Je vais réguliérement sur le site strategium donc pour moi pas la peine mais merci de la proposition.

Je poste quand même au cas où ça en intéresserait d'autres






Hello,

We know you have been all eager to grab fresh information about the game. To be very honest with you, we initially planned to release the first development diary only next week. But you were very insisting, so let's start from the beginning : what is Darkest Hour, and who the developers are.

Darkest Hour Core (no relation to the mod), in its early stages still know as "The Project", can be viewed as a continuation of the 1.3 patch for Armageddon because it is based on it and is nearly 100% compatible with all existing 1.3 mods, and offers for the first time full moddir support.
What started as a small project to fix the remaining hard-coded bugs, after the last beta patch became much more over the last years.
Starting with initial bug fixes, a huge amount of code optimization to increase performance quickly followed. Hard-coded modifiers were then moved to moddable files, Hard-coded limitations removed, and then new features added.
Over the weeks, it became pretty obvious that we were no longer aiming for a patch to fix the last bugs, but for a new platform as standard for the HOI community. One that would offer modders what they have been asking for over the years and to keep our beloved mods alive and enjoyable for many years to come. For it has indeed been developed by fans and modders.


[COLOR="Pink"][SIZE="3"]By fans, for the fans[/SIZE][/COLOR]


MartinBG, who was the Lead programmer of HOI2 Armageddon Patch Project, and Gormadoc, Lead programmer on the Community Database Cleanup Project, started the whole thing more then two years ago.
Fernando Torres developer of World in Flames mod, who has been our most vocal Developer in the forum until now, joined up shortly after, initially aiming to create a new WIF mod for the new improved engine. But things went a bit different, and out of the idea to create an independent mod emerged Darkest Hour Full, the first "mod" for Darkest Hour using the full potential of the new code right from scratch.

Over time even more people joined the team, some as bug testers, others as active contributors.

As for myself, I actually joined the DH team pretty late in the progress, only 6 months ago, and I can't really offer any real recognition value for you guys as I have been not very active in the Paradox community and basically only enjoyed playing the games. But I think you will not hold that against me for long.


[COLOR="Pink"][SIZE="3"]What do you guys do?[/SIZE][/COLOR]


Although the borders are a bit blurry, as all of us work on the database from time to time (add the odd event, fix one thing or another), let me try to give you an idea of who is in charge in our development team:

MartinBG - Coding

Fernando Torres - AI and DB maintenance

Gormadoc - Tech tree

Ewphoenix123 - Map implementation, map related database maintenance



[COLOR="Pink"][SIZE="3"]You mentioned contributors?[/SIZE][/COLOR]


I think we now have more than 30 people who are helping out to a different degree, and listing all of them would just be too much for this diary.
This here is just a (not so) short list for a start with those who contributed the most over the last months in no specific order:

Mumia allowed as to use the E3 map as a base for our new map, and helped with most of the initial concepts.

Eginhard 38 from WIF did an incredible job when he finalized the designs for the new map, always standing on the edge balancing AI capabilities and geographic reality.

Arturius from the 1914 mod, well you can think for yourself where he contributes.

Bizon from the NWO mod made our game launcher, helped out with translations and the implementation of new minors.

^AC^ from Kaiserreich helped out adapting vanilla scenarios to the new map and translations.

Jaegerfeld of the canceled DMP Ragnaroek - Projekt 36 is developing the AI for our 1914 scenarios

Rhysaxiel from WIF is working on event chains for 1914 and coordinating the pre-WW2 scenarios.

tedescoo from Turning Point and BIP helped out with translations and as a tester.

Jrhindo from the Yugoslavian Wars helped with translations and ideas.

The famous sonofliberty has outdone himself in the last weeks as one of our main testers, and offered a lot input in many design aspects.

Inner Circle from GK Multilevel Sprite Pack and GK Atmospherical Improvement Mod is working on our interface graphics.

Cardus helped with new OOB for Italy and Abyssinia, making the Ethiopian war much more interesting..

TeutonburgerW from the Minor Graphics Mod has contributed ideas for new minors a bit of modding, graphics, beta-testing.

Miihkali from Anatolian Wars Mod has done some scenario and event design, and some graphical help. Ideas, suggestions and little historical research.

Cueball from EIR added floating event ideas, the first AI fixes for the new map, ideas to implement new minors, and help with initial map concepts.

WilhelmII from Gamerkollektiv helped with some graphics in addition to the obligatory beta-testing.

thewookie1 added the first concept for the inclusion of the Transsibirian Railroad.

And many more that haven't been that active in the last months, like Koenig from Mod33, 49h from WIF, GAGA Extreme from the GAGA Tech Mod, and a lot others I simply forgot... I elaborate further on their contributions in future development diaries.



This should give you a glimpse of who has been involved in this, how many familiar names to find, and how many of those are still actively developing mods out there. Thus you can draw your own conclusions about what you can expect for the future. Expect for instance some mods to be available for DH from day one..



Here are now a few words from our contributors.


[QUOTE=TeutonburgerW]
Being a long time HOI player, there were several things I've always dreamed of if they would come true but I thought the engine was too old and it was better to adapt and start playing HOI3. That was, until Rayan (aka Fernando Torres) invited me to contribute to what is now called Darkest Hour. Most of the things I've ever wanted (a smarter AI, a better map, automated stuff and higher moddability plus a whole lot more) was there. I'm very pleased that the DH development team listened so much on us "modders" as well as long time players during the development phase; what we enjoyed, what we didn't enjoy and, of course what we wanted to make DH the best WW simulation out there!
[/QUOTE]

[QUOTE=Inner Circle]
When I was invited to the Team, i knew only little, until i got some screenshots from a Beta Build. I was really impressed and eventually agreed to help them.
My contributions are mostly graphics, beta testing and recruiting new contributors. Every new Beta is better than the last one and for the first time i have the feeling to play the HoI game I always wanted...
[/QUOTE]

[QUOTE=AC]
Darkest Hour is a dream come true for me. A game made by fans for the fans... or even better, made by modders for the modders. We have assembled such a good team, that worked together for months (years, some could say) with one objective in mind: to create a game enjoyable by the fans and loved by the modders! Being a part of this is an honor, even if for now my contributions have been limited to beta testing, suggestions and translation.
[/QUOTE]

And maybe a word from Mumia, one of our map geeks (he usually does not communicate with us except to post with strange words and show awesome maps he just drawn but maybe he will make an exception for you..)

