Hello everyone! We are getting close to release now with preorder started a few days ago.
When we posponed HOI4 release it was mostly a question of getting more time for programmers to fix bugs, which left our scripters and artists a little underused. We figured we would put this to use on adding more flavor and fun for some minor. We have a lot of polish players, so focusing on Poland seemed to be a good idea. We werent sure if we would get this complete on time, and since we wanted to see if this kind of content packs would be well received we figured the best idea was to make it a separate DLC from the base game. Things worked out and it got ready on time, so we decided we should just release it to everyone for free (this isn't just for preorder, you will get it whenever you buy HOI4, forever).
If this is popular we hope this is the first of a series of packs we'll make as DLC in the future.

So, what does it contain?

• Focus tree.
  
• 2D art for tanks & planes, complete with flavor names.
  
• 2D art for ministers, generals and country leaders.
  
• 3D art for infantry and some more well known tanks and planes
  
• Some achievements & events.

Polish Focuses
We had two rules when we designed these, first that the Polish focus tree could not be worse than the neutral one and secondly we felt it could not depend on other people's focus trees.

We made sure that all the benefits you get from neutral tree are still there, but made sure that they carried a lot more Polish flavour. In the end we were able to do some really cool things with Poland. The industrialization efforts of Poland are mainly based a short term national investment called the Four Year Plan. Parts of this plan included heavy investment in infrastructure, activation of the Old Polish Industrial Region and developing the Central Industrial Region. We have taken inspiration from the plan and implemented its different parts as branches of the Polish focus tree.

We also focused on the fact that Poland was way ahead of other countries when it came to the decryption of the German Enigma machine. To reflect this, Poland gets special focuses that give them them bonuses in computing and decryption.

When it came to diplomacy we wanted to add additional options for a Polish player who is surrounded by threats. Although we cannot stop Germany and the USSR from trying to carve up Poland (those focuses are elsewhere), we did feel we could have Poland seek accommodation with either power. If you play your cards right this could also lead to an alliance with them (which blocks the “carve up” focuses for that side).

That isn't the most interesting path, however, as digging around in history we stumbled across a rather ambitious Polish plan, called the Between the Seas Concept. This was a proposed alliance of countries between the Baltic, the Black Sea and the Mediterranean (one suggestion including Italy, no less). The idea ultimately failed due to a whole number of reasons which are too many to mention.

Still, it’s an intriguing idea, and one we felt we could something really cool with. If Poland chooses to go for the Between the Seas Concept they can set up an entire faction of their own. Although the Balkans are rocky ground for Poland, the Baltic States was an option. Especially if Poland could make up with Lithuania after the rather unfortunate disagreement over the status of Wilno (or Vilnius, depending on which side you were on). So Poland has the option to carve out its own little mini-faction in the center of Europe. From there it is up to a skillful Polish player to grow their alliance and stand strong against both East and West.




Equipment and names
For the Polish DLC we wanted Poland to feel like a fully fleshed out country. This included the names of equipment, which is a challenge for a country that wasn't too active in the research department after 1939. We therefore had to resolve to our least favorite tool when it comes to historical research: making things up.

If we look at ships, the Polish Navy during World War II was just a few destroyers and submarines. However, it gave us something to work with, and so for the names of more advanced classes we tried to followed the same naming convention as the ones we did have information for. That leaves only a slightly small gap, namely every other ship class. Time to get creative!

For light cruisers we went for Polish cities. As an added bonuses the naming order is by population size in the 1930s, a fun little detail for Polish fans. When it came to Heavy Cruisers we chose rivers in Poland, those mighty arteries binding the country together. The first class is named after the Polish Victory against the USSR in 1920 at the Battle of the Niemen (or course Poland would want to name a ship class after that). The follow up classes then get names after other rivers in Poland.

That's it for the easy ones, it’s time to dig a little deeper. We needed two names for Battlecruisers, and ultimately settled on territories that Poland felt were rightfully hers. For the mighty Battleships we went big and named them after Polish Royal dynasties. We saved the biggest man of Polish interwar politics for the biggest ship, the first Polish Super Heavy Battleship Class is the Pilsudski class. We needed two, though, so we also went for another famous Polish Marshall, Poniatowski (the man I am sure unbiased Polish historians agree would have won the Battle of Borodino, if only Napoleon would have released the Imperial Guard to support his flank attack). This left just the carriers and for ´those we went for Polish Kings, starting with the savior of Vienna, Jan Sobieski.





Next week we will be talking about tutorials, wiki and stuff like that. On wednesday we got another episode of World War Wednesday where Daniel & SteelVolt take the helm of communist France, and also more modding stream so make sure to tune in!

