@@aternixgame I was mainly on CK2, tons of fun! I was mostly in QA though and did a bit of design, so got to be on most of the projects. Super cool to have been working on Stellaris from inception to release 😊
Make sure countries start with historical debt! One reason the Austrian empire was weaker than it ought have been was the high level of government debt it carried throughout the 19thC. Also the Russian empire had a very limited ability to raise taxes which was a structural issue that contributed to its collapse in WW1.
I'm a UE tech artist and have been brainstorming the best way to do this in unreal for a long time, and you've pretty much matched my thoughts 1:1, which is comforting since it tells me I'm not insane :D Really excited to see other people working on stuff like this, as you mentioned basically nobody has been and the resources are very slim.
@@stupidonesgames5923careful you don’t use words like master, death, suffer, war, devastation, develop, plunder, sabotage, destruction, tyrant, etc Those are triggering words to unreal, if it’s possible to be perceived as negative and might cause someone to think about something negative they might have been involved in then Unreal hates it and any mention of it
Yeah Epic's (like most companies fairly) don't like that. There's nothing explicitly in the EULA that says that it can restrict distribution by doing that. However, it does limit what I can apply for in mega grants. However, I can very easily get around most censorship by saying that the game is an educational tool.
Super immersive work! Can't wait to see the finished product. A super small and quick demo of single province using this method would be a really helpful pointer on how to implementing something similar in other projects. Love the work and will follow along!
The map looks great, but I hope the graphics won't compete too much computing power against actual gameplay mechanisms. I think 1 resource per province is not good, should a labor-intensive resource like cotton change to a capital-intensive resource like oil, the consequent mass unemployment would be both unrealistic and problematic.
The graphics is actually surprisingly fast and from now on I'm focusing on gameplay. Now thinking about it having a 1 resource doesn't make much sense considering exploitable resources like coal and oil as you said would employ the whole province. Idk if youve played vic2 but population directly scales resource output which is incredibly broken. I'll try to think of a better way to do it (:
@@stupidonesgames5923 Yeah, I quit playing VIC2 after finding many of its broken mechanisms that can't be solved by modding. And ever since, I often think about making a realistic and working grand strategy of my own, yet, I lack the time and programming skills for now🤣. My idea regarding most game mechanisms is to make everything thing into buildings, here is my thought on oil and by extension other exploitable resources: A province modifier to limit where and how many levels of oil rigs can be built, and how much oil can be extracted in total. Tech unlocks more, representing newly discovered or exploitable. Oil rigs are tech and capital intensive to build, good intensive to maintain but require very little labor to operate, so Nigeria won't have a higher oil production than Texas. Other mineral resources should also operate like this but with different configurations, for example, coal should be more labor intensive. Techs can change this dynamic, usually towards more goods and less labor.
@@stupidonesgames5923 Yeah, I quit playing vic2 after finding out many broken mechanisms that no modding can fix. Ever since then, I often think about creating a working and realistic grand strategy game of my own, yet I lack the time and programming skills for now. To address various broken or unrealistic mechanisms of vic2, my idea is to make everything into buildings. For example, regarding oil, and by extension all exploitable resources, it can be like this: A province modifier to limit where and how many levels of oil rigs can be built, and how much oil can be extracted in total. Tech unlocks more, representing newly discovered or exploitable. Oil rigs are tech and capital intensive to build, goods intensive to maintain but require very little labor to operate, so Nigeria won't have a higher oil production than Texas. Other mineral resources should also operate like this but with different configurations, for example, coal should be more labor intensive. Techs can change this dynamic, usually towards more goods and less labor.
@@stupidonesgames5923 Yeah, I quit playing vic2 after finding out many broken mechanisms that no modding can fix. Ever since then, I often think about creating a working and realistic grand strategy game of my own, yet I lack the time and programming skills for now. To address various broken or unrealistic mechanisms of vic2, my idea is to make everything into buildings. For example, regarding oil, and by extension all exploitable resources, it can be like this: A province modifier to limit where and how many levels of oil rigs can be built, and how much oil can be extracted in total. Tech unlocks more, representing newly discovered or exploitable. Oil rigs are tech and capital intensive to build, goods intensive to maintain but require very little labor to operate, so Nigeria won't have a higher oil production than Texas. Other mineral resources should also operate like this but with different configurations, for example, coal should be more labor intensive. Techs can change this dynamic, usually towards more goods and less labor.
@@stupidonesgames5923 Yeah, I quit playing vic2 after finding out many broken mechanisms that no modding can fix. Ever since then, I often think about creating a working and realistic grand strategy game of my own, yet I lack the time and programming skills for now. To address various broken or unrealistic mechanisms of vic2, my idea is to make everything into buildings. For example, regarding oil, and by extension all exploitable resources, it can be like this: A province modifier to limit where and how many levels of oil rigs can be built, and how much oil can be extracted in total. Tech unlocks more, representing newly discovered or exploitable. Oil rigs are tech and capital intensive to build, goods intensive to maintain but require very little labor to operate, so Nigeria won't have a higher oil production than Texas. Other mineral resources should also operate like this but with different configurations, for example, coal should be more labor intensive. Techs can change this dynamic, usually towards more goods and less labor.
I love what you’re doing, man! Finally someone who goes for the grand strategy with a full fledged plan and good ideas/skills. Will be following you in this endeavour, keep it up!!!!!!
Please make this as an asset on the store. I would pay money for it immediately. I actually am working on a similar project but set in ww2 and this will be perfect for my project. As you mentioned there isnt many videos online on how its done, so if you cant make detailed tutorials. I would gladly buy it on the marketplace.
You deserve so much more recognition. This is awesome and frankly I think this already looks better than most paradox grand strategy map games for a indie dev. PLEASE continue this great work. Also, great you are making something like this from scratch, which allows for more innovation and freshness to it, once again, fantastic work. P.S. I'd hope when this comes out, you'll list this on steam. That would be magnificent.
I know that you have your own vision for your game and it mostly follows vic2 but one thing that would be great and can be implented even in the province system is the distinction between rural and urban areas. That can be done by making separate provinces for most large enough cities that existed in that time. This will allow your game to represent massive population movement that happened in the process of urbanization at the time and differences between these areas in general. Maybe there could be a dynamic system of province creation and destruction, but that's seems like to difficult to implement and too taxing on the performance.
Currently on the map most major cities are small provinces with huge populations (paris, brussles, london e.t.c) and I've got an "Urban" terrain type which will increase pop promotion to certain pops. As there are some pops which in a state when they get promoted move to the capital of that state. Which somewhat simulates urbanization. For instance beurocrats only live in the state capital, meaning by the end of the game youll have hives of beurocracy in various states which still having rural farmland. A dynamic system like you said would completley tank performance as cool as it would be ):
@@stupidonesgames5923 oh, that's great to hear. It would be cool to implement a connection between industrialization and urbanization that happened at the time, and many consequences of this, like lower birth rates, increased assimilation and more politicaly engaged populace. .
That's impressing! I've always been fascinated by maps, but quite intimidated by the process of making them (even basic images; there's not a lot of good software to simplify the process with good results)... So I never dared to even think about making a Grand strategy game (which I absolutely love)! But I've been working on a kind of flight simulator game lately and had to find a way to make the earth in Unreal, so it initiated me a little to the materials blueprints and while doing it I superimposed different kind of map on it (climates, resources, etc) just for fun and thought for a brief moment that it could be an idea for a future project. So seeing how you did it is certainly interesting!
Have you looked at how to place and render rivers and roads? Are you planning on modifying the map at all during the game (e.g. craters or expanding cities)? Do you have a visual target, like a collection of pictures, for how you would like the map to look in the end? (Edit: oh, didn't realize you have a bunch of videos already - thought this was your first)
Super impressive! I tried making a grand strategy map too a couple of years ago and used the unique color technique too, but it was still way too difficult! I subscribed and look forward to more devlogs!