[quote=mumia]
'Me no spiking Inglese'.
[/quote]

Right.
(Just kidding, I love you buddy )


[COLOR="Pink"]Development philosophy[/COLOR]


Our philosophy is to stay true to the community and provide the most fun for players as well as the best platform for modders.

We think it first starts with being honest with the fans. And there is one thing that has been claimed around that we wanted to correct. The game timeline is indeed set to span from 1914 to 1964, which means there will be small and large scenarios available throughout this period. What it does not mean is that there would be a giant scenario allowing to play straight from 1914 to 1964.
It is obviously unrealistic to think that a game like Darkest Hour could cover all (un)historical possibilities for such long period of time. (yet)

On the other hand, we focused on a few unhistorical and yet plausible outcomes, be it during or after the First war or during the Second. We shall not go into details for now but you can rest assured that Darkest Hour rejects the sandbox approach.

The other thing is, We are here to stay, even after two years we are still far from reaching the limits of the Europa engine, and we have all intentions to keep developing Darkest Hour further for a long time to come.


We are still looking for new contributors and testers, as this is basically a project from the community for the community. We will be looking forward to helping modders prepare their contribution even before the release date (we are aiming for November release). Feel free to contact us at darkest.hour.team(at)gmail(dot)com.
We are also going to answer a few general questions later today. But please don't expect too much details yet, as there is still some time left and we need to keep you curious!
Thus, in-depth explanations are left for the following development diaries.


Next week (Monday, 1pm), the second development diary will be dealing with maps!
So see you around folks, and take care.

Screenshot : [http]
_________________

DEV DIARY II - WORLDMAP





It is Monday, and as promised, we are going to reveal a little more about Darkest Hour.
But let us start with a few words from Eric 'Eginhard' who defined most of the concepts of the main map (used in the grand campaigns).


The Holy Rule

The basic problem with game design is to find the best compromise between simplicity and realism. Knowing the community's (and our own) fondness for historical realism, and at the same time the needs of the Europa engine to provide an enjoyable game, we had to resolve the same dilemma with the map.

The first issue that we dealt with was to establish specifications that would make sure that our map would not completely break the game balance, especially regarding artificial intelligence capabilities. After many discussions during the preliminary phases of map development, three major specifications were established.
First, in order to keep consistent with the massive improvements made by Martin with game speed, it was agreed to keep the overall number of provinces below 3,000. It was soon discovered that only the actual number of province IDs used had influence on game performance, which allowed us to put the province number limit to 10,000 (or even higher for future modders' use) as well as to suppress all other limits regarding map modding.
Second, given that military artificial intelligence may have trouble with handling fronts with too many connections (that is, when attackers could come from too much sides), it was decided that no province would have more than six connections with its neighboring provinces. Each time where a province had borders with seven or more other provinces, we suppressed extra connections, either on geographical grounds (major obstacles such as mountains, escarpments, lakes...) or by redrawing it slightly to make the absence of connection “visually acceptable”. After some jokes among the team, this rule became known in our team as the Holy Rule. Nevertheless, this rule admits arbitrary exceptions for gameplay reasons. For instance to ensure fluidity in the Belgian front, Lille has seven connections instead of six.

The Holy Rule can be summed up in two articles:

1. A province shall not have more than six connections with other provinces;
2. If it proves impossible to comply with article 1 without breaking all you have done previously, skip article 1.


Third, we were asked to put emphasis on 1914-1945 era. This means that whenever eras borders would conflict, borders from the world wars era would prevail. It also means that some areas would have more attention than others, so you'll find far more provinces in North Africa than in Sub-Saharan areas. This point has never been fully consensual in our team and has evolved along the overall concept of the game, but combined with the other two specifications it gives the map its current look. Map design is now frozen until release (to ensure a proper game balance and the implementation of other features), but this doesn't mean that it won't change in the future.

All combined, these three major specifications brought us on the verge of insanity more than once, especially when you compare them with our methodology and our desire to achieve the best possible map in terms of geography, history and realism. At one point, I even felt schizophrenic, but now, we do feel better.


So what's new?

Now let us have a look at the things you can see.

Our map originally started as the E3 map, as many of you already realized from the screen-shots. But as beautiful as the E3 map was, it soon became clear that it had severe weaknesses and that was not exactly what we had in mind for our own game.
The biggest was that it was of course limited to 2607 provinces, which were just not enough.
Another one was that it took no account of what became the so-called "Holy rule" of map design.
Others were not real weaknesses but different design choices.

* Optical changes


We decided to switch back to English names for all provinces in order to keep things as user-friendly as possible for the majority of players.
We switched to a new font, Calluna, that is a lot clearer and better to read on higher zoom levels.
We also switched back to a dotted border concept which really brightened up the whole map.

* General concepts


We obviously kept the general guidelines of E3 to try to get as close as possible to historical borders when setting up provinces.
We removed mini-provinces that were too small to host counters, unless they were of key importance during the World Wars.

* Optical gimmicks


Every province can now have its own illustration. We can add unique capital icons for each province. We also no longer use the HOI2 beaches icons, as they didn't really fit on a map that uses realistic coastlines and we instead included a new small icon.

* Things you don't see at first glance


The terrain types and resource distribution is based on historical data and is a big change compared to HOI2. You will be pretty surprised and curse a lot at first when your old strategies lead you in a swamp or forest that wasn't there before.
Of course, the climate zones are as close to the real climate zones as we could get as well.
We also tried to adapt the design of the map to pay tribute to little details like the Trans-siberian Railroad or the Burma Road.

* The things you don't see at all


Let us start first with the obvious, all limits are gone.
There is no limits on province number. Well, to be really honest the current limit is set to 10000, but if you can come up with a map featuring more then 10000 provinces, I will get you a patch with a higher limit the next day.
There are no limits on connections.

