Tag Archives: Company of Heroes

Brecourt Video Update

I’ve still been putting a lot of work into my Brecourt Manor map lately, and it feels like it’s over half complete.  I’ve got a lot of the hedgerows placed, so it’s mostly a matter now of filling in the fields and making everything look natural.  The map’s script has also come a long way (at over 700 lines so far) but still has a lot of tweaking left to go.  However, I’m feeling a lot more comfortable with LUA and the SCAR functions, so it should go quickly.

A couple weeks ago, I dabbled briefly with the Unity engine to see if it was viable for another project I’ve been longing to make.  There’s a lot to learn up-front about Unity before you can get anything even playable (take Quaternions for example), but then things start to come together.  In only a few days, I made from scratch a basic tank that drives around and shoots with (mostly) realistic physics.  I must say, though, that this is the most math I’ve done since college.  😕

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Brecourt Manor Progress

Brecourt Manor 11-17-13The gun trenches are more or less complete and work has started on the surrounding environs.  Creating realistic-looking hedgerows is a multi-step process: trees first, then the hedges themselves, bushes, and finally some scrub grass to smooth out the base.  Then repeat over and over because Normandy is nothing but hedgerows.

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Brecourt Manor in CoH

A few months ago, I released my first singleplayer map for Company of Heroes.  I had a lot of fun scripting the scenario, which is done entirely in LUA, so I was eager for another map to work on.  And it didn’t take long until inspiration hit me in the form of re-watching Band of Brothers.  The prominent engagement in the second episode is the assault on the guns at Brecourt Manor.  The episode must have inspired others as well, since several video game recreations already exist; most notably in the first Call of Duty.

However, all the existing Brecourt Manor assault recreations have major accuracy flaws.  The CoD one has fairly accurate trenches (where the guns were located), but the context is very flawed (e.g. Easy Company did not subsequently attack the manor itself).  There is also another Brecourt map made for CoH, but being that it was made for multiplayer, balance concerns forced them to change almost all the geography other than the trenches.

So to distinguish my attempt from all the others, I decided to make what I hope is the most accurate portrayal of the battle.  To achieve this, I first gathered up as many maps as I could showing the fields and hedgerows where the battle occurred—present day Google maps, 1947 aerial map, D-Day recon map, and a map apparently provided by Maj. Winters.  I then layered and lined up the maps in an image editor to create a composite image of the most accurate map I could make.  That image appears below.

Brecourt Manor Assault Template Map

Brecourt Manor Assault Template Map

You can see on the above image that I’ve already established the playable area (red rectangle) and the map boundaries (green rectangle) for the CoH map, with the gun trenches located in the center.  But the next step is where the real magic happens in making this map as accurate as possible.  In a process I first used in my Ogledow map, I took a greyscale version of the composite image above, saved it to a bitmap, and then copied its raw bytes into a data format called a “stamp”.  The CoH WorldBuilder uses these stamps to let you copy map data between maps, but using this technique, one can also copy data from images into maps.  The result can be seen in the below images.

The result being an extremely accurate template by which to “draw” the actual map content.  This is about as far as I got when I first started working on the map since Serpent 3 was nearing the end of its life at the time.  But I just recently got back into it and I’ve made some pretty good progress, although I’m nowhere near done.  I’d say I’m to a point where it’s playable, though.  (Props to the guys at Relic that actually make these maps from scratch.  It takes forever to get them to look realistic.)

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Serpent 4

Serpent 4

Serpent 4

About a month ago, I decided that I would upgrade my desktop computer’s core components (CPU, motherboard, and RAM) because Serpent 3 was getting increasingly unstable, and Memtest wasn’t coming to the rescue this time.  At the same time, I figured I should probably “upgrade” my OS to Windows 7 since everything seems to be switching over to it now.  Watch the video below to see the build in action.

So the hardware of Serpent 4 is working out flawless so far, but the operating system is constantly disappointing.  The main trouble early on was that I kept getting the dreaded “display driver stopped responding” system freezes but only when using Firefox.  Googling this gives you infinite solutions, but the one that worked for me was just downgrading the nVidia drivers from 320.18 to 310.70.