Looks great. One question I want to ask is if the topographical granularity actually brings anything beyond the point where you understand what they represent? In other words, is there a point showing the full granularity of say a mountain after the point at which you understand it's a mountain? In which case, wouldn't it be better to reduce the resolution such that readability is increased instead?
The resolution of the mountains is mainly for visuals because I think it looks cool. But terrain will play an important part in trade and production. I'll probably make alternative map shaders for players to choose from (e.g a classical map style)
Okay, this is the coolest thing I have seen in a long time and something I've wanted for a long time. If I could make video games I would certainly do something like this.
This is so cool, will be def following along your journey. As a hobbyist 3d modeller, texturer myself, I know a bit of the struggles involved on getting something from idea to reality, love to see when you mention that you haven't found a tutorial for something yet, because I totally take that as a good sign myself :))
This is absolutely amazing, looks exactly on par. How would this compare to something like the Total War grand strategy map, or is it pretty similar? I'm curious how you made the geometry of the map, using any plugins? This may be out of scope, but I'm guessing these provinces can't dynamically update their borders, but I'm curious how one may approach that. For instance showing how borders may change over time or update borders when conquered.
In a total war like game you'd probably be better off doing a mesh based system cause theres way less provinces and you'd beable to use engine tools like the foliage painter more easily. I dont use any third-party plugins. Updating borders dynamically would kinda break everything and might be possible for a smaller map but its out of the scope for this game and would mess up data (like culture)
Can you share a video how to start making this interactive map? no need to share complete tutorial, just wanted to know where to and how to start making it... I want to create one but I can't find any tutorials for making interactive map in Unreal Engine so far.
Looking great so far! Just a suggestion, but could you have distinct “border” and “terrain” map modes? Terrain with province colours alongside the heightmap, and Border as a flat map similar to maps of the 19th or 20th c.s?
Mountains are looking a bit too spikey imo, Maybe it would be good to tone down the exaggeration on the topography heightmap a bit, or even possibly give the player options for that in the graphics settings.
All jokes aside it actually performs realy well im getting 200fps on a 3050 laptop with on high quality. So a midrange intergreate graphics laptop probably could run it at 50-70fps
I was interested until you said every province will only contain one good, i know you said you wanted this to be like vic2, but don't copy the worst aspects of vic2, having one resource per province is lame and isn't realistic. Vic3 did this best IMO. Still curious to see where you take this.
Yeah I gota lot of Feeback on that so I'm gonna do it differently. I think I forgot how broken Vic2's economy was lmao. The current plan is to have each province have a 2 "RGO" buildings. One farming the other mining. With the provinces terrain, climate and vegetation having a large impact on their efficiency and what goods they produce (as well as historic deposits). Which'll be much better than just one as it allows for capital-labor intensive industries and is equivalent to vic3 because everything exists on the state level in vic3.
@@stupidonesgames5923 That's a lot better of an idea, if possible i think playing a bit hard and fast with having not just two rgos and allowing for a third "special" deposit like oil or maybe even gold to be found in some places would be interesting.
Interesting! What time period are you expecting the game to simulate? I assume starting from the early modern period based on the ideas of banking and fiat. Besides that, I think the mountains are a bit spiky, particularly around the balkans :p
I'm aiming for 1830->1930 for content. Might go a bit past that for post release development. Yeah, the Balkans topography is pretty noisy, I kinda just need to source higher res heightmaps and run them through a low pass filter and it should look much better (:
So I guess this is a "suggestion" but I don't want to come off as 'telling you how to make your own darn game'. You obviously may do as you wish. I'm mostly curious about the economy. Mostly 'Production' and 'Trading'. When you say that you have a system where provinces all make one good each is that just a good of any description? Or do you mean something like victoria ii's style 1 RGO with factories separate? You can break goods down into to categories like: mineable/farmable (RGO) (i.e. comes out of the ground) and value-added (i.e. made with factory from other goods). Now, if it were my game (which it's not) I would say just let every province have a 'production modifier' for every kind of good that is an RGO and for some the modifier is just '0' (if there is no oil then you can't produce it). After that one could just treat mineable and farmable resources like factories i.e. a basic farm is just a factory that takes no inputs and makes food. I'm also pertinently interested in the market. Trading, not just between countries but within the, is something I've never seen handled really well by any game. Most games use a simplistic approach to things like pricing and usually have magic, free transportation. I totally understand if the same thing happens here too. You mentioned having not only different currencies but different types of currency. That sounds really cool. Also sounds like a nightmare to implement and then actually balance game-play wise. (I could imagine a lot of potential exploits from this) Overall I think this looks really cool and you clearly have a lot of talent. It would be amazing seeing a well optimized (c++!) grand strategy game for once lol. I wish you the best of luck.
So the new plan is that there are two RGO's per province, one being arable the other being mineable. Both are gathered by Laborer pops. Factories then produce manufactured goods and are a bit different. I'm currently looking into doing buildings as a production zone with terrain/climate/veg/deposits having a big impact on production and construction cost (terrains/climate/veg are now integrated into the universal modifier system so they can do anything from raising unrest to increasing pop promotion). I think buildings would be better than just farmers/miners existing but the problem I run into is that the granularity of pops and terrain I have is much higher than vic3 (as vic3 everything is on a state level). And I don't want the game to turn into a clicking simulator upgrading stuff. In terms of internal trade, transportation will be abstracted into increasing costs moving goods to neighboring provinces with poor infrastructure or terrain and having modifiers for river systems. I can't really do more than that cause it'll run super slow.
This looks very cool, did you plan on opening a discord server? Understandable if you dont want to worry about stuff like that at this point but I think that just having a Server for the development, contributions, questions etc would be pretty nice. Cant wait for whats coming :))
Great map I hope the game will come out in the best shape possible, I tho think that 3 trade goods per province might be a better idea to more stimulate a realistic economy
The idea for having 1 good is mainly for optimization (with switching hopefully removing complete crashes of good values) and at this point I've got a much higher province density then vic 2 so hopefully that'll diversify it more. 3 Trade goods is an interesting idea so I might revisit the 1 good system if I've got the performance to do so (:
On my end its already implemented. Essentially, I use a CRT for VFX which holds indexes of provinces that need an outline, which will later also handle weather and other FX.
Can you please make a tutorial where you explain how you did achieve the movement of units from province to province, with a line (arrow) drag from start to destination? That i cannot find any kind of tutorials how to achieve it! thanks in advance!
Here I've got a vic2 like economy where each province has a good and pops produce it (sorry if i wasnt clear). Im planning on changing it tho to something better (:
I'm more comfortable with unreal and c++ so its easier for me. Also alot of code for gameplay mechanics can only really done in c++ for performance (such as using safe pointers). I also want future modders to be able to do visual programmed decisions and stuff so unreal pretty good for that (:
This looks awesome!! I've tried so many times to get into grand strategy games and it's been a challenge for me, but I really want to have the time to put in to understand one someday. 😆 I know you're early in development, but I'm a professional composer for games and I'd love to chat with you and send some demos if you're interested. You can find my official demo reel and contact info on my UA-cam channel description. Keep up the great work!
Subscribing and looking forward to your progress! I've dabbled with UE5 paradox style map but failed. My problem was using separate meshes. While fine for small amount of them it became slow, as you mentioned. I should use similar approach to yours next time!
Unreal Engine does have superior graphics and is superior in many ways. But nothing beats free and open source in the long run. Godot are slowly winning indie's and now some small studios.