* Gimmicks for modders


Everybody knows we love modders. Thus we have added extensive map related debug logs with warnings for misplaced map icons (grouped by icon), possible wrong climate zones, missing sea province definition in the province.csv file and suggestions for which sea province would be the best choices. There are also warnings for wrong or not ideal sea province definition in the province.csv and suggestions which sea province would be the best choices, as well as logs about resource/IC distribution by province or for whole countries.
Modders will also find analysis of connections per province in different variations (depending on what you are doing, you might prefer one presentation or the other, this is mostly interesting in regard of the Holy Rule that we introduced above).
And finally, analysis of distance between provinces are also available (I will explain in the next paragraph what this is about).

* A new heart


Here is the first of the really big new features to be revealed, and I am pretty excited about it.
HOI2 distance calculation was based on pixel coordinates defined in the province.csv file (the amount of pixels between one airbase coordinate and another to be exact).

The whole thing started like this.
One of the biggest problem with HOI2 maps was the size of the oceans.
It was a bit of a compromise, according to the range calculator for the game, the world was 10,000 km in circumference. While that might be fine per se, it created other (and worse) problems considering that large amounts of the Pacific have been shrunk.
It could therefore never be possible to really fix the naval combat system unless we had more reasonable ocean cartography. If the map had to be expanded, how about doing something to increase the relative size of the oceans, so that the Mediterranean is not half the size of the Atlantic?

What have we done about this?

In Darkest Hour, we replaced the old HOI2 system with a new distance calculation which is based on real geographic coordinates (the old engine can of course still be activated in the misc.txt file, as most new features, it is optional to use the new calculation).

Most of you are now asking: "Why should I care? What is so exciting about that?" :confused:

Well let us think about it.
You can now see real distances between one province and another, the distance between Berlin and Moscow is as far in the game as it is in reality.
While this is cool in itself, it becomes even cooler when it comes to sea provinces. With HOI2, all you got was wrong distances based on the way the map was morphed to display a 3D earth on a 2D map.
When you used to have, for instance, a giant Mediterranean sea, and a tiny Pacific ocean compared to reality, the game now features real distances.

The whole thing gets especially important when it comes to battle-scenarios, which use new and more detailed maps (that we will show you later ).
As in HOI2, all distances were based on pixel coordinates you ended up with provinces that were hundreds of kilometers far away in-game, although they were maybe 20kms away from each other, only because you had increased the scale of the map.
Even with massive workarounds and modified units speeds you couldn't get it completely right.

Still not excited?

Alright, what does it mean for the casual player who doesn't care about realistic distances? And why should you as a map modder go through the hassle of creating coordinate tables?

The simple answer is performance.

The following table shows the time that it takes with Darkest Hour compared to Hearts of Iron II to perform distance calculation (more than one calculation taken into account to get a nice average) :

Code :That is a 45-50% reduction in calculation time for each distance check. The artificial intelligence does multiple of those for each division every tick to decide about unit movements, and even more for air units.
Of course a lot more things influence game performance, but this one is a good chunk and led to a noticeable performance boost.

The best thing about this improvement is that it actually has a higher impact when the game progresses as the amount of units increases and war breaks out. The more distance calculations the engine does, the higher the performance gain compared to vanilla.
Same goes for maps that have more provinces.

We do regular tests to check performance, the old Doomsday (fictional WW3) scenario shows the impact pretty well.
We compared the average cycle time of different game versions between 1936 (the world at peace) and the Doomsday scenario with fighting all over the place.

Switching to the new distance calculations increased game speed by up to 10-15% in scenarios with heavy fighting compared to the same Darkest Hour version that used the old calculation model.


Code :
In Armageddon 1.2, game speed in DD scenario was ~1/3 of the speed in 1936.
In Armageddon 1.3b it is increased by ~8 points to 42%.
In our current DH version, it is at 75-80%, or only 20-25% slower then in 1936


We of course included the necessary coordinate tables for our own map, and the old HOI2 map, so that all mods that are based on HOI2 can benefit from the new system.
I will not say that it is not intensive work to set up those coordinate tables, because it is! But it is definitely worth it to do so for your own mod maps, and once you get in a rhythm, it is not that bad.
We will support mods conversions from HOI2 to DH anyway.

You can get the coordinates straight out of Google Earth, and with the right settings and tools to copy the coordinates, it gets pretty fast (at least compared to the time involved to actually draw a new map).



And that's it for today guys, I hope you enjoyed it.
Of course this thread is open to topic related questions.
See you next Monday for a new development diary.



Björn 'Nathan' Winkler,

Darkest Hour Developer
- Map Implementation

P.S.:

As promised screenshots of the USA






And as an extra gimmick one of our ID maps of Europe 1936. (this is a big one)
http://img709.imageshack.us/img709/5199/europe1936.jpg
_________________

[SIZE="4"][COLOR="SandyBrown"]‘Introduction: Some history'[/COLOR][/SIZE]

Spying in DD/Arma 1.2 had many bugs: missions that do not work for the AI - including counter-intelligence, broken AI mission selection code, and incorrect messages to name just few. Once we fixed all known bugs in the code and ran some tests using advanced logging (logger is part of DH) we found that in a game AI countries do tens of thousands send and kill spy missions outperforming any player because of the micromanagement involved in the spying and very few real missions (about 10%). It was clear for us that the old system needed to be changed and after some brainstorming and few tries Martin and Chris came up with the spy system used in Arma 1.3.

Its main features are:
- Fixed spying AI - it can do any mission
- Send/kill spies missions removed and replaced with Spy network levels (0..20)
- increased game speed
- all modifiers exported to spy_cost.txt and AI files
- there are more here that are out of my mind after 2 years

These changes while to drastic for a patch and not welcomed by all modders at the time paved the road to the auto-spying system we implemented in DH.

Changes:
- merged AI and player auto-spying code
- cleared spy_cost.txt file and moved old and new spying modifiers to a new section in misc.txt

[SIZE="4"][COLOR="SandyBrown"]
‘All warfare if based on deception'[/COLOR][/SIZE]


That quote from Sun Tzu enlightens the prominent role played by intelligence operations in times of war. But while popular myths have been created around a few people like Mata Hari or Joseph Sorge, intelligence and counter-intelligence operations have truly been of a great importance in the events of two World Wars witnessed by the XXth century. Darkest Hour therefore intends to put a certain emphasis on this matter.

