Kursk mod

[Philippe]

There's going to be another round of updates to my mods as a result of work being done on the soon-to-be-released Normandy.

Normandy has turned out to be surprisingly complicated despite the fact that I've been working on it the longest. The problem may be that it came very early in the series, and a lot of things that one takes for granted (visually) hadn't been fully developed. Or sumfink. It will probably be done by the end of next week.

The silver lining is that a lot of basic issues got re-examined, and this turned up a few overlooked features in one or two mods that had been produced but never released. This round of updates will take care of that.

And what is going to trigger the new round of releases is a new method for representing damage: a red circle with a white horizontal line (a 'do not enter' traffic sign) instead of a yellow triangle with an exclamation mark (a computer 'pay attention' sign). I'm not really comfortable with using signs and symbols peculiar to the end of the 20th century for early and mid-twentieth century environments, so I think the traffic signs are a good solution. I had tried various other ways of representing mayhem, destruction, and collateral damage, and found everything I tried to use either visually unsatisfying or too obscure to comprehend at a glance. The yellow triangle has a lot going for it visually, but the circular red sign next to knocked down bridges and torn up track is eye-catching without being intrusive (I hope) and fairly self-explanatory. Their one drawback (which may not be a drawback) is that they don't overwrite trees and buildings and don't stand out strongly in forests and cities.

Of course, after saying all of that about the new symbols, I don't seem to have any screenshots of the first mod that will get updated with them. They'll be obvious in Budapest, but that's probably going to be the fourth East Front update. So untill I get a little further into the series of updates you'll have to use your imagination. I'm also thinking of including a set of roll-back map graphics (six bitmaps) just in case people hate my signs and want to go back to yellow triangles.

While I don't have any screenshots of the new signs ready at hand, I do have a couple of images of Kursk resized for the Blitz (I hope). This should show the new East front buildings that I've been phasing in for the last few updates.









You can see more of this in earlier versions by going here:

http://forums.gamesquad.com/showthread.p...igns-Kursk


The best place to see what I'm working in is GameSquad forum -- they don't resize screenshots and I've managed to keep the posts there up to date. The posts also include directions on how to install my mods, and links to the latest version of my mod along with the latest version of the mods that my mods build on.