Also, remember to preorder so I can beg Fredrik for a real office T-34!

Read original post

Useful links
Official Website
Hearts of Iron IV Wiki
Development Diary Archives
World War Wednesday Stream archive

Hello everyone! We are getting close to release now with preorder started a few days ago.
When we posponed HOI4 release it was mostly a question of getting more time for programmers to fix bugs, which left our scripters and artists a little underused. We figured we would put this to use on adding more flavor and fun for some minor. We have a lot of polish players, so focusing on Poland seemed to be a good idea. We werent sure if we would get this complete on time, and since we wanted to see if this kind of content packs would be well received we figured the best idea was to make it a separate DLC from the base game. Things worked out and it got ready on time, so we decided we should just release it to everyone for free (this isn't just for preorder, you will get it whenever you buy HOI4, forever).
If this is popular we hope this is the first of a series of packs we'll make as DLC in the future.

So, what does it contain?

• Focus tree.
  
• 2D art for tanks & planes, complete with flavor names.
  
• 2D art for ministers, generals and country leaders.
  
• 3D art for infantry and some more well known tanks and planes
  
• Some achievements & events.

Polish Focuses
We had two rules when we designed these, first that the Polish focus tree could not be worse than the neutral one and secondly we felt it could not depend on other people's focus trees.

We made sure that all the benefits you get from neutral tree are still there, but made sure that they carried a lot more Polish flavour. In the end we were able to do some really cool things with Poland. The industrialization efforts of Poland are mainly based a short term national investment called the Four Year Plan. Parts of this plan included heavy investment in infrastructure, activation of the Old Polish Industrial Region and developing the Central Industrial Region. We have taken inspiration from the plan and implemented its different parts as branches of the Polish focus tree.

We also focused on the fact that Poland was way ahead of other countries when it came to the decryption of the German Enigma machine. To reflect this, Poland gets special focuses that give them them bonuses in computing and decryption.

When it came to diplomacy we wanted to add additional options for a Polish player who is surrounded by threats. Although we cannot stop Germany and the USSR from trying to carve up Poland (those focuses are elsewhere), we did feel we could have Poland seek accommodation with either power. If you play your cards right this could also lead to an alliance with them (which blocks the “carve up” focuses for that side).

That isn't the most interesting path, however, as digging around in history we stumbled across a rather ambitious Polish plan, called the Between the Seas Concept. This was a proposed alliance of countries between the Baltic, the Black Sea and the Mediterranean (one suggestion including Italy, no less). The idea ultimately failed due to a whole number of reasons which are too many to mention.

Still, it’s an intriguing idea, and one we felt we could something really cool with. If Poland chooses to go for the Between the Seas Concept they can set up an entire faction of their own. Although the Balkans are rocky ground for Poland, the Baltic States was an option. Especially if Poland could make up with Lithuania after the rather unfortunate disagreement over the status of Wilno (or Vilnius, depending on which side you were on). So Poland has the option to carve out its own little mini-faction in the center of Europe. From there it is up to a skillful Polish player to grow their alliance and stand strong against both East and West.




Equipment and names
For the Polish DLC we wanted Poland to feel like a fully fleshed out country. This included the names of equipment, which is a challenge for a country that wasn't too active in the research department after 1939. We therefore had to resolve to our least favorite tool when it comes to historical research: making things up.

If we look at ships, the Polish Navy during World War II was just a few destroyers and submarines. However, it gave us something to work with, and so for the names of more advanced classes we tried to followed the same naming convention as the ones we did have information for. That leaves only a slightly small gap, namely every other ship class. Time to get creative!

For light cruisers we went for Polish cities. As an added bonuses the naming order is by population size in the 1930s, a fun little detail for Polish fans. When it came to Heavy Cruisers we chose rivers in Poland, those mighty arteries binding the country together. The first class is named after the Polish Victory against the USSR in 1920 at the Battle of the Niemen (or course Poland would want to name a ship class after that). The follow up classes then get names after other rivers in Poland.

That's it for the easy ones, it’s time to dig a little deeper. We needed two names for Battlecruisers, and ultimately settled on territories that Poland felt were rightfully hers. For the mighty Battleships we went big and named them after Polish Royal dynasties. We saved the biggest man of Polish interwar politics for the biggest ship, the first Polish Super Heavy Battleship Class is the Pilsudski class. We needed two, though, so we also went for another famous Polish Marshall, Poniatowski (the man I am sure unbiased Polish historians agree would have won the Battle of Borodino, if only Napoleon would have released the Imperial Guard to support his flank attack). This left just the carriers and for ´those we went for Polish Kings, starting with the savior of Vienna, Jan Sobieski.