Darkest Hour spying system addresses two main issues which are the realism of the intelligence operations and their planning in the long-run as a Head of State.
The first thing that you need to know is that there two modes: manual and semi-automatic intelligence. While the manual mode has many similarities with Hearts of Iron II spying system, the semi-automatic is much more interesting. There you can allocate a certain part of the national income to intelligence operations. There are also others factors that you can play with such as spy activity or the minimum level of infiltration required prior to any foreign operation.

Furthermore, as the Head of your State, you can assign generic or specific priorities to your intelligence services. Playing the United Kingdom, you might for instance be willing to grab more informations about Nazi Germany. Specific country priorities can therefore be set in that regard.

But there are also missions specific priorities which allow you tell your intelligence services what specific mission to perform (either globally or in a certain country). You will for instance be able to perform only industry sabotage in one country or couple it with industrial espionage, provided that you need two times more sabotage missions.

That way, you have a relative control over the operations led by your intelligence agency. You are also encouraged to plan your spying strategy in the long run and check the reports on a regular basis when you used to be overwhelmed with micro management in Hearts of Iron II (where you had to send every spy and perform every operation manually). Hence Darkest Hour spying system is not a clicks contest but instead, a panel that lets you plan your policy in the long run.
This was also a matter of realism because as a Head of State, you obviously have a certain level of involvement, which sending all spies one by one should be excluded from.

Automation:
- Can be enabled or disabled
- Even when enable players still can do any mission to any country manually if they want
- auto-increase of spy levels to manually set Max level (0..20)
- set spy money threshold (use money above XXX)
- Min. spy level threshold before try to do any foreign missions (0..20)
- Spy activity
- Min chances for every spy mission - do no try a mission if chances are less
- Can add/remove countries from spying list
- Can set country priority for each country in the list
- Can set missions priority for each country in the list
- Can apply same priorities to all countries at once
- Can clear countries list at once

Spy reports, added:
- Transports/Escorts
- Resources
- Submarines, TPs


[SIZE="4"][COLOR="SandyBrown"]Moddability[/COLOR][/SIZE]


We are also looking forward to making Darkest Hour as mod friendly as possible.
Thus, many parameters will be subject to changes in mods, such as:

AI priorities

Code :

General parameters

Code :

And mission basic costs and chances

Code :

And here are the two screen-shots of this week.





We have also posted exclusive screen-shots on [URL="http://www.facebook.com/pages/Darkest-Hour/143379419030864?v=wall&ref=ts"]our Facebook page[/URL] and I am pretty sure you would be very interested.
See you next week for a new development diary.
Take care.
_________________

[SIZE="4"][COLOR="SandyBrown"]Playermade Modifications[/COLOR][/SIZE]

Hello again,
It is monday noon, and that means it is time for another Development Diary.
As you should have already seen in the last weeks, one of our main goals was to keep it extremly easy to use your favorite HOI 2 mod with Darkest Hour.

And this week I gonna talk about how this actually gonna work for you, be it as a Modder for one of the Big Projects, someone who would like to play an old mod that is nolonger developed, or just as someone who likes to modify his own game a bit.



The first thing you gonna start to love is that Darkest Hour finally offers full MODDIR support, you no longer need jsgme or individual installations for each mod you use.

You only need one Darkest Hour installation!
Copy the mod you fancy in a subfolder the Mod folder.
Pick the mod you like to play the next time you start the game with the launcher.





This works of course only when the mod is adapted to Darkest Hour, some bugfixes and new features were not possible without modification that affect basic files, there are few things that need to be changed for a mod to start properly. Don't worry It's not much, and you don't even need real modding experience to do it yourself.

Depending on mod's complexity this could take from 1-2 minutes (Confederate Armageddon) to about 15 minutes (CORE as this mod already use moddir and some paths in its DB files have to be edited and many dummy pictures to be skipped).


In one of our latest version we included a Darkest Hour Mods Pack (located in the Modding documentation folder of your installation ) that can be used for easy Armageddon 1.3 to DH mod conversion.
It contains the following files:

Code :

These are the files that need to be in the new DH format in order for the game to work and are the only files that modders should worry about when porting their mods to DH.

• \config\Buttons.txt - new button definition *we changed certain interface elements for new features, and of course those need new buttons*
  
  
• \config\mods.csv - the file where all modders should put mod specific texts to ensure compatibility with further game patches. This file will never be modified by any patch.
  
  
• \db\difficulty.csv - new difficulty settings *some of our new features are influenced by the difficult settings and got their own entry here*
  
  
• \db\diplo_costs.txt - only one change here from 1.3: removed "-" sign from all costs
  
  
• \db\spy_costs.txt - some changes from 1.3 as most spy system modifiers are moved to misc.txt now. Only cost and chances are left here.
  
  
• \db\misc.txt - tons of new modifiers here, but all are set to Armageddon 1.3 defaults, so you have only to edit those values you changed for your mod for 1.3
  
  
• \db\teams.txt - list of all tech team files that should be loaded by the game. These files could be either in MODDIR or in main game folder. By default it is populated with all 1.3 file names so you just need to add your new file names and (optionally) remove those you don't see need to be loaded by your mod
  
• \db\leaders.txt - list of all leader files that should be loaded by the game. These files could be either in MODDIR or in main game folder. By default it is populated with all 1.3 file names so you just need to add your new file names and (optionally) remove those you don't see need to be loaded by your mod
  
• \db\ministers.txt - list of all minister files that should be loaded by the game. These files could be either in MODDIR or in main game folder. By default it is populated with all 1.3 file names so you just need to add your new file names and (optionally) remove those you don't see need to be loaded by your mod
  
  
• \gfx\interface\ill_prov_overlay.bmp - changed file.
  
• \gfx\interface\map_circle.bmp - changed file.
  
• \gfx\interface\plate_division.bmp - changed file.
  
• \gfx\interface\tc_icons.bm - changed file.
  

