Quick question on the Tiller games

[acctingman]

I know the Campaign series has the 3d units option, but am I right in saying his other games (Panzer Battles and Panzer Campaigns) do not?


Thanks

[Philippe]

Panzer Campaigns has a 3-D option, but I can't imagine why anyone would use it.

[panzerde]

The Napoleonic games, ACW series, Early American Wars, Panzer Campaigns, and First World War games all have 3D. Squad Battles also has a 3D option. Musket & Pike : Renaissance has 3D.


Panzer Battles does not have a 3D option.


In the pre-Modern games, the 3D views can occasionally be useful, and with mods, almost palatable. Having said that, you generally will want to mod the 2D views of these games as well, except for the First World War campaigns games. Our own Philippe has done some excellent mods for the Napoleonic Campaigns games and one for Renaissance - though I would love to persuade him to finish that one! In any case, the 3D views in these games can give a nice, almost miniatures-like view of the battlefield with some judicious modding.


In the modern era games, the 3D view is frankly horrible. I suppose there's someone that uses it, but as Philippe says, I can't imagine why.


The 2D views in Panzer Battles are a thing of beauty. Aside from excellent maps (which are about to get even better with some amazing overlays), the games have three different counter sets to choose from. While none are 3D specifically, one is a top-down view of units and vehicles that is quite appealing. I tend to go with the NATO symbols myself, since reading those on a crowded map is second nature to me, but any of them work very well. For platoon scale WWII gaming, it's impossible to beat Panzer Battles, IMHO.

[Strela]

Panzer Campaigns has a 3-D option, but I can't imagine why anyone would use it.

We've been officially looking at upgrading all the Panzer Campaign series graphics.

We have some solid prototypes for the 2D views which are a step in the right direction.

As far as 3D the actual terrain is quite good, but the issue is the actual units. They're either 'counters' or 'figures'. We can do something decent with counters but figures which should be the default approach is limited by the icon size which is only 32 pixels high. It's just not big enough and if this was even increased to 50 pixels we could do a lot more. Ideally at the scale of ACW/Napoleonics would allow us to put decent representations in game.

Off to petition John Tiller.....

As far as Panzer Battles, as Panzerde says, no 3D at this point of time, the 2D works pretty well.

David

[Boggit]

Panzer Campaigns has a 3-D option, but I can't imagine why anyone would use it.

Well I can, although unmodded it's pretty ugleee...  :hide:

Anyway Philippe is right because of that fact alone, and maybe because he hasn't done a mod for it.  ;)

(and as many people playing Tiller games will know, Philippe does some very attractive mods for Panzer Campaigns et al :bd: - There! Another challenge for Philippe! O0)

[Nefaro]

I know the Campaign series has the 3d units option, but am I right in saying his other games (Panzer Battles and Panzer Campaigns) do not?


Thanks

The ones that do, such as some of the Squad Battles series, doesn't look as good.  Most notably, the way the map is displayed, in 3D, looks weird and stretched horizontally too much.

For some reason, the old Campaign series did it much better.

[Micha]

Hello, i play squadbattles for long time but i wonder about an 3 d option. There are 2 2d looks, zoomed in and out, but 3 d ?? How this can be found in the options ?

[Micha]

Ok , ww1 has 3d but, Vietnam, Falkland and Tour of Duty ?

[Nefaro]

Ok , ww1 has 3d but, Vietnam, Falkland and Tour of Duty ?

Only a few SB titles have it.  Don't think those do.

I tried it once or twice, but it looked so messy & disproportionate I quickly switched back to counters.

[Boggit]

Ok , ww1 has 3d but, Vietnam, Falkland and Tour of Duty ?

Only a few SB titles have it.  Don't think those do.

I tried it once or twice, but it looked so messy & disproportionate I quickly switched back to counters.

I thought the same. It works with the Campaign series, but not SB. Of course a 3d art mod might change my mind...

[southern_cross_116]

The thing with the art in the SB series is that it was all done in 8 bit (that goes for both the 2d and 3d).  Vietnam, Tour of Duty, and Falklands don't currently have 3D. I think Pacific War doesn't either, nor does Soviet-Afghan War, Modern War, Korean War, Dien Bien Phu, and Spanish Civil War.

I don't remember if Winter War had it or I added it myself; anyway eventually they all will have 3d. I imagine it will have a different look than currently.