Next week we will be talking about tutorials, wiki and stuff like that. On wednesday we got another episode of World War Wednesday where Daniel & SteelVolt take the helm of communist France, and also more modding stream so make sure to tune in!

Also, remember to preorder so I can beg Fredrik for a real office T-34!

Read original post

Useful links
Official Website
Hearts of Iron IV Wiki
Development Diary Archives
World War Wednesday Stream archive

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WEN5SEb5ASA

You can find the Information and FAQ thread here!

http://store.steampowered.com/app/394360

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WEN5SEb5ASA

You can find the Information and FAQ thread here!

http://store.steampowered.com/app/394360

Hi everyone! At this point we have covered almost all big features of Hearts of Iron IV, so today I thought I would highlight some of the smaller changes we have done and give a little update on where we are in the project. Right now our Release Candidate has been approved which means that no matter what we have something of good quality to release, and the release date 6th of June is safely locked in! At the moment we are working on further balancing and bug fixing for a release day patch.

Straits and Canals
The straits system in HOI4 is our most flexible and moddable yet. Each strait can have different rules to better match historical rules rather than trying to fit it all under a general blanket. Each strait has a list of provinces that needs to be controlled to decide the rules and they can have 4 states in relation to you:
Friendly - you and allies control all provinces.
Contested - Control of provinces is mixed between you and someone you are at war with generally blocking you both.
Enemy - Controlled by enemy, generally blocking you completely although some may let submarines through.
Neutral - You are neither friend or foe. Usually means you can go through unless it's something like the Panama Canal, or the Turkish Straits where only trade is allowed.
For each of these a strait can specify what happens with military transports, fleets, trade and submarines.


Manpower, Anti Air and Naval battles
To better be able to model historical use of manpower and for balance reasons Fleets and Air wings now require quite a bit of manpower tied up in shore/ground crews. This means we can get a much more interesting tradeoff for nations like USA and Britain. If you run out of manpower now you won't be able to form air wings or deploy ships.
We have also done changes to how static anti-air works. It now gives a clear damage reduction to bombing in its state and will also shoot down bombers so it's a much more worthwhile investment. In fact if you combine lots of anti air and the Dispersed Industry track in industry research you can remove the majority of bombing damage letting you fight outnumbered in the air easier.
Oh we also added extra details you can toggle on for naval battle reports if you want to dig into all the details of a combat, looks like this:


Graphics Settings
In an attempt to help out people with less endowed computers we have added a ton of settings to graphics where you can lower texture resolutions and turn off visual features. You can for example turn off all 3D models leaving you with just counters.


Airplanes and art
Japanese and US carrier planes now have awesome unique art where they differed from base model. We also fixed a few odd choices. For example the He 111 no longer has to fill the shoes of strategic bomber for Germany and gets moved to tactical instead. In its early game place we now instead have the Dornier Do 19.


We will now be entering the home stretch push for HOI4 before release, so expect more videos and streams in the coming weeks. In fact we have a special longer World War Wednesday Tuesday planned next week at 17:00 CEST. If you aren't completely busy purging evil xeno fungi across the galaxy in Stellaris you can help as well: Pull your friends away from whatever they are doing and tell them about WW2 and HOI4! At this point our aim is, to quote Churchill: Victory at all costs!

Read original post

Useful links
Official Website
Hearts of Iron IV Wiki
Development Diary Archives
World War Wednesday Stream archive

Hi everyone! At this point we have covered almost all big features of Hearts of Iron IV, so today I thought I would highlight some of the smaller changes we have done and give a little update on where we are in the project. Right now our Release Candidate has been approved which means that no matter what we have something of good quality to release, and the release date 6th of June is safely locked in! At the moment we are working on further balancing and bug fixing for a release day patch.

Straits and Canals
The straits system in HOI4 is our most flexible and moddable yet. Each strait can have different rules to better match historical rules rather than trying to fit it all under a general blanket. Each strait has a list of provinces that needs to be controlled to decide the rules and they can have 4 states in relation to you:
Friendly - you and allies control all provinces.
Contested - Control of provinces is mixed between you and someone you are at war with generally blocking you both.
Enemy - Controlled by enemy, generally blocking you completely although some may let submarines through.
Neutral - You are neither friend or foe. Usually means you can go through unless it's something like the Panama Canal, or the Turkish Straits where only trade is allowed.
For each of these a strait can specify what happens with military transports, fleets, trade and submarines.


