29.12.2007, 13:17
lowfighter Wrote:But there's also the fact that buildings were placed by the machine on Basarabia, while the Slovaks placed them by hand mostly. Machine is stupid, saves a lot of time of course, but the result is not good, all villages are alike, all towns are alike.
Anyway we end with a map which has very nice aspects and also not so nice ones. There are a couple of possibilities. Divide map in say 4 regions and populate (mission templates etc). Reduce number of villages and/or size of villages and especially towns on the whole map. Then you can again populate.
I just took a closer look at Bessarabia and I agree, the west is very nice, but sparsely populated. To me the towns just look like generic IL2 towns, as can be seen on the older maps - though perhaps with even fewer types of object. I noticed one particular house is repeated endlessly throughout, so I think they've already pared down the number of different types of object quite ruthlessly. I run a 2.8GHz machine and suffered a few stutters at times even with only one sightseeing plane on the map. This map might be another Finland - good, but not very useable without a top-end machine.
As I understand it, the map centred on Iasi is a drastically cut-down version of Bessarabia (25% the size) for more playability. Seems Iasi saw a lot of action during the war along with the Odessa area.
I think the makers must be aware of the difficulty, so they may also reduce the object count again- though in this case it would make the map look very bare. Fly_zo achieved good results with very few objects on his Croatia map, so it can be done if you have an artistic eye, but it means hand-positioning everything.
I think I'd favour reducing the size of the major cities to maintain a densely built-up effect though I'd be loath to lose any more of the small villages. They bring maps to life and prevent that 'snooker table' look. Dividing the map in half or by 4 might be the best solution as it just seems a bit too ambitious right now.