I've never really used Godot but I've heard its pretty expandable. And unreals super fiddley to get working with anything that isn't and fps lmao. But im still way more comfotable with unreal and I use it at work (:
@@stupidonesgames5923 You have a great level of control using Godot and can do anything from very low-level programming in C++ (as the engine is open source, though you've got to recompile the whole thing), through more mid-level stuff in C#, all the way to scripting in Godot's own Python-adjacent language GDscript… But then, the level of graphical fidelity and 3D performance you get falls behind both Unreal and Unity without serious tweaking, and going with what you're used to for such a taxing and long-term project is absolutely the best course of action anyway.
Various sources. Im basing alot of it of this map: www.deviantart.com/venezuelan-1-reich/art/Map-of-the-world-in-June-1830-remake-860270863 With the German confederation being based off its Wikipedia page. For populations I can kind of guess off some data for most areas but for contentious areas like the Balkans I use a bunch of journal articles and the ottoman census.
Keep up the good work. Question: Are you going to include the cost of transportation of goods? When it comes to economics, the most important part and the most overlooked, is the cost of moving goods from one place to another. People scratch their heads as to why Russia is so much poorer than the United States, when the obvious answer always comes down to the cost of moving goods. This Mississippi River system has more interconnected navigable waterways than the rest of the world combined. Once the Erie Canal was built, you could get on a paddle boat in New York, and go into the interior. Connecting to the Great Lakes. Connecting to the Ohio River. Reaching the Midwest and the interior of the continent. You could float down to New Orleans and connect to the rest of the world. Or you could go west to the Rocky Mountains. You could even paddle all the way up to Montana. 200 years ago, when people migrated to America. They would get a horse and cart. They would head west. They would put seed in the ground. And 6 months later they would harvest the produce and float it on a barge almost for free down to New Orleans, where the product would then be shipped to the market that would pay the most for it. This was the invention of Capitalism. As in, for the first time in human history, ordinary normal people had the ability to generate their own capital. Changing the economy from being primarily dominated by exchanging goods and exchanging time, to becoming all about exchanging money. So, Capitalism as the social standard came to be. Dirt cheap land and dirt cheap transportation means a massive surplus. Natural economic growth with minimal State interference. The total cost of moving something on a river and moving goods through mountains, is something like 80 times. Building roads and railroads requires maintenance, resources, and manual labor. Floating something on a barge, or having a barge be pulled by a steamer, costs nearly nothing. You require few to no people, few resources, no management, tiny risk of disruption or delay. Et cetera et cetera. The United States is unfair and overpowered. They have the Mississippi which I have already described. On top of this, they have the largest agricultural zone in the world. The whole interior is flat and easy to build infrastructure on. The climate is stable, not as stable as Western Europe but stable enough to not wreak havoc on infrastructure. You have different climate zones from the north to the south, allowing for a wide variety in produce grown. The whole thing is in the middle of the Continent, which means no foreign power could ever threaten it. You also have near infinite iron, coal, and oil, right on top of the interior heartland close to rivers and population centers. This creates a system where independent industries and people can set out and produce a profit for themselves, without needing the Government to intervene. In Russia the situation is completely different. Almost like a sort of "mirror universe" version of the United States. The Russian rivers do not connect to each other. And the large rivers of the interior all flow north to the north pole. You have a shorter growing season. The temperature variation is bigger, causing a yearly nightmare to road and rail. Everything is more expensive to do. Everything produces less. Making a detached American-esque approach impossible. As independent industries simply cannot make a profit on their own without the collective investment from the National Government to brute force the enormous geographic barriers. There is a reason why Russia went from the Autocratic Tsar to the Totalitarian Soviet system. Because the only way of handling the Russian geography, is to brute force it. And once you brute force it, it barely produces a profit. The Americans could manifest their destiny, because it generated growth and profit. But when the Russians tried to do it with Siberia, trying to spread and build new cities, trying to expand the Siberian Railroad. It never made a profit. Causing the inevitable collapse of the USSR, as they were unrealistic and tried to do with the impossible in a geography that would never allow it. ---------- In Victoria 3, goods simply teleport and float around in the ether. They have a nonsensical "Transportation" resource, which is arbitrary and nonsensical. They have "Infrastructure" which is applied like the mobile phone game that it is. Electricity is no longer teleported across the globe through arcane magical portals. Instead, electricity is entirely locked to the province. Which means there is zero electrical transfer from New York to Connecticut, but the Appalachian Mountains separating East and West Pennsylvania is completely ignored. Good fly over the Andes, the Alps, the Himalayas, the Urals, and the Rockies as if magical elves on arcane flying machines carry them all across the world. I am becoming a tired old man. With the improving technologies and increasing computing power of the past decades, I thought the natural process would be to add complexities and features to give us games that were closer to reality while at the same time being playable as video games. Instead, we have improving graphics, while the gameplay features stagnated over a decade ago. And me as a natural result, becomes obsessed about every small project that tries to make a Grand Strategy game during the Victorian Era. I am glad I found this project. Now this and Gilded Destiny and live together on a mantle in my brain. Keep up the good work. I will be praying for it and you.
Thanks for all the info. In terms of trade, I'm thinking of implementing a system where a state has a storage of various goods essentially being a state market. This then goes to the region market, which is a landlocked or overseas region of the country + sphere members. The of the same county gets bonuses and disadvantages depending on location and what separates them and their distance. Which then goes onto the global market which will massively help in simulating preferential trade (which essentially held the British empire together and vic3 poorly simulates). On the state level the terrain of adjacent provinces, railways, roads, climate, vegetation etc. will contribute to the effectiveness of interstate/region trade. I might also add modifiers on specific states to simulate river flows. Like you said the Mississippi was very important but also the canals which are dynamic. This will hopefully make trade flow around the Appalachians. It'll also be a useful debuff for instance in Siberia where rivers flow northsouth which is effectively useless. This'll hopefully result in the right balance of accuracy and not needing a super computer (:
@@stupidonesgames5923 It's marvelous that that you are already thinking about the mechanics! It sounds good, and should go a long way to represent reality. I love Geopolitics, and the way technology interacts with geography to create and end result based on total costs. Some fun facts: Sub-Saharan geography is horrendous. But let's contextualize it. Their coastline is exposed. This means that the locations for large ports and harbors is very limited, and it is very difficult to use them for long periods. Mix this together with the fact that the interior is raised up on a plateau in many places, causing a severe disconnect between where you can have harbors and where people live and where the resources are. Mixed with being in the tropics. Which means using concrete and asphalt is very difficult. And then for the rainy season with mud slides and all that, it has a tendency to wash away the bridges and infrastructure. Making the total costs enormous for the most basic of infrastructure. So, the fun fact, the country of South Africa has, roughly, access to the same usable coastline as the rest of the African continent put together. And when you look at the coast of Eastern United States, the entire coastline is protected. Which means you can pretty much build a port anywhere you wish from Maine all the way down to Florida. Brazil shares much of the same problems as Africa. Everybody lives on the coast, which is an unpleasant coast. Then, to reach the interior, you need to pass a massive mountain chain. This means, to develop the interior of Brazil, you need to drive everything by truck down the mountains. Driving soy and everything else they make by truck. This means their vulnerability and their costs are enormous compared to the interior of America. Who, still slowly float their stuff on the river almost for free. But when you play EU4, you just walk in, find gold, and becomes the world superpower..... Paradox logic. ------ And then for some fun facts for the American Civil War: The Northeast connected to the Midwest thanks to the Erie Canal. Binding those two regions together in a very natural way. But the core of the South, from Virginia down to Georgia does not have this. The Southern rivers all flow from the Appalachians straight east into the Atlantic Ocean. Mix this together with the unpleasant