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.
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.
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 RU-vid channel description. Keep up the great work!
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.
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 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.
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.
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!!!!!!
Macedonians are not Bulgarians, Dubrovnik was Serbian in 19th century and the proof is easy to find - Austrian census nd also Krajina was 90% Serbian Orthodox population, they weren't a minority as this map shows.
Responded to the first your other comment. Firstly, the Austrian census (with the only conclusive on being held way after the start date in 1910) is wacky and it groups serbs-croats-bosnians all into one group (although has data on religion). Secondly I'm 90% sure that nowhere in the Balkans 90% of people made up anywhere. Also, Krajina and Dubrovnik aren't provinces as this map "provinces" are somewhat arbitrarily drawn shapes. For example, the countryside of Zeng may be majority Serb but the whole province is a serb-croat plurality.
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.
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 (:
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 :))
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.
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'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 (:
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 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. .
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.
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 (:
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!
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 north<->south 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 (:
