Names to Faces

@barnee

So those are extra images that were going to be for commanders in the variant 1941 game. You could probably ditch em all from the standard package since they’re extraneous, and cause I also put those in the extra folder with map making stuff. Sorta your call there, what all to include. Like there are some extra tanks and whatnot as well. Mechanically those Commander units were going to work sorta like bombers, except also as a ground/naval unit which boosted the attack/defense of other units.

I used each of the Generals from the Iron Blitz 1999 game, plus a few more for the pick six. I tried to avoid some of the most horrid Nazis and also tried to go with peeps who got their comeuppance and died during the war rather than being hanged afterwards, so nope, not Goring. I had them as Command 1, Command 2 etc, cause I was less interested in the named figures and more just sorta generic visualizations like for a general staff. The general idea was to avoid sus RP, by avoiding the political leadership and focusing on the military, or just choosing peeps on team Axis who would be less fraught or maybe just completely unrecognizable, which seemed somehow preferable. That was a bit of a challenge, so I’m not sure it’s entirely satisfying. Like initially I just wanted to go with a broadcast TV hogan’s heroes type thing, or just to keep all the basterds inglorious or whatever.

For G I had Manstein, Rommel, Valentine Hube, Kesselring, Guderian, Doenitz.

For the Soviets it was Zhukov, Konev, Vatutin, Vasilevsky, Rokossovsky, Katukov

And I just did something like that for each of the big 6. I picked most of them for reasons of having like the right hat for the job, more than any sort of statement about who was the better random general. In Iron Blitz it was 5 star, 4 star, 3 star, but I didn’t try to follow that idea. There’s probably a rogue email or post in that thread somewhere that I had em still labelled, but yeah you could probably use whatever. I basically just cropped what I could find that had a vibe into a circle and colorized them in a couple cases where I could only find BW stuff. There are like a million of these sorts or portraits floating around, particularly in the Hearts of Iron game series, though I tried to riff off stuff that was in the wiki rather than those.

Yeah that’s Ike and Bradley. For my thinking it’s kinda better to push it pretty Hollywood if going that direction. Like I almost just did George C. Scott for Patton and Karl Malden for Bradley, cause my aesthetic is basically technicolor flicks of the 60s and 70s.

Or like for the dime store balsa wood flyer, pretty much this is my jam… I just think it works better generally hehe

For sure!

Yeah, there’s like some sort of weird uncanny valley aspect too, like when the game becomes a bit too realistic that way visually, sorta loses an element there which I kinda dig. So in Iron Blitz for example, it was just a name and some stars, sorta at the level of Looney Tunes cartoon, but not fully visualized in any way.

I think what might be more interesting is some sort of caricature of a General, or probably even better would be just some Officer Corps thing, or an advisor who could maybe grimace when the dice go bad, but without going much beyond that. Then one could give it the flavor, but without going out in the weeds. I think the little gif style video clips or newspapers clippings, or even the cool end game stats graphs could probably do a similar type of visual flare but I don’t know how to do that stuff really. Like the sound or animation stuff. But yeah sorta cartoons and penny flyers, I just feel like that fits the plastic army men vibe of the thing somewhat better somehow hehe.

You can do whatever makes the most sense, but to me it’s sorta not necessary for a global style game, but then I didn’t really know what all might be useful for an expansion really. I found for myself that, as it starts to look more realistic in the vibe, the uncanny valley starts to open up. Even with the map I see the same, like if you magnify in too close on a topo it sorta starts coming apart at the seams a bit in that way, but then the cartoon aspect kinda compensates with map colors or whatever. Kinda trippy how that works

ps. Anyway I’m kinda rambling, the short of it would be something like just trying to keep Global more general audience or pg13 in the vibe. I think there’s probably room for other takes on it as well, but for the regular game probably anything not assigned could get nixed? Then whatever else just lives in some sort of customizer thing where peeps can riff and do variants, in the same ways they do on the home board. At first I was thinking just put a bunch of stuff in so it’s easier to play around with, but then that could get confusing if trying to figure out which stuff the game actually uses, like for tech say or default options of that sort, as opposed to just like random HR idea I had once hehe. Basically so that when they open the Global folder or the UHD analogy the player would sorta see the same stuff in the same place, like even if the graphics are different, same folders and such, just so they’d know what’s what like that when browsing. Anyway, just let me know, whatever seems best or easiest for you. I’m playing Dragons again, so just hit me up if ya need anything dude. Catch ya next round!

pps. oh and just one other thought, so for the commander dude graphics, if any, I would probably follow the cues from the Box cover art of the OOBs, but like post AA50. Meaning I probably wouldn’t highlight any figures that aren’t making those more recent covers. The old MB box art blue box from 1984 and even the Revised box from 2002 features figures and flags that I would just avoid in 2024. Like if the they weren’t in Tora Tora Tora or the film Patton as an already semi iconographic figure, but even the poster type art for a box cover or manual art feels different than say a piece that moves on the gameboard. For that it’s almost like you’d rather see something off brand, than big name historical figures, since it’s always kinda dicey. Faces are somehow charming though, and I think there is something to be said for providing something to RP against. You know so like instead of pretending to be anyone specific it’s more like some other name or just Commander 1, 2, 3 etc. I think if it was more like random non commissioned officers who pop up in some news reel at the end of the year, or in a battle screen, you could sorta capture that. Like those old Might & Magic games where dudes look upset and scowl cause the battle is going south lol. Maybe like an operator who patches in the news from the front at round’s end, ticker tape style. For a general or admiral type unit that plays on the field, I’d consider just some extra jumbo Tank or Ships or Sculpt-look inf type, an abstract Chevron maybe? Not sure though, I’m not familiar enough with those house rules.

@barnee

I absolutly love the pics! great stuff!
I recently discovered, after you told me so, that I can use my own images for each unit by just adding the pics to the units folder.

GRGReat work.

ps. @barnee Amusingly, I didn’t even realize this was a separate thread until right now lol. I just clicked the little notification to bring me here, thought it was the other UHD thread, so apologies if the above/below sounded sorted confusing. I thought it had just kicked on to a new page. I actually forgot there even was a General forum down at the bottom of the tree lol.

@Panzerstahl-Helm Yeah this is like the main thing that appeals to me about tripleA, the fact that you can go under the hood and tinker. Sorta like painting sculpts or using pennies on the physical boards to do whatever. Some of the original graphics have been adjusted many times to change the tint colors, add drop shadows or things of that sort. The main thing that sorta organized most graphics is that they were 48px squares. Though tripleA can go up to 96x54 px. The extra 8px tall isn’t the most massive ever, but the extra width is pretty significant, since that’s almost double if you use a graphic that is say 2:1 rather or 4:3 aspect rather than 1:1 aspect. For stuff like tanks, aircraft, ships, bases etc this is pretty huge. But when I wanted to try and do an upscale for global the only set of tripleA WW2 units that attempted to go jumbo were Frostion’s, so I asked him if I could use those to create a national tinted set. In his game the presentation was more fully painted with a roundel at the feet and a 3/4 drop shadow on everything.

Mainly I just removed the roundels and shadows and colorized the units for a monotone tint in the same color family, then went back in and painted on some faces or a safety color. Essentially to make it looks more like the standard World War II sculpts (which are totally monotone) but just larger and with some flare to spice it up. I added basically main infantry units and whatever tech stuff was missing, so mostly aircraft to fill in the gaps there. Basically substituting the graphics in the standard folder for the newer stuff at the larger size. Most games don’t really work like that, like where you can just open a subfolder and see hundreds of tiny png image files of like everything used in the display the way you can in tripleA. To browse around see what’s there, replace stuff by using a different file with the same label etc. Typically that stuff would all be just encoded I’d guess. But tripleA is so oldschool that you can just see all the tiny rasters for everything and get a sense of how they come together in-game.

This is great for stuff like customizing and house rules, but then there’s also a dilemma of uniformity or standardizing stuff so that it looks cohesive and doesn’t depart too much from the basis. That’s what I meant about the whole pg13 thing and sorta separating off the main materials from whatever additional stuff. Because one can go in and and explore other aspects in more detail via mods and such, but when it’s all in the standard folder kinda gets confusing potentially.

Current Global package is very much like that, where there are additional graphics to support all the mods and whatnot inside the main map folder. This is why it was challenging initially to know which stuff actually needed to be replaced or which graphics where just like holdovers from other iterations or only used in a mod say. Initially I just copied everything I was using into my UHD global folder to keep it all together somewhere, but now I think it’s probably a bit easier to have inside the UHD only the stuff that is actually used for standard Global, and everything else can live alongside that in some separate customizers/mod folder, or basically separate maps for separate mods to keep the main one lighter footprint. I don’t know that we’re going to do much better than like 80mb, even if removing all the extraneous graphics, so it’d be more just to keep it orderly. Most of the filesize is coming from the reliefTiles themselves, since the single image is quite large.

TripleA can’t use svg really, like for anything other than font, and even that if displayed in the UI is treated as a raster graphic, so the main map image we see in-game, the relief is just a giant ass PNG. It get’s pretty hefty the more pixels that have to be displayed, especially if in color. At first I tried to do this UHD thing at like 16000px the same as the other big map, but I had a lot of difficulty there since the image becomes so large and it’s a challenge to say create an image off it in GIMP with a dozen layers. At 11000px I was able to get maybe 6 layers going at once before GIMP would just devour my ram and start locking up, like any sort of filter or copy/paste action taking many seconds and the whole map to take a few minutes to export. And that for an image not particularly crazy, like these reliefs are sorta basic and bare bones in the grand scheme, but then the unit graphics sorta carry it, just cause they’re all jumbo and have a bit more detail.

Anyhow, to the earlier point, if looking for some familiar faces I’d restrict it just these figures… Not these box cover illustrations but perhaps the photographs they painted from, or just the same figure in a different photograph, or stuff like that. Basically for the stuff that is in print

the 1941 starter board just uses the same box cover art as the Anniversary.

1942 Spring, and 1942 second edition, A&AO all use the same illustration.

I think probably any historical figure depicted on a box cover since AA50 came out would be ok to use for a visual, but probably comes down to how it’s purposed. Like if you go to the source image, not the painted illustrations I mean, but the dudes depicted. So like you see on the boards for Japan like Genda and Yamamoto, I think maybe Hara? Like usually IJN seems to be the theme there. Basically the films Tora Tora Tora or Midway. The theater boards tend to show more like the regular GI Joes, but I think Guadalcanal has like Nimitz and some other dude who’s face I can’t recall right now. The Pacific board 2000 didn’t have figures just painted aircraft and ships. Europe 1999 had sorta the generic soldiers in a photomontage. I think the more recent boards post AH aegis are sorta more in the ballpark.

It’s hard for me to remember who painted what or when, but Jim Butcher, Beasley, Sansaver etc the gang there all kinda set the art direction over the years so that it’s fairly consistent from board to board even decades on. I think the stuff from the 80s and early aughts still looks pretty cool, but for figures I’d stick to the more recent boards for the changing times. Anyhow, massive digression there. Glad you like it though! Have fun out there!

Number 3 from the top is General der Flieger Albert Kesselring.

Number 4 from the top is Soviet Marshal Aleksandr Vasilevsky.