climate of not having the proper 4 seasons of the year. Meant that Cash Crops was the only way to generate a profit. As homesteading here simply did not generate a profit like it did in the Northeast and Midwest. And so, forced labor served a vital economic need for decades after the formation of the United States. So, while the North could industrialize and exist within a similar situation as Western Europe, developing a modern financial system and industry. The South could only ship their product straight to the ocean. Binding the Southern economy to that of British textile industry. In a perfect situation, the Southern product would have gone to Northern industry, which would have fused the nation together economically. But instead, you got two separate economic entities within the United States. And those two economic entities split off, and would be known as The Union and The Confederacy for the Civil War. The early Democratic Party refused the idea that the Federal Government should build infrastructure. They feared that if the Federal Government could raise the taxes for national infrastructure, and then decide where the infrastructure would go, they feared the Federal Government would consolidate and become all powerful. This sadly meant that there was little to no National infrastructure that would bind together North and South. No economic integration. Had Andrew Jackson fallen down the stairs and the Whigs had been able to secure themselves as the prominent Party, there would have been a generation of integration before 1860. By then, Virginia and Lee would most likely have sided with the Union, and the whole American Civil War would probably have been avoided completely, or it would be nothing but a big yet short rebellion. Saving the lives of hundreds of thousands of men. And, looking at Abraham Lincoln and his views on the American Colonial Society, it would be quite likely that there would have been some sort of gradual emancipation, and with subsidized colonization of Panama and Liberia for the willing freedmen. Also, as a side note. This also means that the United States never leaves Japan as they did in real life. Which is going to completely alters everything about the Meiji Restoration, which would probably never have happened, as the Americans were doing most of their cooperation with the Shogunate and the various strongmen around Japan. Which, again, completely reshapes how the Pacific functions, where it would simply grow into a natural American "lake". ----- History and geography is amazing. Again, keep up the good work. Take your time and doo it right... Just don't take too long. :)
South Africa being the only usable coastline is crazy I had no idea. It's really cool how subtle geographical properties beyond climate impact development and trade (definitely gonna model that). I'll be honest my knowledge of American history is pretty poor compared to european-asian history. All I mainly know is the civil war and all that. It'll be intresting to implement different endings for the USA resolving slavery in terms of the methods used (i.e civilwar, economic integration, European intervention). I'll probably start doing the American demographic map after I do the ottomans cause it'll be very important for when I implement migration mechanics (:
What you are doing is very cool. I once dreamed of a game in which it would be possible to combine 4X strategy and the ability to play from a third person, but before that I had not come across a game in which maps from the paradox games were implemented in the Unreal Engine.
Looking really neat! I apologize if it was shared in a previous video (I haven't watched those yet), but how did you get the height map terrain thing to work with the provinces? It looks really pretty.
The provinces and heightmap are kinda independent of eachother for now. But the topography is done by a massive 16k virtual texture which then uses nanite tesselation.
Not exactly. Previous versions used normals and parallax mapping to fake height. The current method is leveraging nanite, which essentially stops sub-pixel triangles from being a thing, and then having a dynamically tesselated sphere whoes vertexes get offseted by the heightmap. It looks alot better then normals.
I made the province map using the tool. The tool uses data from nasas blue marble missions. The country names are a simple algorithm that interpolates between the two longest points of a country and the average of all the provinces.
@stupidonesgames5923 The border shape and texture is also created by this tool? I'm just curious how you made it. I've tried to create similar map with meshes but it was not efficient.
So I've got a basic modern day province/country "borders" which i use for reference whilst creating the provinces which is overlayed in the editor (think its in the video). The click on provinces is found by looking up the color of the pixle at the UV of the click which can be derived by some trig.
Main thing for gameplay is just to have a working economy right now with demographic mechanics inspired by vic2/3. I intend to make the combat systems a bit more like hoi4 in terms of army compositions and frontlines later in the time period, but importantly add systems for war escalation as an annoying thing about paradox games is that there's almost no difference between a colonial skirmish and total war.
Man its really coming together! i wish i could try and do a grand strategy game with your worklow too but iam way too unexperienced to use the information you just gave us in this video, any tips how i could go on about reacreting this as a beginner in blueprint??
Sorry, yeah its quite advanced. Unreals not really designed for this sort of thing. I had to write a whole bunch of c++ functions to edit datatable rows which for some reason isn't standard in blueprints (probably plugins). Look into using Maps (as in the variable type) instead of arrays (Maps basically can find an item super quickly with a lot of data) with a struct containg province info like ID color, name e.t.c. Look into creating a (canvas) render target painter for the province making tool (basically impossible without it). For actually reading a pixle on a static texture in pure bps you could have a 1*1 render target that you write to using the ID map texture then read it so its fast. Hope this helps theres a bunch of tutorials on render targets (:
@@stupidonesgames5923 thank you for the quick answer! to be honest i dont know what half of the words you just said mean, but im gonna try and research about it, i aldready tried godot but.. for me unreal fits better.
I didn't delete any comments? Ik this is a tricky historical nuance but pretty much every census describes them as Bulgarians (although some of them are wacky). I might add a couple of events relating to culture divergence in the future.
I used to work for paradox many years ago :) Great work!
What projects out of curiosity? :)
@@aternixgame I was mainly on CK2, tons of fun! I was mostly in QA though and did a bit of design, so got to be on most of the projects. Super cool to have been working on Stellaris from inception to release 😊
RIP paradox, now its ParaDEI and absolutely is anticonsumer. I hope mini devs like this one replace fallen giants like ParaDEI
if you cant find tutorial on something, that means you are making something new/fresh/unique so keep em up :)
Make sure countries start with historical debt! One reason the Austrian empire was weaker than it ought have been was the high level of government debt it carried throughout the 19thC.
Also the Russian empire had a very limited ability to raise taxes which was a structural issue that contributed to its collapse in WW1.
I'm a UE tech artist and have been brainstorming the best way to do this in unreal for a long time, and you've pretty much matched my thoughts 1:1, which is comforting since it tells me I'm not insane :D
Really excited to see other people working on stuff like this, as you mentioned basically nobody has been and the resources are very slim.
Hahaha I've seen your videos before. I got a lot of useful info on terrain setups. Glad you like it (:
@@stupidonesgames5923careful you don’t use words like master, death, suffer, war, devastation, develop, plunder, sabotage, destruction, tyrant, etc
Those are triggering words to unreal, if it’s possible to be perceived as negative and might cause someone to think about something negative they might have been involved in then Unreal hates it and any mention of it
Yeah Epic's (like most companies fairly) don't like that. There's nothing explicitly in the EULA that says that it can restrict distribution by doing that. However, it does limit what I can apply for in mega grants. However, I can very easily get around most censorship by saying that the game is an educational tool.
your voice could be louder - i had to crank up the volume quite a lot to hear you
yeah
Super immersive work! Can't wait to see the finished product. A super small and quick demo of single province using this method would be a really helpful pointer on how to implementing something similar in other projects. Love the work and will follow along!
The map looks great, but I hope the graphics won't compete too much computing power against actual gameplay mechanisms. I think 1 resource per province is not good, should a labor-intensive resource like cotton change to a capital-intensive resource like oil, the consequent mass unemployment would be both unrealistic and problematic.
The graphics is actually surprisingly fast and from now on I'm focusing on gameplay. Now thinking about it having a 1 resource doesn't make much sense considering exploitable resources like coal and oil as you said would employ the whole province. Idk if youve played vic2 but population directly scales resource output which is incredibly broken. I'll try to think of a better way to do it (:
@@stupidonesgames5923 Yeah, I quit playing VIC2 after finding many of its broken mechanisms that can't be solved by modding. And ever since, I often think about making a realistic and working grand strategy of my own, yet, I lack the time and programming skills for now🤣.
