Although we try to evade manual editing as much as possible, which makes sense when dealing with tens of thousands of troops, we noticed it would be nice to be able to create a custom setup for recording video and taking screenshots. So we designed a number of edit functions to place troops manually, beyond what is possbile with unit orders.
- Deploy along road
- Deploy on area
- Deploy along line
- Change heading
These edit functions turned out to be a lot of fun to play around with. For example, deploy a Corps level unit over the road network created a 1000 Km long traffic jam across all of Belgium and Germany!
We also had a couple of nice idea's to extend this functionality. For example:
- Automatically generate camera-paths along deployed units
- Randomisation to control adding noise to positioning and orientation to make the deployment less synthetic
- Adding filters. For example to exclude disabled or destroyed troops from deployment.
We now see that these edit functions will also be powerful tools for anyone of you who plan to do some modding and want to recreate a specific cinematographic scene or historical event.