Panzer Battles 2 - The Official Teaser Thread

[Strela]

Hi all,

These are not intended to be weekly updates (or any frequency at all!) but it seems to be the only time I have a little extra bandwidth.

As mentioned elsewhere I was away on work travel and that slowed a few things down this week. An additional (big) scenario has just been completed and this will be a fun team play game. At forty turns it's manageable yet with a 'monster' scope. We got some time with one of the new 'features' for Panzer Battles that has huge potential. We may not use this feature to the depth we would like, but it will come down to bandwidth in the final home run.

There has been lots of talk in the 'nationalities' teaser about uniforms. Firstly, many of our graphics are generic. It's hard to find an appropriate photo with the right badges, beret etc. Sometimes there are even theatre issues as pointed out with Corporal M Smith.

We will try and correct or find images where we have glaring issues. A great example is the Luftwaffe/Marine discussion. The represented unit is Luftwaffe. When I went back and looked at how we arrived at green uniforms vs the expected blue, it turns out Osprey shows both in one of their volumes. The green was used. That said, I'm proposing to change it to the more common luft blue.

As we haven't announced the title, we can't share scenarios and other interesting info and hence we continue to use graphics as the discussion driver for the moment. Apologies to all that see endless pictures in this thread. We will share more on the game title/topic soon.

With graphics in mind, I thought it worthwhile to show you the effort it takes to change from green to blue in a simple uniform.

The below shot shows the original photo which was in black and white. The second shot is the current colourisation using green for the uniform. The third shot is adjusted for a more blue uniform;




How was the change from green to blue done? Essentially we convert the graphic into multiple layers with the black and white image as the base. That then has a colour 'rinse' overlaid to get the blue uniform we want. This is done by combining the grey from the black and white and tweaking the opacity of the blue. Lastly, we put the original green uniform image as the top layer and cut away all the green uniform allowing the blue to show through. This leaves the leather strapping, flesh tones and other equipment in their original colours and they supersede the blue uniform below.

Here is an example of the layers - you can see how the uniform is removed in the top layer;






Finally we can convert that into game images. That requires a special resizing program. As should be obvious a lot of detail is lost in this process, but enough remains to still be of reasonable quality.

Here are the 100% & 200% examples of both uniform colours;









There is a lot of effort that goes into the game images and considering the size we end up with, maybe just a little too much...!

David

PS I will close the 'nationalities' teaser off by the end of the weekend unless someone gets it before then.