My idea regarding most game mechanisms is to make everything thing into buildings, here is my thought on oil and by extension other exploitable resources:
A province modifier to limit where and how many levels of oil rigs can be built, and how much oil can be extracted in total. Tech unlocks more, representing newly discovered or exploitable. Oil rigs are tech and capital intensive to build, good intensive to maintain but require very little labor to operate, so Nigeria won't have a higher oil production than Texas. Other mineral resources should also operate like this but with different configurations, for example, coal should be more labor intensive. Techs can change this dynamic, usually towards more goods and less labor.
@@stupidonesgames5923 Yeah, I quit playing vic2 after finding out many broken mechanisms that no modding can fix. Ever since then, I often think about creating a working and realistic grand strategy game of my own, yet I lack the time and programming skills for now.
To address various broken or unrealistic mechanisms of vic2, my idea is to make everything into buildings. For example, regarding oil, and by extension all exploitable resources, it can be like this:
A province modifier to limit where and how many levels of oil rigs can be built, and how much oil can be extracted in total. Tech unlocks more, representing newly discovered or exploitable. Oil rigs are tech and capital intensive to build, goods intensive to maintain but require very little labor to operate, so Nigeria won't have a higher oil production than Texas. Other mineral resources should also operate like this but with different configurations, for example, coal should be more labor intensive. Techs can change this dynamic, usually towards more goods and less labor.
@@stupidonesgames5923 Yeah, I quit playing vic2 after finding out many broken mechanisms that no modding can fix. Ever since then, I often think about creating a working and realistic grand strategy game of my own, yet I lack the time and programming skills for now.
To address various broken or unrealistic mechanisms of vic2, my idea is to make everything into buildings. For example, regarding oil, and by extension all exploitable resources, it can be like this:
A province modifier to limit where and how many levels of oil rigs can be built, and how much oil can be extracted in total. Tech unlocks more, representing newly discovered or exploitable. Oil rigs are tech and capital intensive to build, goods intensive to maintain but require very little labor to operate, so Nigeria won't have a higher oil production than Texas. Other mineral resources should also operate like this but with different configurations, for example, coal should be more labor intensive. Techs can change this dynamic, usually towards more goods and less labor.
@@stupidonesgames5923 Yeah, I quit playing vic2 after finding out many broken mechanisms that no modding can fix. Ever since then, I often think about creating a working and realistic grand strategy game of my own, yet I lack the time and programming skills for now.
To address various broken or unrealistic mechanisms of vic2, my idea is to make everything into buildings. For example, regarding oil, and by extension all exploitable resources, it can be like this:
A province modifier to limit where and how many levels of oil rigs can be built, and how much oil can be extracted in total. Tech unlocks more, representing newly discovered or exploitable. Oil rigs are tech and capital intensive to build, goods intensive to maintain but require very little labor to operate, so Nigeria won't have a higher oil production than Texas. Other mineral resources should also operate like this but with different configurations, for example, coal should be more labor intensive. Techs can change this dynamic, usually towards more goods and less labor.
I love what you’re doing, man! Finally someone who goes for the grand strategy with a full fledged plan and good ideas/skills. Will be following you in this endeavour, keep it up!!!!!!
Please make this as an asset on the store. I would pay money for it immediately. I actually am working on a similar project but set in ww2 and this will be perfect for my project. As you mentioned there isnt many videos online on how its done, so if you cant make detailed tutorials. I would gladly buy it on the marketplace.
You deserve so much more recognition. This is awesome and frankly I think this already looks better than most paradox grand strategy map games for a indie dev. PLEASE continue this great work. Also, great you are making something like this from scratch, which allows for more innovation and freshness to it, once again, fantastic work.
P.S. I'd hope when this comes out, you'll list this on steam. That would be magnificent.
Now this is intriguing.
I know that you have your own vision for your game and it mostly follows vic2 but one thing that would be great and can be implented even in the province system is the distinction between rural and urban areas. That can be done by making separate provinces for most large enough cities that existed in that time. This will allow your game to represent massive population movement that happened in the process of urbanization at the time and differences between these areas in general. Maybe there could be a dynamic system of province creation and destruction, but that's seems like to difficult to implement and too taxing on the performance.
Currently on the map most major cities are small provinces with huge populations (paris, brussles, london e.t.c) and I've got an "Urban" terrain type which will increase pop promotion to certain pops. As there are some pops which in a state when they get promoted move to the capital of that state. Which somewhat simulates urbanization. For instance beurocrats only live in the state capital, meaning by the end of the game youll have hives of beurocracy in various states which still having rural farmland. A dynamic system like you said would completley tank performance as cool as it would be ):
@@stupidonesgames5923 oh, that's great to hear. It would be cool to implement a connection between industrialization and urbanization that happened at the time, and many consequences of this, like lower birth rates, increased assimilation and more politicaly engaged populace. .
That's impressing! I've always been fascinated by maps, but quite intimidated by the process of making them (even basic images; there's not a lot of good software to simplify the process with good results)... So I never dared to even think about making a Grand strategy game (which I absolutely love)! But I've been working on a kind of flight simulator game lately and had to find a way to make the earth in Unreal, so it initiated me a little to the materials blueprints and while doing it I superimposed different kind of map on it (climates, resources, etc) just for fun and thought for a brief moment that it could be an idea for a future project. So seeing how you did it is certainly interesting!
If you listed the map editor to purchase in the store, I'd buy it ASAP. I always wanted to create worlds with Paradox-style interaction
Have you looked at how to place and render rivers and roads? Are you planning on modifying the map at all during the game (e.g. craters or expanding cities)? Do you have a visual target, like a collection of pictures, for how you would like the map to look in the end? (Edit: oh, didn't realize you have a bunch of videos already - thought this was your first)
Super impressive! I tried making a grand strategy map too a couple of years ago and used the unique color technique too, but it was still way too difficult! I subscribed and look forward to more devlogs!
Looks great. One question I want to ask is if the topographical granularity actually brings anything beyond the point where you understand what they represent? In other words, is there a point showing the full granularity of say a mountain after the point at which you understand it's a mountain? In which case, wouldn't it be better to reduce the resolution such that readability is increased instead?
The resolution of the mountains is mainly for visuals because I think it looks cool. But terrain will play an important part in trade and production. I'll probably make alternative map shaders for players to choose from (e.g a classical map style)
The way you assign the right colour to each province is insane yet genius. Bravo! We need more developers like you
UI can be improved other than that it looks good I will keep an eye on the development👍
love the insights on your thought process creating the map and first gameplay mechanics 🙌
Okay, this is the coolest thing I have seen in a long time and something I've wanted for a long time. If I could make video games I would certainly do something like this.
This is great, same brickwall, nothing out there for grand strategy, you should consider selling your tools as a toolkit on the UE marketplace
I'll probably make the map free or sell it as an asset at some point latter on in development (:
Appreciate your hard work ❤
March of eagles 2 look promising
This is so cool, will be def following along your journey. As a hobbyist 3d modeller, texturer myself, I know a bit of the struggles involved on getting something from idea to reality, love to see when you mention that you haven't found a tutorial for something yet, because I totally take that as a good sign myself :))
This is absolutely amazing, looks exactly on par. How would this compare to something like the Total War grand strategy map, or is it pretty similar? I'm curious how you made the geometry of the map, using any plugins?
This may be out of scope, but I'm guessing these provinces can't dynamically update their borders, but I'm curious how one may approach that. For instance showing how borders may change over time or update borders when conquered.
In a total war like game you'd probably be better off doing a mesh based system cause theres way less provinces and you'd beable to use engine tools like the foliage painter more easily. I dont use any third-party plugins. Updating borders dynamically would kinda break everything and might be possible for a smaller map but its out of the scope for this game and would mess up data (like culture)
@@stupidonesgames5923 that's good to know, thanks for the reply.
looks dope, and finally an accurate world map
Ah man, the game is that far from completion? It's just taking up space on my wishlist now.