[Warhorse]

I did some 3D modding for the PzCampaigns, to make the 3d more appealing, 2D as well. They are available at the Blitz. These are early ones, I post regularly at the Panzer Campaigns forum when I update. Just did the Market Garden '44, Normandy '44, and Rzhev '42 games.

[Philippe]

Tiller's use of counters in the 3-D view does violence to a basic concept of perspective that has been part of the canon of western art and design since the fifteenth century.

If you visualize the sides of each unit as segments of lines that radiate out towards the viewer, in one-, two-, and three-point perspective all those different lines will converge on a single vanishing point that can be imagined as sitting somewhere far behind the screen.

The problem is that in Tiller's games all those lines are parallel and never converge.  This leaves the viewer with an uneasy sense that something is wrong, but you may not be able to put your finger on quite what it is unless you've spent some time worrying about how perspective actually works.

Many years ago when I realized what was going on (or rather, not going on), my initial reaction was to try drawing the counters and the Nato symbols on them with lines sloping inward, but quickly realized that that would only compound the problem: you can only have one single vanishing point for the sides of all the counters, and not have as many vanishing points as there are counters.

In case anyone is wondering, they teach this in Drawing 1 courses in community colleges because four-year schools won't give transfer students credit for drawing courses if they don't understand this (my artist girlfriend also teaches drawing at a local community college).

The issue can be ignored when you're using little tanks, cannons, or soldiers to represent  units because the lack of converging lines isn't in your face.  But it's much harder to ignore when you start using representantions of square counters for the images.  A shame, because I can still remember being artistically inspired when I was a kid and playing Blitzkrieg with my brother, and drawing a schematic of a battle situation that used counters. The sides of my counters didn't converge on a vanishing point either, but I was only nine years old and didn't know any better. 

[Strela]

We've been officially looking at upgrading all the Panzer Campaign series graphics.

We have some solid prototypes for the 2D views which are a step in the right direction.

David

As mentioned above we're looking at replacing all the artwork across the current twenty one games that have been published. This is definitely not a task for the faint-hearted and is something we have been doing in our spare time while working on further Panzer Battle titles. This is not just a graphics upgrade but will also include Ed Williams Volcano mods alternate scenarios - so it's more of a relaunch of the series. There may even be some new (very popular) channels to buy them from...

The current JTS versions of Panzer Campaigns use an early version of the 'small sized' Panzer Battles graphics. They were not at all to scale and the 'realistic' look didn't quite work.



Here is the current terrain set in Kharkov '43;





Here is the same shot using a more 'map' like view. All the unit images, markers and counters across the series will be updated also. Please note all images that follow are WIP.





Zoomed out view - Kharkov '43 (winter)





Zoomed in view;





Zoomed out 3D;





Zoomed in 3D (I am going to try to do more with the counters);





Here is another set of shots done for the earlier title, Kharkov '42. These show some summer shots. First one is the standard 2D view;





Zoomed out 2D;





Zoomed in 2D;





Zoomed out 3D;





Zoomed in 3D;





As mentioned this is to cover all twenty one games that have been released and we would like to upgrade them all at the same time to ensure consistency. So please don't ask when it will be ready but it is moving along nicely.


Finally, for comparison we will continue with the 'realistic' top down look for Panzer Battles to differentiate that series. Here is Maleme from our recent blog series.





David

[Philippe]

The new 2-D terrain for Kharkov '43 that you're proposing is very nice.

I'm not sure how it would look, but if you don't use little tanks, guns, and infantry in the 3-D, one thing you might consider playing around with is a Columbia games look:  draw the counters a bit more like Ageod-style  (or GMT-games style) leader counters that stand up vertically from the map rather than lying flat on it like the conventional die-cut counters we know and love.

Part of the problem with the tanks, guns, and infantry in the 3-D is that they were set up to face different directions.  Not sure about this, but if you were to simplify things a bit and only used one larger representative counter for everything in the hex, that might buy you enough spare pixels to produce a better image. The counters might have to be a bit like chess pieces and only face in a single direction (perhaps not as extreme as the counters in Unity of Command).

I will admit to having saved my old Talonsoft disks for the Command series so that I could mine them for unit images.  But I never got past making one or two halftracks because the project was more labor-intensive than one of my Napoleonic mods.

By the way, if you petition John about graphics, what he really needs to add into the game is the ability to change the orientation of the map.  When you play a board wargame you always sit behind the front line.