My First Units That I Made - POWs

[Xerkis]

Ok, this is going to need some explaining on what this scenario is about – or better said; why I went with this.

I have never done anything in the way of graphics before, but have seen all the wonderful new units many of you have been making. So I wanted to give that a shot – at least enough of one to see the basic ideas on how to make a new unit’s graphics. After doing this exercise I now have an even greater respect for you that are pumping out all these awesome looking units.
And a special call out to zombiehunter1977 for your great tutorial. It helped a lot.
viewtopic.php?t=27378

Just for the record – and maybe to get some pointers from you all on how to better do this – here were the main issues I had with my graphics.
1) Big learning curve. I downloaded and used Gimp; mainly because that was what some of you suggested. Going in to it blind, it is not an easy piece of software to figure out. Even the most simplest of tasks were taxing.
2) Trying to find a half way decent photo to use as a model was not that easy either. The first thing you will notice is that the units are in black & white. Simply because I couldn’t find any color photos and after how long it took me to do what I did do – I wasn’t going to try and add the color at this point in time.
3) My hand is certainly not steady enough for this kind of work. And I’m sure that is more than evident when you see the units.

I say all of that just to say why I picked this scenario to make. If I was going to go through the trouble listed above, I didn’t want to make just another plane or tank. There are already tons of those in the game. So I tried to think of something that was WW2 related but not at all in the game. I came up with POWs. But how to work that in to a scenario? And that lead to a POW escape.

Therefore, the story line and object of this scenario is quite simple. There are POWs that have escaped a German stalag. The German’s objective is easy; eliminate the POWs. Unfortunately there is no way to actually “capture” a unit in this game, so they more or less have to shoot up the unarmed men. The Russians (and I picked the Russians just because the photo I found was of Russian POWs) they have to run for the safety of their owned city (found in the south-east corner.) there are supporting Russian units to use in any way you can to make sure the POWs stay alive.

This really was designed to be played as the Russians; especially since the AI wouldn’t have any idea on what to do with these units that can only move around and not attack. (Or possibly as a MP game.)
Also, the “safe area” that the POWs need to get to is the two city hexes and their surrounding hexes that the Russians start off owning.
And one more thing to start to play this; I have it listed under the normal scenario selection menu. Not in “custom”.

If you wish to make suggestion on the scenario itself; obviously that is more than fine. But honestly – as stated above – my main goal in this exercise was not to make a smash hit of a scenario, but to just make a new unit(s) with graphics and then see what they look like when playing.

http://www.mediafire.com/?pll643fp0vlok17

[VPaulus]

Good show, Xerkis.
We've another modder.
And now that I'm re-watching Colditz....

[Xerkis]

Good show, Xerkis.
We've another modder.
And now that I'm re-watching Colditz....

I was originally going for The Great Escape, but couldn’t find decent photos of POWs to match it – so I went with the Russian theme instead.


This whole thing was a diversion – I’ve been working on a campaign but wanted to see how to create a new unit and its graphics. But I didn’t want to mess up any of the work I’ve already put in to my campaign… so I did this little scenario as a test.