In general, there’s too much that’s really annoying about Windows 7 and not enough to actually like.  A few things I do like, though:

  • Libraries are kinda cool, I guess
  • Not being limited to 3.25 GB of memory is very cool
  • Task Manager on steroids–even saves your sorting
  • Pin to Taskbar can be useful
  • WebDAV remote folders work seamlessly
  • Resizing thumbnails in explorer is occasionally helpful

And that’s pretty much it.  As far as things I don’t like in Windows 7, most of them fall into the category of needlessly changing things (e.g. making it more “user-friendly”) such as the entire network connections control panel, not displaying drive free space in the explorer status bar, the lameass search box in explorer, etc.  And the UAC… I really wanted to believe you might be helpful sometime, but after a month of dealing with your bullshit, I couldn’t take it anymore.

But at least I’m getting to play Company of Heroes 2 now, so I guess it’s all worth it.

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Five Games I Can’t Stop Replaying

There are some video games that are so fun that I find myself replaying them regularly.  And if my Steam gaming stats are anything to go by, I’ve logged considerable time with the following games after so many playthroughs.  I’ve tried to choose games that are all fairly recent here, but for a list of some great older games, see Snake’s Top Tens from 2005.

Tropico 3

The Tropico series is all about managing a tiny island nation in the Caribbean, and the third game in this series definitely does it best.  There’s something very addicting to this game in its delightful blend of economy management, city-building, and island vistas.  Because your island only starts with roughly 50 citizens, you can connect with their individual needs and preferences and fulfilling those feels very rewarding.  The near infinite combinations of variables for the presidente, scenario, and island makes Tropico 3 that much more replayable.

Company of Heroes

The accurate portrayals of World War II weapons and combat and the exceptional graphics are the two main factors that make Company of Heroes so enjoyable to play.  There’s nothing better than seeing a mammoth German Tiger tank crushing everything in its path with all turrets firing and the ensuing visceral fireballs and carnage.  And on top of this brutal combat comes a very intelligent strategy game where the balance of power is constantly shifting, keeping you on your toes.  The campaigns (Normandy, Market Garden, Caen) in Company of Heroes are great for occasional replaying, but the skirmishes are even better for a quick bout of WW2 action.  (Best if consumed with Band of Brothers.)

Red Faction: Guerrilla

Red Faction: Guerrilla is Grand Theft Auto with explosives.  Who knew that the creative destruction of buildings could make for such enjoyable gameplay.  On top of that, you feel like your actions are actually having an effect on the world as you start completing missions and freeing zones.  But mainly, blowing stuff up never gets old.  (Highly recommended to go xliveless, though.)

It all starts with a sledgehammer

It all starts with a sledgehammer

Dark Messiah of Might and Magic

Dark Messiah combines a lot of the features I love in a game.  It has great first-person combat, character development via a skill tree, plenty of loot to find and equip, sneaking around and stealth kills, and nice graphics and level design.  The combat alone is quite intense and takes some careful choreography from the player; so, executing the perfect attack is very rewarding.  All of these RPG elements combined with the combat and great locales make for a wonderfully replayable adventure.

Call of Duty: World at War

World at War is like playing a non-stop action WW2 movie.  And everything about this game is focused on keeping the action coming.  Normally I would be opposed to constantly spawning enemies in a game, but here they only force you to ferociously press on.  It’s an amazing-looking and -sounding game as well.  Even though the full game can be played in only a few hours, I find myself playing the game (or portions of it) over and over.

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New Website for SnakeByte Studios

SnakeByte Studios 2012

Heeeey…I have a new website.  It’s very much a work in progress, but I needed to make it live now because it’d probably have been another year before I finished completely.  As I mentioned a couple posts ago, the new site is powered by WordPress.  However, I mostly scrapped the theme I was working on in favor of a heavily modified Twenty-Ten and Nivo Slider for a homepage header.  The theme is not too unlike an idea I’ve been playing around with on my work blog, which itself was inspired by another theme called Dusk to Dawn.

Besides the other reasons I gave for switching to WordPress in the aforementioned post, which in summary were:

  1. Visitor commenting
  2. Full-featured backend
  3. Familiarity from using at work

I also just don’t have time to code my own site from scratch anymore.  And this is fine—I get enough coding websites at work—and will allow me to focus more on posting and other projects.  Speaking of other projects, I finished another map for Company of Heroes over winter break.  It’s a remake of a map from the original Red Orchestra.  It’s also on FileFront.

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