WWI Mod: Storm of Steel

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zookeeper
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WWI Mod: Storm of Steel

Post by zookeeper »

Having worked almost entirely solo for a few months on a WW1-themed full-scale mod, I'm now releasing the first pre-alpha version of it. The main motivation for doing this is that I require help in order to continue: mostly small C++ changes or additions to the Wesnoth engine.

I've collaborated a bit with Yanshee, who worked on his own WW1 era a while back and did, among others, those fancy attack icons and units. I haven't heard of him in a while, but he did agree to the merging of our projects into one, and hence the usage of the name of his era, "Storm of Steel" (consider it a working title if you will, since obviously it might change) for this mod.

Now, I mentioned this being a "full-scale mod", but what does that mean? Simply speaking it means that I can change all graphics and all WML used by the running instance of the game, which is obviously something a simple era cannot do. This also means that you must start the game differently when you want to play using the mod, and here they are:

Installation instructions:

1. This will only work with 1.3.2 or later.
2. Download and unpack Storm_of_Steel.zip in a normal manner to userdata/data/campaigns/ (which is where all the other UMC is).
3. Start Wesnoth with the command-line parameter of userdata/data/campaigns/Storm_of_Steel/. On Windows, the simplest way to do this is to create a shortcut to your wesnoth.exe and just edit the shortcut to execute the command like this: C:\Games\Wesnoth-1.3.1\wesnoth.exe userdata\data\campaigns\Storm_of_Steel\. I'm not sure whether on a *nix system you can just type wesnoth ~/.wesnoth/data/campaigns/Storm_of_Steel/ in a terminal for it to work, but most of you can probably figure it out. If you got it right, starting the game will bring you to a title screen with custom graphics. If you see the normal Wesnoth title screen, something went wrong.
4. Set up multiplayer game, select the Storm of Steel era and either one of the Storm of Steel maps (the other is a testing map and the other a more proper one), and off you go.

Now, don't expect this to be playable: it's not. You can recruit, move units around, do combat and such, but you can't play properly due to the large number of missing things and outright bugs (and the occasional crashes). I release such a pre-alpha version just to make all you potential contributors aware of this project, and hopefully to get some of the aforementioned help. If I felt like I had a realistic choice, I certainly wouldn't release anything in this kind of a junk state. ;)

Networked MP might work. I haven't tested it yet, but I don't think there's anything in the WML that should be able to cause OOS. We'll soon see whether that's correct, I suppose. The AI can't handle SoS in a meaningful manner since it doesn't know how to use the various WML-scripted abilities, but it should be able to provide a dummy opponent which you can beat up if you don't feel like controlling two sides yourself.

And now to what this mod is actually about, besides technical inconvenientments:

World War I era setting. Two factions, Central Powers and Allied Powers. Maybe later we'll have national factions (Germans, Russians, British, etc), but for now two will do. The factions are almost identical, with the only differences being that Central can recruit railway guns and slightly different naval units.

The current basic unit types are:

Infantry - can entrench if kept stationary for one turn and call fire support from nearby artillery units.
Engineer - can destroy entrenchments, repair vehicles and move undetected at night.
Medic - heals infantry, engineers and other medics. If kept stationary for one turn, establishes a field hospital for more effective healing.
Artillery - provides fire support when called by infantry and airplanes. Fire support has a multi-hex reach but has limited ammo every turn.
Tank - slow on rough terrain, but takes only half damage from all rifle and machine gun fire.
Airplane - fast, can move after attacking but must end the turn on a town, airfield or a supply center.
Dreadnought - deals heavy damage at sea, and can also provide fire support.
Destroyer (Allies)- faster and lighter than the dreadnought, and has no fire support capability.
U-Boat (Central) - is invisible to enemies in deep waters and can perform torpedo attacks which do not expend movement.

Units have no advancements. Instead, they'll later get various AMLA-style veteran bonuses when they advance. The custom terrains are rather simple and I won't bother to explain them here.