Notes:
1. This pack is supposed to be Merged with the mod.
2. Only files that were actually changed by the mod, which are included in this pack should actually be updated/replaced by files from the pack. The rest (except 3 - see next) can be skipped as they are identical to DH Core files already installed in the game's main folders.
3. The only files that must be included into mod's folder are \db\ministers.txt, \db\leaders.txt and \db\teams.txt

[SIZE="4"][COLOR="SandyBrown"]Usual 1.3 Mod porting steps:[/COLOR][/SIZE]


1. Create a new folder for your mod in Mods folder
2. Extract all mod files into that folder preserving original game folders tree
3. Using a program like WinMerge compare mod's folder with Darkest Hour Mods Pack folder and update files as required:


- Copy db\ministers.txt, \db\leaders.txt and \db\teams.txt and add any mod specific file names there
- Copy and update \config\Buttons.txt, \db\difficulty.csv, \db\diplo_costs.txt, \db\misc.txt, \db\spy_costs.txt ONLY if these are changed by your mod from vanilla 1.3 values.
- Copy \gfx\interface\ill_prov_overlay.bmp, \gfx\interface\map_circle.bmp, \gfx\interface\plate_division.bmp and \gfx\interface\tc_icons.bm ) ONLY if these are changed by your mod.
4. Create an empty "save games" folder in your mod's scenarios folder.
5. Select your mod from DH game Launcher
6. Play


It really is that straight forward and easy to convert a mod to Darkest Hour, we are testing it often enough to be sure.


Some feedback on the topic from AC of the Kaiserreich team:


Citation :I did. *g* White & Sea as always guys.

But you can Sea even when using DH without most of its new features there are quite a lot of improvements to talk about, even if we won't talk about them yet.


Here's a list of mods that already officially announced porting to DH:

• Confederate Armageddon
  
• Fallout's Doomsday Mod
  
• Kaiserreich
  
• New World Order
  
• Whites & Reds
  
  
• And let's not forget that the Iron Cross expansion for HOI2Arma and AoD will be available for DH too!
  

I hope you enjoyed those new informations at least a bit.
See you next week for a new development diary.
Take care.

P.S.: I think we didn't show you Asia yet.

http://img839.imageshack.us/img839/151/aisa.png
_________________

alors les codes j'y comprend .... RIEN
_________________
Les convictions sont des ennemis de la vérité plus dangereux que les mensonges

Hello again, it is Monday and that means it is time for another Dev Diary. Well actually we have more for you today. As things were a bit hectic over the weekend i didn't have time to write the Diary as long as i would have liked to we will give you a small one first. And finish up later in about 3 or 4 hours with another one.

Claims

We're here today to talk about one of the new concepts introduced by Darkest Hour: Claims!
What are claims? And what is the difference between claims and cores? Here are the answers to these questions!

Claims are basically used for diplomatic purposes and are useful to assert the desire of a country to own and control a province. There are no economic benefits of claiming provinces: they are counted as non-national when it comes to IC/MP/Resources or revolt risk and there will be no way to transform those claims into cores. However, claimed provinces are counted as national when it comes to diplomacy or country release. That means that a claimed province appears in the "Have claims against..." section and can be asked with the "Demand Territory" mission in the Diplomatic tab. The AI won't secede provinces it has claims on to allies/puppets even if those provinces are cores to that ally. In most cases claims will be used by players just to "redraw" the map in the way they wanted it to be after a successful war, especially in case of partition. Think about the partitioning of Greece for example: Italy, Germany and Bulgaria can claim different provinces and they won't secede them to their allies (even if those allies have cores on them).

So, how does claiming provinces work? Via the right-click menu it is possible to add and remove claims to single provinces, areas or regions. Claiming non-owned province increases belligerence and removing claims from such provinces decreases it (both values are set in misc.txt). Claimed provinces can be seen best on the Diplomacy map mode - they use lighter green than cores and also a black dot as opposed to the red one used for cores.

However, there are some limitations to avoid exploiting this new mechanism: it is not always possible to claim provinces of another country. New claims can be freely set to war enemies, but can be set to neutral countries only if policy allows that (interventionism must be high enough). Moreover claims cannot be demanded from countries that you are guaranteeing at the same time: for example Germany cannot ask for provinces from Poland if it is guaranteeing its independence!

Another new useful feature is that peace negotiations now take into account cores and claims:
- Insist on Demands automatically adds all claims and cores the initiating country has to the demanded provinces list;
- Beg for Peace automatically adds all claims and cores the receiving country has to the demanded provinces list;

Automatic Release of Nations

Another very interesting new feature introduced by Darkest Hour is the Automatic Release of Nations. First of all, claims are taken into account when a new nation is released and are considered like extra provinces. Moreover, Darkest Hour reviewed the automatic release of countries done by the AI, which suffered many limitations: the AI could release a country in its release = { } list only if it was a democracy, it was at peace and there were no more Axis powers. These limitations were removed and now even Germany or the Soviet Union can release countries during the war.
Moreover, if it no more necessary to control all the provinces in the minimum list in revolt.txt: minimum, extra and claimed provinces are all taken into account and if enough of them are already under the control of the AI nation, it will release that country.

Yeah, but what does that mean in terms of gameplay? Well, we know that after the end of WWII the Allies released West Germany and South Korea whereas the Comintern released East Germany and North Korea. But what if things went differently? What could have happened if the Allies had recovered part of Poland? Couldn't this situation lead to a Democratic Poland and a Communist Poland? Or had the Soviet Union conquered all of Germany and half of Netherlands, wouldn't they have created a East Netherlands opposed to the West Netherlands freed by the Allies? Or maybe even a North Communist Italy opposed to a South Democratic Italy!

With these new mechanism (and with new "communist" countries implemented of course) it is possible to recreate a dynamic situation after the Victory in Europe. No more bundled by fixed events, the AI will be able to release nations as soon as possible and the outcome of the war will be different every time. The Rush for Berlin will be even faster now and with greater consequences!


So, to conclude this Dev Dairy, here are the changes to the code regarding claims:
Code :

And here are the changes to the code regarding the release of nations:
Code :


More to come in a few hours.


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petite screen en cadeau
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Hello again, this time it's actually me.
We promised you a big one today, and here it is even when it is a bit late.


Chancellor Otto von Clausewitz wrote:


Citation :State policies and ideologies indeed play a central role in the process, of going to war and how to wage it.
Isn't the Second World War often called a « war of ideologies »?

On the other hand, international relations and diplomacies never ceased to get more complex during the XIXth and XXth centuries.
We always felt that the impression to lead, not only the armed forces, but a whole nation, was missing in Hearts of Iron games.
We were therefore looking forward to making players actually feel they embodied a Head of State. This is one of the major philosophical design choices that has defined Darkest Hour development.

