values, I saved indices. Bad move. So I plan on fixing that as well. We are also looking at the font resolution issue and will have some solution for that in the future. It might be something like 'large fonts' in where you can just globally increase the font size.

I think that's about it for now. I hope we have at least a little of what's important to all our supporters.

[Asid]

Dev Update 20241026
Sat, October 26, 2024



AI


The two biggest projects in converting GB to the remastered engine are the screens and the AI. Looking back on how I did the AI dll, I'm not very happy with the work. It's very limiting and hard to understand. I am looking to redesign the interface as doing the same for GB is just building on a crumbling tower.

The concept of the AI is to receive the information and then issue a series of commands. It should be simple. The first pass I just moved code from the main engine to a dll and it caused a ton of odd functionality.

The forced checks should not happen in the AI. Meaning the forced fallback, retreat, and route are not AI routines. They are engine rules and therefore should not be moddable. But other items, such as the full strategic AI should be included in the DLL rather than the odd mix that is there.

The design concept that I am striving towards is where machine learning, behavior graphs, reinforcement learning, could be added if someone wanted to take on that project. Those require a clear set of commands. So you enter the AI routine and you send back a series of commands.

Of course if you really wanted to add true machine learning, you'd need to run it a LOT in order to train your model. That's also not really possible and the game is not conducive to that feature. But I can set it up that way so that it will be easier to add when we have the time.

I really hoped to get this done by the end of the year, but I'm not so sure at this point. That is still my goal, so hopefully I can get there.

PS - Americans, go vote!

Norb