Recent Posts

21

General Staff Support Forum / Fixed bug in the way battle lines are calculated

« Last post by Dr D Ezra Sidran on May 23, 2019, 10:00:49 AM »

Wow! This was the worst case worst bug I've hunted down and killed in my 30+ years of coding. I noticed an error in a picture I posted in this article on our development blog: http://general-staff.com/battle-lines-commanders-computers/.

It's been driving me crazy for two weeks. But, it's fixed now.  I'll write a bit more about this in a blog post shortly.

22

General Staff Support Forum / Ai & the Sand Box

« Last post by Dr D Ezra Sidran on May 20, 2019, 03:16:42 PM »

For the last six weeks or so I've been working on porting the AI code that I wrote for my  PhD dissertation (http://www.riverviewai.com/download/SidranThesis.html) and the MATE project code that I did for DARPA into the General Staff Sand Box which was created for testing AI, combat, etc.

The thing about AI is that I like it's often like being a submarine commander: it's all happening below the surface and often there's nothing much going on visually. AI - especially tactical AI - requires numerous 'building blocks'. For example, one of the most important is being able to identify battle lines. Here is a screen shot from the Sand Box showing how the AI perceives battle lines: .
This scenario uses a restored map from the original 1882 American Kriegsspiel.

I've written at more length about what's going with the battle lines calculating AI on our development blog here: http://general-staff.com/battle-lines-commanders-computers/

As always, please feel free to contact me directly if you have any questions or comments (or just reply to this post). I'll be glad to respond.

23

General Staff Support Forum / Re: Changelog - picture heavy

« Last post by Andy ONeill on May 18, 2019, 12:20:56 PM »

Ezra is working on the ai but posts on his blog.
The pause in my development work is due to several factors.
It's a pause rather than end though.

24

General Staff Support Forum / Re: elevation maps

« Last post by zu Pferd on May 16, 2019, 11:40:17 PM »

 

25

General Staff Support Forum / Re: Changelog - picture heavy

« Last post by Sitnam on May 16, 2019, 08:28:45 AM »

It's gone quiet here and still no word on a release date.  Should backers be worried?

26

General Staff Support Forum / Re: elevation maps

« Last post by Andy ONeill on May 07, 2019, 04:43:03 AM »

This is one of the sources I looked into.
There are satellite based elevations on this particular site.
Others also offer Lidar ( laser ) which is more precise.
They give a measurement for a chunk of the earth ( like say a square 500 metres ) with a resolution of +- so many metres.

All are encoded and you either obtain a specific elevation or you get a thing called a geo tiff. This encodes elevation in a sort of a picture.

Unfortunately, significant development would be necessary to make these usable without a lot of manual intervention from the user.
As you can see in the linked pdf.
You would be doing all those processes yourself to get your elevations ready to import.
There is no web service you can call to return an elevation for a specific latitude/longitude.
I found one source is a sort of a hobby site ( could be taken down any time really ).
It is throttled to one call per minute.
We need 1155 * 805
Or 15,496.25 hours.

From the geotiff or dataset you manipulate the data using an open source utility.
What you end up with is a greyscale image.
Which you can import with the current code base.
You can use that process right now.
It has an inherent limit of 255 elevation steps because it uses 255 greyscale.
This is minimum elevation 0 (black) and maximum 255 (white).
For many battlefields that is going to be enough for one step = 1 metre.

What about if that isn't enough though?

If you somehow had a mountain you wanted to include but retain a finer granularity elsewhere then you could potentially blank the mountain higher parts out white.
Set a matching elevation (part way up the mountain) as the upper elevation limit.
Import that image.
Then add the pointy bits back in with a custom greyscale import.
The custom option lets you work with a small image which can contain transparent parts (no change) and is additive.

Which is all very clunky.
But no credit card registration is necessary.

If you're ok with registering a credit card then the google elevation api works very reliably.
They've removed the checks which were intended to stop abuse so it doesn't stop part way through now.
Although this is costed, you get $200 credit a month.
Which covers a lot of maps.

I do understand that the step of registering a credit card is likely to put some off.
It's difficult to get away from the fact that this is a far easier process than the alternatives though.

27

General Staff Support Forum / elevation maps

« Last post by zu Pferd on May 05, 2019, 09:14:44 PM »

Hello,
In regards to elevation maps, I found this link within Armored Brigade/Matrix
and a handy PDF with step by step instructions to gain at least the gray image to create the
sat elevation in making maps for General Staff
the link is here
http://www.matrixgames.com/amazon/PDF/AB_Map_making_Tutorial/AB_map_making_tutorial_small.pdf

and the link to the data also in the PDF.
You need to register to gain the data set.
https://earthexplorer.usgs.gov/

its a little on the technical side.

28

General Staff Support Forum / Re: Changelog - picture heavy

« Last post by Andy ONeill on April 16, 2019, 07:43:12 AM »

Game

Added mechanism tracks which the "current" side is.
Because ( naturally ) as you play the game you should only be able to order your own units about, see what your entire army contains etc etc.
Add "second" army's pieces to board.
Clear old pieces when starting a new game.

29

General Staff Support Forum / Re: Changelog - picture heavy

« Last post by Andy ONeill on March 27, 2019, 02:27:30 PM »

Kriegsspiel pieces

Made the line formation icons square.
Unit type width multipliers are now no longer applied to kriegsspiel line icons.

30

General Staff Support Forum / Re: Changelog - picture heavy

« Last post by Andy ONeill on March 19, 2019, 01:13:41 PM »

Kriegsspiel piece


Fix width of 3rd kstrength displayed