When the basic mechanics and rudimentary balancing is complete, I'd like to aim for having a rather small set of partially scripted scenarios to play on. Not a big bunch of generic maps, but a small bunch of scenarios with possibly special objectives and some pre-placed units and such (perhaps even some real historical battles?). I don't know how exactly I'll make the economy be. It could end up like in Wesnoth, or there might be no money at all and you simply get only as many units as you have vill...supply centers, or it might be something completely different.

And now to the more present matters:

The things I need help with:

1. C++ patches. There are a number of small feature requests and bugfixes that are essential for enabling this mod to fully function. All these features are generally potentially useful (not to mainline content necessarily: useful for other major UMC/mods like Spacenoth counts in my mind) so that they can safely be added to the Wesnoth engine itself. Somewhat urgent feature requests I currently have include: 2. Art. As you can see, the custom graphics (units and terrain) are currently rather abysmal. The unit placeholder graphics work as placeholders just fine for now, but some of the terrain stuff is downright horrible. Wasn't much of a priority yet. I'll also have to eventually make custom versions of all the icons (like in the MP menu) and other art that's still from mainline Wesnoth. However, at this point I consider the art side to be much less important than the C++ side, since without the latter the former cannot be utilized.
Last edited by zookeeper on April 29th, 2007, 7:55 pm, edited 8 times in total.
Blarumyrran
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Post by Blarumyrran »

the mod has the most interesting gameplay i have seen this far, railguns & artillery were especially nice.

i tried it twice against AI, and it crashed on turn 4 both times. and lots of other less serious bugs whom ill not mention.

other than that, VERY good job.
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Konrad II
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Post by Konrad II »

It looks great, but why the clumsy install(nevermind, got the answer to that)? :( I don't know how to use your era on my computer(mac OS X) for I am not really good at computers at all... Do you have an idea how to? For now I can't get Storm of Steel to work thanks to that "command line" I have to start Wesnoth with.
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zookeeper
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Post by zookeeper »

Konrad II wrote:I don't know how to use your era on my computer(mac OS X) for I am not really good at computers at all... Do you have an idea how to? For now I can't get Storm of Steel to work thanks to that "command line" I have to start Wesnoth with.
You'll have to find out how to give parameters to a program when running it on your OS X (maybe some other OS X user can give simple instructions?) and then use the right path as that parameter. You should be able to figure out what the path is exactly on your system from the EditingWesnoth page (my guess would be that you'll have to use ~/Library/Preferences/Wesnoth/data/campaigns/Storm_of_Steel/, after successfully unpacking the .zip to that directory of course). More than that, I cannot really say.
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Post by Weeksy »

I'm getting some major issues with this. I load it like you say, and I get a cool background, but when I try to start a game, it gives me some junk about how it can't find some Era of Myths units... :annoyed:
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zookeeper
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Post by zookeeper »

Weeksy wrote:I'm getting some major issues with this. I load it like you say, and I get a cool background, but when I try to start a game, it gives me some junk about how it can't find some Era of Myths units... :annoyed:
Hmh, that's annoying and something I didn't quite think of. This is caused by all MP content (like EoM) being loaded when entering MP (even in SoS), and EoM for example probably fails at that point since it can't find the normal mainline units (undead, for example) it uses since SoS never includes them. I'm not sure if it's at all possible to work around that...I'll have to take a closer look.

EDIT: Wow, I actually did find a workaround for that, which means I can isolate all other custom MP content from being included when SoS MP is started. Basically, just put #undef MULTIPLAYER in the beginning of userdata/data/campaigns/Storm_of_Steel/data/game.cfg somewhere. I'll include this fix in the next release, which might come rather soon.
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zookeeper
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Post by zookeeper »

Ok, I've uploaded a new version (check the first post). Expect this to still be in the pre-alpha stage, although I've fixed quite a number of bugs, implemented some new things and cleaned up quite a lot of WML.

Notable changes, besides various bugfixes which I won't mention separately:
* Created a custom theme.
* Added a few naval units: Dreadnoughts for both factions, Destroyers for allies and U-Boats for central (and a harbour terrain onto which they may be recruited).
* Added a new semi-proper map in addition to the testing map.
* Networked MP might work. Not sure and I haven't tested it myself yet, but it might.

Do note that this won't work with 1.3.1, but only with more recent SVN trunk (around r16390 and upwards).