We believe it will provide an unprecedented experience for those who will get the chance to play our game.


Being a Head of State first starts with taking policy decisions.

In Darkest Hour, you will have the opportunity to dictate a decisive policy change every two years that will have in influence in the years to come, beginning with the ministers that you will appoint. We have also implemented an auto-reminder notification system that can be turned on/off that lets you know when such change is possible.


We all know characters that had a considerable influence for the history of their country.

Prime Minister Winston Churchill was often described by British war propaganda as a bulldog ready for duty and fight. Such figure is alleged to have inspired courage to the British people.
Darkest Hour reproduces this through a unique minister's personalities system that is entirely modifiable by users.
Most prominent State figures have already their own personality that in turn affects their country, but there is nothing stopping you from creating indivdual personalities for each minister in the world.







But being a Head of State is also a matter of decisive and even sometimes impulsive policy decisions.

There are two other ways to influence the course of history from a diplomatic perspective in Darkest Hour. Historical events are one of them.
We have entirely rewritten the events using our new syntax which opened up much more possibilities for ourselves and modders.
There will now be tons of new diplomatic events simulating for instance the United States foreign policy, from the decision to send destroyers to the British Navy to the passing and the enforcement of the Lend-Lease Act.

There will also be situations when you will be able to take immediate decisions when certain conditions are met.
We have indeed implemented a unique “Policy decisions” concept in Darkest Hour that allows players to take a specific decision when they think the time is right (provided that they match all requirements).
As an example, when playing the 1936 Grand campaign as Germany, a “Reoccupation of Rhineland” decision will be available with specific requirements to be activated. As soon as the player activates the decision, a newspaper notification appears, offering him a little bit of historical background.






Lastly, the course of events has been made more dynamic.

As players now actually have an influence on when and how certain events occur, they will influence the timeline. As Germany, you can obviously lead your country to war as fast as possible. But be aware that your army or your industrial base may be left unprepared for a long conflict.
Of course the artificial intelligence will always try to surprise you and take decisions when you are not ready for them. For example, playing as China, the Japanese Army will not always invade your country at the same time and the same place so you can just wait for them and push them back when they come.

We truly believe that as a Grand Strategy game, Darkest Hour needed an in-depth diplomatic model.
While we are still polishing it and adding new parts with every build, especially to provide even more user modifiability, this development diary should have given you another glimpse at the very basics of our philosophy and we hope you will appreciate it.
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Here we are again for our usual Monday appointment. Today, we're gonna talk about Missions, Interface and Leader Traits.

First of all, let's talk a bit about Missions: we have introduced a new interface for Air and Naval Missions.
As you can see in the picture below, in the new Air Mission interface it is possible to select infinite mission time and to choose between province, area and region (for most of the missions). It is really a neat feature, as you will learn: you will be able to instruct your CAS to focus on a single province and your Naval Bombers to Attack Convoys over a great sea region. Obviously, this is always limited by the range of your aeroplanes: if you assign them to perform a mission over a whole region, they will be able to do it only in the provinces of that region that they are effectively able to reach.
In the Naval Mission Interface, you can see that for some missions (like Naval Interdiction and Naval Combat Patrol) it will be possible to instruct the fleet to attack enemy convoys even if they are not in an hunting mission. This adds a touch of realism: a fleet in a Naval Interdiction mission that encounters an enemy convoy would surely fire a couple of rounds at them instead of waving their hands and passing by.

Moreover, settings for every mission are saved and restored when ordering the same mission again during the current game session (on game start are reset to mission defaults).

But this is just the beginning! We've introduced four new missions:
- Planned Defense (for land units): units with Planned Defense missions will automatically retreat to the pre-selected adjacent province when under enemy attack and their remaining Str/Org is below the given threshold;
- Air Scramble (for air units): Air Scramble missions are given to interceptor and fighter units; they will scramble to protect adjacent provinces from enemy planes;
- Sneak Move (for naval units): Ships on a Sneak Move mission move to the target trying to avoid being detected. Because sneaking forces fleets to use longer routes, it takes more time to reach the target, but also reduces the chance to be detected by the enemy;
- Naval Scramble (for naval units): Naval Scramble missions assigns your fleets to stay in home port and engage any enemy ships detected in adjacent sea provinces;
The new Naval Scramble mission gets really interesting when you take a look at the new map, you will notice that we added a line of coastal seaprovinces. In combination with the new distance model we introduced (see DD2 for more details) this means you can have a very nasty surprise when you move too close to hostile harbors. On the other hand, this is an effective tool to defend against amphibious landings.

EDIT:
Another important feature that I somehow forgot is that for Sea Transport and Amphibious Assault missions there is a special checkbox for the auto-return to base: it is now possible to enable or disable for a specific mission!

Sorry guys, sometimes it is hard to remember all the new things introduced by DH! I haven't played HOI2Arma in months!

Obviously the new interface is optional and can be enabled or disabled from misc.txt. Moreover, all the modifier for mission (new and old alike) are now exported to misc.txt and be tweaked as you please! As always, we've struggled and succeeded not only in improving the game, but also in making it as moddable as possible, so that you can have full control and modify it as it pleases you. We're looking forward to seeing the new mods that the community will create for Darkest Hour! Don't disappoint us!

Another useful addition is the Leader Traits filter:

As you can see in the picture above, it is possible to filter the leaders by trait and by rank (the four checkboxes next to "Available Replacements"). No more wasted time looking for a specific leader, you can find a Field Marshal with Panzer Leader traits with only two clicks!
Please note also that latest filter settings used for each branch (army/air/navy) are saved and restored in the current game session too.

To close this Development Diary, here are the mission modifiers from misc.txt!
Code :
Code :
Come back next week for a new shiny Development Diary!
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Par les fans pour les fans.
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J'ai mis en ligne un mini AAR joué avec l'Allemagne sur le scénario WW1 sur la page Facebook de Darkest Hour.
N'hésitez pas à jeter un oeil et poser des questions éventuellement.
La partie a été jouée avec une version beta du jeu néanmoins encore loin de la version finale.
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How to wage a successful war? Well, the answer to this question is not easy, as so many different factors can influence the outcome of a conflict. However, surely having a better control over the units under your command won't do you any harm. This week, we're going to talk a bit about how we improved the interface.