So, out of curiosity, how did you decide on the shape and size of the ocean/ sea "provinces"?
Can you share a video how to start making this interactive map? no need to share complete tutorial, just wanted to know where to and how to start making it... I want to create one but I can't find any tutorials for making interactive map in Unreal Engine so far.
Nice work, that looks gorgeous. Do you share the project files?
Looking great so far! Just a suggestion, but could you have distinct “border” and “terrain” map modes? Terrain with province colours alongside the heightmap, and Border as a flat map similar to maps of the 19th or 20th c.s?
Thats a great idea! I'll probably make different shader versions for players to choose from when I get round to it.
Mountains are looking a bit too spikey imo, Maybe it would be good to tone down the exaggeration on the topography heightmap a bit, or even possibly give the player options for that in the graphics settings.
Really cool project and thanks for sharing your knowledge!
Looks great
I hope my PC will survive after launching this project in the future
ну, надеюсь у тя получится
and your minimum specs are gtx 1080 and 14th gen intel XD
All jokes aside it actually performs realy well im getting 200fps on a 3050 laptop with on high quality. So a midrange intergreate graphics laptop probably could run it at 50-70fps
@@stupidonesgames5923 good luck then
JUST IN TIME!
I was just googling on this exact same topic! Thank you so much :D
I can already see how incredible this project will be! But clearly a huge undertaking, I wish you nothing but success 🥳
I was interested until you said every province will only contain one good, i know you said you wanted this to be like vic2, but don't copy the worst aspects of vic2, having one resource per province is lame and isn't realistic. Vic3 did this best IMO.
Still curious to see where you take this.
Yeah I gota lot of Feeback on that so I'm gonna do it differently. I think I forgot how broken Vic2's economy was lmao. The current plan is to have each province have a 2 "RGO" buildings. One farming the other mining. With the provinces terrain, climate and vegetation having a large impact on their efficiency and what goods they produce (as well as historic deposits). Which'll be much better than just one as it allows for capital-labor intensive industries and is equivalent to vic3 because everything exists on the state level in vic3.
@@stupidonesgames5923 That's a lot better of an idea, if possible i think playing a bit hard and fast with having not just two rgos and allowing for a third "special" deposit like oil or maybe even gold to be found in some places would be interesting.
I always wanted to do something like that part with the map, but I am just too stupid to even start it. To bad.
Main thing about this i gotta comment on so far i believe the map is generally just very dark
Interesting! What time period are you expecting the game to simulate? I assume starting from the early modern period based on the ideas of banking and fiat.
Besides that, I think the mountains are a bit spiky, particularly around the balkans :p
I'm aiming for 1830->1930 for content. Might go a bit past that for post release development. Yeah, the Balkans topography is pretty noisy, I kinda just need to source higher res heightmaps and run them through a low pass filter and it should look much better (:
Good job man
So I guess this is a "suggestion" but I don't want to come off as 'telling you how to make your own darn game'. You obviously may do as you wish. I'm mostly curious about the economy.
Mostly 'Production' and 'Trading'. When you say that you have a system where provinces all make one good each is that just a good of any description? Or do you mean something like victoria ii's style 1 RGO with factories separate? You can break goods down into to categories like: mineable/farmable (RGO) (i.e. comes out of the ground) and value-added (i.e. made with factory from other goods). Now, if it were my game (which it's not) I would say just let every province have a 'production modifier' for every kind of good that is an RGO and for some the modifier is just '0' (if there is no oil then you can't produce it). After that one could just treat mineable and farmable resources like factories i.e. a basic farm is just a factory that takes no inputs and makes food.
I'm also pertinently interested in the market. Trading, not just between countries but within the, is something I've never seen handled really well by any game. Most games use a simplistic approach to things like pricing and usually have magic, free transportation. I totally understand if the same thing happens here too. You mentioned having not only different currencies but different types of currency. That sounds really cool. Also sounds like a nightmare to implement and then actually balance game-play wise. (I could imagine a lot of potential exploits from this)
Overall I think this looks really cool and you clearly have a lot of talent. It would be amazing seeing a well optimized (c++!) grand strategy game for once lol. I wish you the best of luck.
So the new plan is that there are two RGO's per province, one being arable the other being mineable. Both are gathered by Laborer pops. Factories then produce manufactured goods and are a bit different. I'm currently looking into doing buildings as a production zone with terrain/climate/veg/deposits having a big impact on production and construction cost (terrains/climate/veg are now integrated into the universal modifier system so they can do anything from raising unrest to increasing pop promotion).
I think buildings would be better than just farmers/miners existing but the problem I run into is that the granularity of pops and terrain I have is much higher than vic3 (as vic3 everything is on a state level). And I don't want the game to turn into a clicking simulator upgrading stuff.
In terms of internal trade, transportation will be abstracted into increasing costs moving goods to neighboring provinces with poor infrastructure or terrain and having modifiers for river systems. I can't really do more than that cause it'll run super slow.
hi
make more video tutorials unreal engine 5
thx
This looks very cool, did you plan on opening a discord server? Understandable if you dont want to worry about stuff like that at this point but I think that just having a Server for the development, contributions, questions etc would be pretty nice. Cant wait for whats coming :))
I'll probably do community stuff in the next couple of devlogs (:
Always wanted a 3d globe map game.
THE VERY FIRST TO MAKE THIS TUTORIAL THANK YOU!!!
Blood and Iron ... Reminds me of a lego game uhm
Godspeed you goddamn madman
Great map I hope the game will come out in the best shape possible, I tho think that 3 trade goods per province might be a better idea to more stimulate a realistic economy
The idea for having 1 good is mainly for optimization (with switching hopefully removing complete crashes of good values) and at this point I've got a much higher province density then vic 2 so hopefully that'll diversify it more. 3 Trade goods is an interesting idea so I might revisit the 1 good system if I've got the performance to do so (:
How would you handle highlighting borders when hovering over the country with this map/territory architecture in UE5?
On my end its already implemented. Essentially, I use a CRT for VFX which holds indexes of provinces that need an outline, which will later also handle weather and other FX.
Can you please make a tutorial where you explain how you did achieve the movement of units from province to province, with a line (arrow) drag from start to destination? That i cannot find any kind of tutorials how to achieve it! thanks in advance!
I'll elaborate on that more in the next devlog (a month or so). In the mean time look into A* algotihms (:
i absolutely hate the province good EU 4 style system, its utter nonsence, vic 2 or 3 would be a much better example of an actual economy.
Here I've got a vic2 like economy where each province has a good and pops produce it (sorry if i wasnt clear). Im planning on changing it tho to something better (:
It is interesting that you are doing grand strategy in Unreal. Have you found that this works better than Godot or Unity?
I'm more comfortable with unreal and c++ so its easier for me. Also alot of code for gameplay mechanics can only really done in c++ for performance (such as using safe pointers). I also want future modders to be able to do visual programmed decisions and stuff so unreal pretty good for that (:
This looks awesome!! I've tried so many times to get into grand strategy games and it's been a challenge for me, but I really want to have the time to put in to understand one someday. 😆 I know you're early in development, but I'm a professional composer for games and I'd love to chat with you and send some demos if you're interested. You can find my official demo reel and contact info on my UA-cam channel description. Keep up the great work!
Early days but I'll do that when I get more advanced (:
@@stupidonesgames5923 great! I can't wait to follow your development.
Are there going to be world empires or is it going to be realistic so that we don't see a Great Luxembourgian empire of Eurasia?
The games gonna have a more historical focus and will try to stay away from total wars before ww1 and 2
very cool!
Subscribing and looking forward to your progress!