EDIT: And of course, fixed the abovementioned bug with other user-made content such as custom eras.
Last edited by zookeeper on April 1st, 2007, 8:59 pm, edited 1 time in total.
viorc
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Post by viorc »

zookeeper wrote:Do note that this won't work with 1.3.1, but only with more recent SVN trunk (around r16390 and upwards).
I just tried it with svn r16430 and it worked fine. I always wanted to see these great sprites from Yanshee in the game. You have done a great job too, zookeper.
:D
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zookeeper
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Post by zookeeper »

Just for the record, I did test some networked MP myself the other day, and it seemed to work fine without any OOS. I also did a minor update that fixed TC issues with the ellipses (stars?) and some minor submarine stuff.

And by the way, I wouldn't mind finally starting to get some feedback on balance and the economy system (which I still haven't figured out). Mainly; can you come up with an economy system that's simple but somewhat different (actually, it can be radically different; I don't value having the gameplay be similar to that of Wesnoth)? Some ideas I've had so far:
  • The Wesnoth way.
  • Just having supply centers give you 1g every turn (and either removing upkeep entirely or having supply centers not pay upkeep, just give the 1g).
  • Allowing you to only have as many units as you have supply centers. Not really good for many reasons.
  • Allowing new recruits only once per day, twice per day or something similar.
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Post by TheFlyingSquid »

I have not tried the game and I'm not sure if this is possible (I have very little grasp of programming), but I think for the economy it would be cool to have some sort of supply line system. Whereas you could have a major supply line and then lose it all because some enemy attacked a link in it.

Again, I have no idea if this is possible. This is just an idea that is fairly simple in theory.
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Post by Darn Penguin »

I've got a better name for it: All Quiet on the Wesnoth Front!

...

You know that's funny, you just won't admit it.
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zookeeper
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Post by zookeeper »

TheFlyingSquid wrote:I have not tried the game and I'm not sure if this is possible (I have very little grasp of programming), but I think for the economy it would be cool to have some sort of supply line system. Whereas you could have a major supply line and then lose it all because some enemy attacked a link in it.

Again, I have no idea if this is possible. This is just an idea that is fairly simple in theory.
I'm not quite sure of what you mean by a supply line system (I know what a supply line is) and/or how it would actually work in a scenario. Would the supply line consist of actual non-combat units such as freighters (controllable by the player or automatically moving ones?) or would supply lines be just locations on the map you would have to protect, or something else?
Darn Penguin wrote:I've got a better name for it: All Quiet on the Wesnoth Front!

...

You know that's funny, you just won't admit it.
Indeed. I just won't admit it.
TheFlyingSquid
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Post by TheFlyingSquid »

It could indeed be actual units that are moving. But I was more thinking stationary locations on the map in which it would be smart to protect or attack. You wouldn't just be sending out all out assaults on people because there would actually be a reason to leave some units behind to defend. It would be cool to have a defensive aspect to the game.

I think a moving supply line would just complicate, but you're the developer. Again, this is just an idea.
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zookeeper
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Post by zookeeper »

Updated! The mod should now work with all systems, as I've duplicated all the core mainline stuff over to SoS (increasing the download size from 1.5MB to 6.25MB, too), so people like Turin should now be able to run it. If you still experience similar problems, please do tell.

BTW, I won't rewrite some of my posts that got lost in the forum crash. It was mostly something insignificant about supply lines and something about the problems on non-windows which should now be resolved anyway.
tw
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Post by tw »

For supply lines, are you saying that for example if you want to make a dreadnought, you need an iron mine, a coal mine, a steel factory, and a shipbuilders, and if the enemy destroy or capture any you can't make dreadnoughts any more until you rebuild or recpature the facilities.

Going KISS a bit more, how about have a general idea of infrastructure to maintain and protect, and attack enemy. So, for example, you need roads, railways, electricity lines, telephone lines, and so on. If they get damaged it becomes more difficult or impossible to keep your war machine going, or you have other drawbacks. Destruction of the telephones forces you to use radio, for example, which can be intercepted by the enemy, unveiling the fog of war for them, unless you have encryption.
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