First of all, all units (land, air naval) can now be identified by their colour and their icon. We've expanded the colour scheme and we added icons next to the unit name for a better identification at first glance. Here's an example of the colour scheme for land units:
- a land unit composed exclusively by mobile divisions has a green colour;
- a land unit composed by a mix of mobile divisions and other divisions (like infantry) has a light green colour;
- a land unit composed exclusively by special divisions (mountain, marines, paratroopers) has a blue colour;
- a land unit composed by a mix of special divisions and other divisions (like infantry) has a light blue colour;
- a land unit with at least one garrison division has a light pink colour;
- an air squadron composed exclusively by interceptors has a light green colour;
- an air squadron composed exclusively by tactical bombers has a pink colour;
- an air squadron composed by a mix of interceptors and tactical bombers has a light pink colour;
- a fleet with at least one air carrier has a blue colour;
- a fleet composed exclusively of naval transports has a red colour;
... and so on and so forth. There are just examples, the complete colour scheme is more complex. Initially you may think that it is a bit too complex, but you'll soon grew accustomed to it. And if you don't like the colours or the dispositions we chose, you can always mod your own! Remember, this is meant to help you have a better control over your armies!

Another, perhaps bigger, improvement in the interface is a small icon next to the name of the unit. As you can see from the picture below, for land units we've added specific icons for the unit type. Moreover, every unit with an HQ has a specific HQ icon and every unit with at least one engineer brigade has a very small icon. For example, "West Coast Reserve" is a unit composed exclusively by mobile divisions (icon + green colour), one of its division is an HQ (icon) and one of its division has an engineering brigade (very small icon above the icon for mobile units).

Naval fleets are identified by their most important ships: air carries, others capital ships (please notice the difference between BB and CA!), screens, submarines or transport. Moreover, a fleet with at least one naval transport always has a small icon on top to represent it. The icons for air units are simple and easy to understand, the icons are intuitive. Moreover, if a bomber unit is mixed with an interceptor/fighter/escort unit, there will be two icons, to show that the bombers are escorted (the top icon is set in this order: 1) at least one FTR -> FTR icon; 2) at least one INT -> INT icon; 3) at least one escort brigade ->Escort icon). In the screenshot above there are three units with an escort brigade attached.

Another useful tool to have a better control over your own units are tooltips. We've improved the tooltips shown over the unit and the new icons (explained above), in order to quickly obtain the information you need. Tooltips will show useful information, like the name of the leader, organization and morale of the unit and model, organization and morale of the divisions that compose the unit (similar information are displayed for air and naval units too). Moreover, for naval units the capital ships / screens ratio is displayed, together with the number of carried divisions and the total transport capacity. For transport planes, the number of carried divisions and the total transport capacity are displayed. For land units, the tooltip of the HQ icon and the tiny engineering icon will display useful information, as you can see below:


One more improvement in the interface will let you see with a quick glance which units belong to your country and which are foreign units under your control, thanks to a small icon with a flag. There is also a tiny difference between military control and expeditionary forces: Mongolian units are under military control and the Mongolian flag has a black border whereas the unit from Tannu Tuva is an expeditionary unit and the Tuvan flag has a gray border:

If there is not a country specific icon (like "icon_unit_MON.bmp") then a generic icon is displayed ("MC" for military control and "EF" for expeditionary forces).

A final word about nation specific model names and pictures on foreign units. In HOI2 Armageddon there is a well known bug: when a player has military control (or have expeditionary forces) from another country, those units use the model name and the picture as the same model for the player's country. We've corrected this bug: the model name and the picture will now be those of their original country!

To close this Development Diary, here is part of the code involved:
Code :
Code :
Code :
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Bonne lecture

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Darkest Hour was officially announced by Paradox Interactive only two months ago. Yet many questions arose from the community.
We already introduced to you some of the game's features in previous development diaries. Therefore, we chose to dedicate this one to a session of questions and answers.
Let us start at first with general questions about the game philosophy.

[SIZE="4"][COLOR="Orange"]Game philosophy[/COLOR][/SIZE]


Citation :We kept in mind the idea that combat pace was too quick in Hearts of Iron II. We thence developed several tools to modify it easily (so modders can play with it as well). We tweaked many new misc parameters in such a way that land combats are now more realistic, e.g. slower and deadlier. Terrain and climate modifiers have been tweaked as well to provide players with more accurate results.


Citation :The main idea behind the game was to put players in the same position as world leaders during the darkest hours of XXth century. Therefore, you have to deal with dilemmas and, most of the time, no solution will be completely satisfying.
Playing Germany, will you be looking to wage the war as soon as possible and take the risk to leave your army or industrial base unprepared for a long conflict? As Japan, will you intend to invade new lands and thus have access to new resources or will you try to prevent a clash with the United States and the Western allies?
So generally speaking, you have to lead your nation dealing with constraints (more than in Hearts of Iron II). On the other hand, we were obviously very careful in letting minors still fun to play.


Citation :DH obviously offered to me the opportunity to implement ideas and features that I had dreamed of for years. I worked on this closely with Martin for two years now.
I for instance supported the implementation of a decision system for many months and finally convinced Martin to introduce it. Then I took care of the soft coding part with Björn and I can say that I am pretty proud of what we did in that regard. I believe this new feature brings a new dimension to the Hearts of Iron saga.


Citation :You always think you could do better or more. There are still areas where I have tons of ideas ranging from minor enhancements to complete revamp. But development could go on for years this way. You have to make hard choices. And I am very happy with what we implemented so far.

[SIZE="4"][COLOR="Orange"]Game features[/COLOR][/SIZE]


Citation :It is indeed possible to change country's flag. We have implemented a new event command that changes not only the flag but most national graphics (such as the skin or the counter, etc).
Nevertheless, we choose not to change flags automatically based on the ideology, yet it is possible to write simple events to create this behavior. Something along the lines of "if government = communist and flag = democratic then change_flag = XXX_communist" would fit perfectly.


Citation :Entirely reworked. The tech tree now covers the 1914-1964 era, with an emphasis on the 1914-1918 and 1936-1948 periods.