I've dabbled with UE5 paradox style map but failed. My problem was using separate meshes. While fine for small amount of them it became slow, as you mentioned. I should use similar approach to yours next time!
Nice
Unreal Engine does have superior graphics and is superior in many ways.
But nothing beats free and open source in the long run. Godot are slowly winning indie's and now some small studios.
I've never really used Godot but I've heard its pretty expandable. And unreals super fiddley to get working with anything that isn't and fps lmao. But im still way more comfotable with unreal and I use it at work (:
@@stupidonesgames5923 You have a great level of control using Godot and can do anything from very low-level programming in C++ (as the engine is open source, though you've got to recompile the whole thing), through more mid-level stuff in C#, all the way to scripting in Godot's own Python-adjacent language GDscript… But then, the level of graphical fidelity and 3D performance you get falls behind both Unreal and Unity without serious tweaking, and going with what you're used to for such a taxing and long-term project is absolutely the best course of action anyway.
where did you get the data on these historic map borders?
Various sources. Im basing alot of it of this map: www.deviantart.com/venezuelan-1-reich/art/Map-of-the-world-in-June-1830-remake-860270863
With the German confederation being based off its Wikipedia page. For populations I can kind of guess off some data for most areas but for contentious areas like the Balkans I use a bunch of journal articles and the ottoman census.
Keep up the good work.
Question: Are you going to include the cost of transportation of goods?
When it comes to economics, the most important part and the most overlooked, is the cost of moving goods from one place to another.
People scratch their heads as to why Russia is so much poorer than the United States, when the obvious answer always comes down to the cost of moving goods.
This Mississippi River system has more interconnected navigable waterways than the rest of the world combined. Once the Erie Canal was built, you could get on a paddle boat in New York, and go into the interior.
Connecting to the Great Lakes. Connecting to the Ohio River. Reaching the Midwest and the interior of the continent.
You could float down to New Orleans and connect to the rest of the world. Or you could go west to the Rocky Mountains. You could even paddle all the way up to Montana.
200 years ago, when people migrated to America. They would get a horse and cart. They would head west. They would put seed in the ground. And 6 months later they would harvest the produce and float it on a barge almost for free down to New Orleans, where the product would then be shipped to the market that would pay the most for it.
This was the invention of Capitalism. As in, for the first time in human history, ordinary normal people had the ability to generate their own capital. Changing the economy from being primarily dominated by exchanging goods and exchanging time, to becoming all about exchanging money. So, Capitalism as the social standard came to be.
Dirt cheap land and dirt cheap transportation means a massive surplus. Natural economic growth with minimal State interference.
The total cost of moving something on a river and moving goods through mountains, is something like 80 times. Building roads and railroads requires maintenance, resources, and manual labor.
Floating something on a barge, or having a barge be pulled by a steamer, costs nearly nothing. You require few to no people, few resources, no management, tiny risk of disruption or delay. Et cetera et cetera.
The United States is unfair and overpowered. They have the Mississippi which I have already described. On top of this, they have the largest agricultural zone in the world. The whole interior is flat and easy to build infrastructure on. The climate is stable, not as stable as Western Europe but stable enough to not wreak havoc on infrastructure.
You have different climate zones from the north to the south, allowing for a wide variety in produce grown.
The whole thing is in the middle of the Continent, which means no foreign power could ever threaten it.
You also have near infinite iron, coal, and oil, right on top of the interior heartland close to rivers and population centers.
This creates a system where independent industries and people can set out and produce a profit for themselves, without needing the Government to intervene.
In Russia the situation is completely different. Almost like a sort of "mirror universe" version of the United States.
The Russian rivers do not connect to each other. And the large rivers of the interior all flow north to the north pole.
You have a shorter growing season.
The temperature variation is bigger, causing a yearly nightmare to road and rail.
Everything is more expensive to do. Everything produces less. Making a detached American-esque approach impossible. As independent industries simply cannot make a profit on their own without the collective investment from the National Government to brute force the enormous geographic barriers.
There is a reason why Russia went from the Autocratic Tsar to the Totalitarian Soviet system.
Because the only way of handling the Russian geography, is to brute force it.
And once you brute force it, it barely produces a profit.
The Americans could manifest their destiny, because it generated growth and profit.
But when the Russians tried to do it with Siberia, trying to spread and build new cities, trying to expand the Siberian Railroad. It never made a profit. Causing the inevitable collapse of the USSR, as they were unrealistic and tried to do with the impossible in a geography that would never allow it.
----------
In Victoria 3, goods simply teleport and float around in the ether.
They have a nonsensical "Transportation" resource, which is arbitrary and nonsensical.
They have "Infrastructure" which is applied like the mobile phone game that it is.
Electricity is no longer teleported across the globe through arcane magical portals.
Instead, electricity is entirely locked to the province. Which means there is zero electrical transfer from New York to Connecticut, but the Appalachian Mountains separating East and West Pennsylvania is completely ignored.
Good fly over the Andes, the Alps, the Himalayas, the Urals, and the Rockies as if magical elves on arcane flying machines carry them all across the world.
I am becoming a tired old man.
With the improving technologies and increasing computing power of the past decades, I thought the natural process would be to add complexities and features to give us games that were closer to reality while at the same time being playable as video games.
Instead, we have improving graphics, while the gameplay features stagnated over a decade ago.
And me as a natural result, becomes obsessed about every small project that tries to make a Grand Strategy game during the Victorian Era.
I am glad I found this project. Now this and Gilded Destiny and live together on a mantle in my brain.
Keep up the good work. I will be praying for it and you.
Thanks for all the info. In terms of trade, I'm thinking of implementing a system where a state has a storage of various goods essentially being a state market. This then goes to the region market, which is a landlocked or overseas region of the country + sphere members. The of the same county gets bonuses and disadvantages depending on location and what separates them and their distance. Which then goes onto the global market which will massively help in simulating preferential trade (which essentially held the British empire together and vic3 poorly simulates).
On the state level the terrain of adjacent provinces, railways, roads, climate, vegetation etc. will contribute to the effectiveness of interstate/region trade. I might also add modifiers on specific states to simulate river flows. Like you said the Mississippi was very important but also the canals which are dynamic. This will hopefully make trade flow around the Appalachians. It'll also be a useful debuff for instance in Siberia where rivers flow northsouth which is effectively useless. This'll hopefully result in the right balance of accuracy and not needing a super computer (:
@@stupidonesgames5923 It's marvelous that that you are already thinking about the mechanics! It sounds good, and should go a long way to represent reality.
I love Geopolitics, and the way technology interacts with geography to create and end result based on total costs.
Some fun facts:
Sub-Saharan geography is horrendous. But let's contextualize it.
Their coastline is exposed. This means that the locations for large ports and harbors is very limited, and it is very difficult to use them for long periods.
Mix this together with the fact that the interior is raised up on a plateau in many places, causing a severe disconnect between where you can have harbors and where people live and where the resources are.
Mixed with being in the tropics. Which means using concrete and asphalt is very difficult. And then for the rainy season with mud slides and all that, it has a tendency to wash away the bridges and infrastructure. Making the total costs enormous for the most basic of infrastructure.
So, the fun fact, the country of South Africa has, roughly, access to the same usable coastline as the rest of the African continent put together.
And when you look at the coast of Eastern United States, the entire coastline is protected. Which means you can pretty much build a port anywhere you wish from Maine all the way down to Florida.
Brazil shares much of the same problems as Africa.
Everybody lives on the coast, which is an unpleasant coast.
Then, to reach the interior, you need to pass a massive mountain chain.
This means, to develop the interior of Brazil, you need to drive everything by truck down the mountains. Driving soy and everything else they make by truck.
This means their vulnerability and their costs are enormous compared to the interior of America. Who, still slowly float their stuff on the river almost for free.
