Good morning!

This weeks topic is brought to you by the embedded Quality Assurance on Hearts of Iron IV, and how we work. My name is Distantaziq and I’m one of the two embedded QA on HoI4. My partner is currently in flux, but at time of writing and until HoI4 is released it is Da9L who holds the position, or maybe you know him more prominently as the person who put the ”Y” in ”Yermany”.

Quality assuring a game is much like quality assuring any other piece of software, except in an arguably more creative setting. If you’re thinking of getting into the business “to get to play games the entire day” you’re more or less signing up for “a fun safari trip” while you’re really enlisting to the corps.

The Quality Assurance department in Paradox Development Studios is divided in two parts; Embedded Testers, that are a part of the project’s development team, and Central QA that are more fluid as they jump between the titles. Continue reading “Hearts of Iron IV – Development Diary 55 – HoI4 Quality Assurance” →

Greetings everyone!

This weeks DD is about something I know many of you have been hoping and waiting for a long time; AI!

“The field of ridiculously high expectations and abysmally low standards.” – Wiz

Being the only one crazy enough to want to take on the AI in HoI4 as Wiz went on to other projects, I was thrown in to it over a year ago now, and while it has been the hardest job I have ever had, it has also been the most fun and rewarding one.

So, lets jump in, shall we?

Right off the bat there were a couple of MASSIVE challenges in making the HoI4 AI;
1: Maintaining plausible historical behavior in a relatively dynamic and sandbox oriented game
2: Making the execution of player drawn battle plans solid enough that it would feel beneficial to use it.

Rest assured that significant amounts of sweat, blood and tears have been shed to tackle these issues.

For the first challenge, a couple of things sets the AI of Heart of Iron apart from the other PDS titles. First of all the chronologically compact and recent nature means people have different expectations on the HoI AI to act more or less according to history. While HoI4 is more of a sandbox experience than at the very least its latest predecessor, the set up is still historical and there were often reasons for countries to take certain actions at the times that they did. The challenge here was to have an AI capable of handling new situations dynamically in a way that makes at least some sense, regardless of if they are historical or not.

Continue reading “Hearts of Iron IV – Development Diary 54 – AI” →

In this episode, Hungary under mighty Daniel invades Germany (after Romania of course). You’ll see how well that will go.

Source

Hey people, this weeks topic is about the 2d art, everyone’s favourite yay! Let me start by introducing myself, I’m Mats Virtanen, aka Sideburnout, I´ve done most of the 2d art in the game, from the cover, loading screens, interfaces, icons down to the smallest land battle modifier (only made a handful of the portraits though). I´m a classic forum lurker so I seldom post stuff, but rest assured i read as much as I can, the forum is always a good place to check out if I need references, a good laugh or just inspiration.

So, how do you go about to create the graphical profile of Hearts of Iron 4. First of, get in the mood. Glenn Miller is always a nice start Since the beginning i´ve watched countless documentaries, war movies, series like band of brothers etc. Other ww2 games ofc and the team itself! I love the 30-40ies music and wartime posters so these were a natural inspiration too.

Continue reading “Hearts of Iron IV – Development Diary 53 – 2D Art” →

Romania still stands against Daniel 🙂 And a global war has begun! A pretty good episode, overall.

 

Hi everyone, this weeks diary is going to get really technical! We will be talking modding and improvements we have made for the modders in HOI4. This is also going to be a very long one

When starting out we decided we wanted to make HOI4 our most moddable game yet. That meant not hard coding things (HOI3 had a lot of hard coded logic and references to certain nations). In HOI4 all these things are in soft code, or part of scenario script setups making it a much better platform for cool mods. We have also decided to include the tool we use (more further down), and while it is provided as-is and not really polished compared to the real game its very useful. The game is also much better at letting you know when you have made mistakes and everything that can go wrong will usually let you know with logs etc.

Tools and Getting Started
Getting started with the creation of mods are now easier than ever before!
Using the launchers mod tool will allow you to create an empty mod for the game without any hassle and without even starting the game.

Then starting the game with the “-debug” flag will enable the “modder mode” that adds some extra sanity checks and enabling tools useful for modifying the game.
For example the in game Nudger tool that provides a simple interface to modify the properties of the map.

Continue reading “Hearts of Iron IV – Development Diary 52 – Modding” →

This time Italy and Hungary are played – and D9eL makes Hungary extra large.