Citation :Unfortunately, we cannot reveal much now, but a future development diary will introduce the new automated trade system. It is one of the most efficient part of the game. Many will be surprised how easily it can be relied on.


Citation :There a lot of new commands and triggers, but we will introduce them in a future development diary. For now we can say that we have worked with the aim not only to correct and improve the existing triggers and commands, but also to add new ones! Based on the example you made, we can say that you'll be positively surprised.


Citation :Yes, we have implemented such command and players will be able to take decisions featuring them. As Germany, you will for instance be able not only to support the Fascist coup in Spain but also to directly control the Spanish army. American players can also assume the control of Chinese and French armies alike, which is especially useful for multiplayers sessions. We believe this feature will bring a lot of fun!


Citation :Yes. We have added a nice and functional zoom effect. It gives a clear view of what is going on on such small provinces while adding a nice touch to the map.


Citation :When certain requirements are met, the United States can pass the Lend-Lease Act. Then they can choose how they want to help the Allies. This help can go from merely sending them resources to becoming an actual “arsenal of democracy” (reflected by the displacement of factories).
Moreover, the Lend-Lease shipments can be intercepted and stopped by the Axis. Britain can for instance no longer receive the American aid when they do not have enough transport convoys. Therefore, the Atlantic submarine warfare becomes much more important than in Hearts of Iron II.


Citation :As time goes by and new doctrines are put in use, firepower increases whereas casualties tend to decrease. Thus, battle mechanics are completely different in 1945 compared to 1914. Not to mention that the advent of tanks and airplanes is a major revolution in military doctrines.


Citation :We have reduced the total amount and the number of provinces with victory points. We think that this is a better representation of the world.




And now, to close this Development Diary, here are two screenshots, the first depicting the Caribbean and the second depicting the Horn of Africa.




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Est ce que c'est toujours prévu pour Mars ?

Absolument
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Une preview de la...preview a été publiée sur le site de PC4WAR. L'article est dans le numéro 48 en kiosque ce mois ci !
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Impossible de voir qui a fait la preview, c'est toi ?

One of our aims with Darkest Hour is to reduce the amount of time the player has to spend on useless tasks instead of having fun. A good example of this is new improved and automated Spying System we already talked about (see DD3 for more details). But obviously we did much more than that: today, we're going to talk about some the time-saving improvements in the interface.

First of all, in Darkest Hour the use of the SHIFT+ and CTRL+ shortcuts have been extended. As you already know, usually with SHIFT+ you add 5 items to the queue whereas with CTRL+ you add 10 items to the queue. The places where this was possible was limited, so we decided to expand its use. For example in the province interface it is now possible to add 10 levels of IC/AA/Naval Bases/Air Bases/Infrastructure/etc. in the Production Queue with a single click!

Moreover, we've added a new shortcut: SHIFT+CTRL+click will now add the maximum possible amount of items! You will be able to queue 99 convoys with just one click! But let's forget about this for a while, we'll get back when we'll talk more about production.

A new interesting feature is the multiple deployment of divisions. If you have a long list of divisions in your deployment pool and you don't want to waste your time deploying each of them separately, you can now simply press CTLR+click to select/deselect them. Moreover, if you press SHIFT+click over a division it will automatically select all divisions of the same model (infantry, motorized, interceptors, CAS etc.). And if you press CTRL+click over a division it will automatically select all divisions of the same type (which means land, naval or air units). But this is not the end: after selecting the divisions, there will be a new screen where you can choose to add these divisions to an existing unit or deploy them in a specific province. Nothing new? Wrong, there is a new trick! The game will automatically group together units of the same model creating groups (but if you want them separated you just have to press SHIFT). By default land units are placed in groups of three, air units in groups of 2 and naval units in groups of 6, bu this value is moddable in misc.txt for each unit type. So for example if you have 7 land divisions, the system will automatically separate them in 3 units: the first two unit will have 3 divisions each and the third unit will get 1 division. You can them easily deploy these three units in a specific province. If you want 7 different units each composed by a single division you'll only have to press SHIFT.

Now it may sound a bit too complex, but trust us: it is a really useful feature, you'll love it!

Another improvement that you will surely appreciate is the merging of the terrain and the weather map. This option is initially disabled, but all you have to do is right-click on the pause button and you can enable it. As you can see from the screenshot below, the terrain map will now display the clouds from the weather map and two new small icons to represent mud and frozen terrain. Very useful when you are executing Operation Barbarossa!

As you might have spotted in the screenshot above, there is also another option: you can hide icons and units from view in the diplomatic mode! Take a look at how the diplomatic map may look with this new feature:

And finally, we made some cosmetic changes to the economic map: the units are hidden and the icons are grouped together:


We hope you'll appreciate these new features! Come back again next week!
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Je ne suis pas trés convaincu par ces "raccourcis" claviers...
A voir en jouant.
Sinon il va falloir quand même un de ces jours annoncer une date de sortie.

Je ne poste pas souvent ici car mes posts restent malheureusement souvent sans réponse mais pour ce qui est de la date de sortie, elle a été fixée mais je ne peux la révéler car notre éditeur, Paradox Interactive, détient l'exclusivité de l'annonce.
Pour donner simplement une indication, beaucoup de joueurs passeront leurs weekends d'avril à réécrire les pages les plus sombres de l'histoire.
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Pas de problémes de toute facon comme je t'avais dit je passe réguliérement sur le site Strategium.
Je trouve que pour donner envie du jeu l'AAR que tu présentes sur Strategium est plus pertinent que la description de nouveaux raccourcis clavier. Je ne les ai jamais utilisés jusqu'àlors et je ne pense pas que ca va changer ma vision du jeu.
Je suis entrain de faire une partie avec les chinois sur le WIF et je trouve ca trés interessant il faut savoir etre patient et utiliser la masse chinoise à bon escient. HoI2 est vraiment le premier jeu qui ne me lasse pas. Bref vivement fin Mars début Avril.

idem à jmcm2.

Faudra que je reprenne une partie d'HOI3 avec un AAR derrière, ma partie actuelle est "bloquée" pour cause de civ 5 !
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Les convictions sont des ennemis de la vérité plus dangereux que les mensonges