But when you play EU4, you just walk in, find gold, and becomes the world superpower..... Paradox logic.
------
And then for some fun facts for the American Civil War:
The Northeast connected to the Midwest thanks to the Erie Canal. Binding those two regions together in a very natural way.
But the core of the South, from Virginia down to Georgia does not have this. The Southern rivers all flow from the Appalachians straight east into the Atlantic Ocean.
Mix this together with the unpleasant climate of not having the proper 4 seasons of the year. Meant that Cash Crops was the only way to generate a profit. As homesteading here simply did not generate a profit like it did in the Northeast and Midwest.
And so, forced labor served a vital economic need for decades after the formation of the United States.
So, while the North could industrialize and exist within a similar situation as Western Europe, developing a modern financial system and industry.
The South could only ship their product straight to the ocean. Binding the Southern economy to that of British textile industry.
In a perfect situation, the Southern product would have gone to Northern industry, which would have fused the nation together economically.
But instead, you got two separate economic entities within the United States.
And those two economic entities split off, and would be known as The Union and The Confederacy for the Civil War.
The early Democratic Party refused the idea that the Federal Government should build infrastructure.
They feared that if the Federal Government could raise the taxes for national infrastructure, and then decide where the infrastructure would go, they feared the Federal Government would consolidate and become all powerful.
This sadly meant that there was little to no National infrastructure that would bind together North and South. No economic integration.
Had Andrew Jackson fallen down the stairs and the Whigs had been able to secure themselves as the prominent Party, there would have been a generation of integration before 1860. By then, Virginia and Lee would most likely have sided with the Union, and the whole American Civil War would probably have been avoided completely, or it would be nothing but a big yet short rebellion. Saving the lives of hundreds of thousands of men.
And, looking at Abraham Lincoln and his views on the American Colonial Society, it would be quite likely that there would have been some sort of gradual emancipation, and with subsidized colonization of Panama and Liberia for the willing freedmen.
Also, as a side note.
This also means that the United States never leaves Japan as they did in real life.
Which is going to completely alters everything about the Meiji Restoration, which would probably never have happened, as the Americans were doing most of their cooperation with the Shogunate and the various strongmen around Japan.
Which, again, completely reshapes how the Pacific functions, where it would simply grow into a natural American "lake".
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History and geography is amazing.
Again, keep up the good work. Take your time and doo it right... Just don't take too long. :)
South Africa being the only usable coastline is crazy I had no idea. It's really cool how subtle geographical properties beyond climate impact development and trade (definitely gonna model that). I'll be honest my knowledge of American history is pretty poor compared to european-asian history. All I mainly know is the civil war and all that. It'll be intresting to implement different endings for the USA resolving slavery in terms of the methods used (i.e civilwar, economic integration, European intervention). I'll probably start doing the American demographic map after I do the ottomans cause it'll be very important for when I implement migration mechanics (:
@@stupidonesgames5923 I bet. Modelling the Americas without migration would be rather odd :)
Good luck with the Ottomans!
Bologna, not Bolonga. Looks great otherwise!
Thanks for the catch im changing it now (:
bro the audio too low, im on max volume, still quiet
Unwontedly in order to change it I need to reupload ): Next video will be better
What you are doing is very cool. I once dreamed of a game in which it would be possible to combine 4X strategy and the ability to play from a third person, but before that I had not come across a game in which maps from the paradox games were implemented in the Unreal Engine.
Respect
Wow! It looks impressive, is there any info you can give on the release year and month?
probably early access within the year
@@stupidonesgames5923 amazing gotta say
gyaaaat dayumm
Can this game simulate other time periods, like the early medieval era for example? 😉
Yeah but it'll be overfitted to simulate a victorian->modern style economic system
@@stupidonesgames5923 it’s still incredible but ty
is this vic2 being redone ?
More of a spiritual successor then a remake.
Do you have a Discord?
Not yet. Just want to get some more mechanics before I do that. Probably in the next couple of devlogs I'll make one (:
Ive been looking into this on and off glad to see its do able motivation to get back to it
Very cool. You should turn up your audio in your videos though.
Looking really neat!
I apologize if it was shared in a previous video (I haven't watched those yet), but how did you get the height map terrain thing to work with the provinces? It looks really pretty.
The provinces and heightmap are kinda independent of eachother for now. But the topography is done by a massive 16k virtual texture which then uses nanite tesselation.
@@stupidonesgames5923 oh!
I don't know much about how that all works, but does it use the normal mapping stuff to create a height appearance?
Not exactly. Previous versions used normals and parallax mapping to fake height. The current method is leveraging nanite, which essentially stops sub-pixel triangles from being a thing, and then having a dynamically tesselated sphere whoes vertexes get offseted by the heightmap. It looks alot better then normals.
@@stupidonesgames5923 woah...
Any chance you know of a tutorial on how to implement that? 😅
@@Bizob2010 Sure ill elaborate on it next devlog (:
It's really coming together
Where did you get province map and the height map? How do you render country name on map?
I made the province map using the tool. The tool uses data from nasas blue marble missions. The country names are a simple algorithm that interpolates between the two longest points of a country and the average of all the provinces.
@stupidonesgames5923 The border shape and texture is also created by this tool?
I'm just curious how you made it. I've tried to create similar map with meshes but it was not efficient.
Also how do you detect click on province? In mesh based system it could be just click on event, but here? I have no idea 🤷♂️
So I've got a basic modern day province/country "borders" which i use for reference whilst creating the provinces which is overlayed in the editor (think its in the video). The click on provinces is found by looking up the color of the pixle at the UV of the click which can be derived by some trig.
@@stupidonesgames5923 The borders are hand-painted? What are these boxes?
I love the change in video style, keep it up! This is a very impressive project already, what plans do you have for gameplay?
Main thing for gameplay is just to have a working economy right now with demographic mechanics inspired by vic2/3. I intend to make the combat systems a bit more like hoi4 in terms of army compositions and frontlines later in the time period, but importantly add systems for war escalation as an annoying thing about paradox games is that there's almost no difference between a colonial skirmish and total war.
Man its really coming together! i wish i could try and do a grand strategy game with your worklow too but iam way too unexperienced to use the information you just gave us in this video, any tips how i could go on about reacreting this as a beginner in blueprint??
Sorry, yeah its quite advanced. Unreals not really designed for this sort of thing. I had to write a whole bunch of c++ functions to edit datatable rows which for some reason isn't standard in blueprints (probably plugins).
Look into using Maps (as in the variable type) instead of arrays (Maps basically can find an item super quickly with a lot of data) with a struct containg province info like ID color, name e.t.c. Look into creating a (canvas) render target painter for the province making tool (basically impossible without it). For actually reading a pixle on a static texture in pure bps you could have a 1*1 render target that you write to using the ID map texture then read it so its fast. Hope this helps theres a bunch of tutorials on render targets (:
@@stupidonesgames5923 thank you for the quick answer! to be honest i dont know what half of the words you just said mean, but im gonna try and research about it, i aldready tried godot but.. for me unreal fits better.
could you add teyrnllwg as an releasable nation? I want to do a teyrnllwg world conquest
Maybe I'll make Teyrnllwg the name of anarchist Wales (:
Looks beautiful
Hay sorry cool dicord ?
Probably make one in the next couple of devlogs (:
Hoi 6 or Eu 6 ?
Vic 4 (:
Whats the point of deleting comments? Macedonians are not bulgarians!
I didn't delete any comments? Ik this is a tricky historical nuance but pretty much every census describes them as Bulgarians (although some of them are wacky). I might add a couple of events relating to culture divergence in the future.
new EU4?? ;)))
Yes but, it will never be better than a Paradox game trust me
Do you have a discord or anything?
Probably within the next few devlogs when I've implemented core gameplay stuff.