Manpower, Anti Air and Naval battles
To better be able to model historical use of manpower and for balance reasons Fleets and Air wings now require quite a bit of manpower tied up in shore/ground crews. This means we can get a much more interesting tradeoff for nations like USA and Britain. If you run out of manpower now you won't be able to form air wings or deploy ships.
We have also done changes to how static anti-air works. It now gives a clear damage reduction to bombing in its state and will also shoot down bombers so it's a much more worthwhile investment. In fact if you combine lots of anti air and the Dispersed Industry track in industry research you can remove the majority of bombing damage letting you fight outnumbered in the air easier.
Oh we also added extra details you can toggle on for naval battle reports if you want to dig into all the details of a combat, looks like this:


Graphics Settings
In an attempt to help out people with less endowed computers we have added a ton of settings to graphics where you can lower texture resolutions and turn off visual features. You can for example turn off all 3D models leaving you with just counters.


Airplanes and art
Japanese and US carrier planes now have awesome unique art where they differed from base model. We also fixed a few odd choices. For example the He 111 no longer has to fill the shoes of strategic bomber for Germany and gets moved to tactical instead. In its early game place we now instead have the Dornier Do 19.


We will now be entering the home stretch push for HOI4 before release, so expect more videos and streams in the coming weeks. In fact we have a special longer World War Wednesday Tuesday planned next week at 17:00 CEST. If you aren't completely busy purging evil xeno fungi across the galaxy in Stellaris you can help as well: Pull your friends away from whatever they are doing and tell them about WW2 and HOI4! At this point our aim is, to quote Churchill: Victory at all costs!

Read original post

Useful links
Official Website
Hearts of Iron IV Wiki
Development Diary Archives
World War Wednesday Stream archive

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.

Central QA are more generalists, and jack-of-all-trades. While the embedded testers are the first to test out all the new features, balance changes etc, the testers in the central group are able to support the embedded testers by providing with more long term gameplay testing, and a “fresh” perspective on things and catch anything that might have slipped through.

The Embedded QA are the true experts in their respective projects. As was mentioned above, we are the first ones to test out any new changes in the game, in order to see any possible problems with the changes, if they are entertaining or not, and provide this feedback to the projects producer/project lead.

We also have the opportunity to specialize in various areas. If we take Da9L as an example, he is the resident expert on AI, which means that a of the project leads can request him for a certain amount of time to have a sweep of the AI, or maybe see how the AI handles the new DLC features that was just implemented.

As two QA who are solely on HoI4 we are a part of the development team and our three main purposes are to assess the risks of the project, monitor the activity/numbers on our bug tracking service JIRA (and subsequently regress the issues) and give continuous feedback on the project, if something works better/worse and why/if it needs to be changed.

The risk assessment is where we analyze the project’s status that week, and pin down specific issues that we think (for instance) are destabilizing the build, or are crippling the AI/other essential features. We also take the time frame into aspect, if we have enough time to assure the quality of implemented changes before deadlines, and/or if a so-called “feature creep” is attempted.

If everything is working smoothly we don't really have anything to report that week, but there are usually crashes or other issues that are worth taking note of for the project leaders and managers.

Regression as such involves reading resolved JIRA issues and getting into the problem at hand and checking if the issue still exists in our latest version (which is why it’s so important when you report bugs to note what version you encountered the issue in). If the issue is fixed, we close the issue and help it pass on to the other side.

Every week we schedule multiplayer with the rest of the HoI4 team to make sure all multiplayer features are up to par (so far pretty good!), and in a perfect world we also get some scenario testing done, to uncover issues we might not have noticed otherwise. (Since one of the most dangerous things about being quality assurance is getting comfortable and losing your edge by following the same motions when you enter the game.)

As you can imagine, working on such a vast game as HoI4, our days are a blur of keeping track of bugs and trying to make sure none of the more severe bugs slip through the cracks.

Like that one time when Soviet had a coup trigger on them that turned into a civil war, and both sides ended up nuking each other to bits (needless to say, the AI received a lot of restrictions on their nuclear usage after that).

We’re therefore really grateful to the betas who provide observations and help testing the game to make sure it’s providing entertainment for as many players as possible. :)


Enclosing some tidbits of weird things that we've seen throughout the development process:


In for a wild ride...

Border updates took a break.

Who needs ships anyway!

Denied tech.

Sticky player map mode names. Myes.


(Pink IS programmer art.)


Until next time!

Read original post

Useful links
Official Website
Hearts of Iron IV Wiki
Development Diary Archives
World War Wednesday Stream archive

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.

Central QA are more generalists, and jack-of-all-trades. While the embedded testers are the first to test out all the new features, balance changes etc, the testers in the central group are able to support the embedded testers by providing with more long term gameplay testing, and a “fresh” perspective on things and catch anything that might have slipped through.

The Embedded QA are the true experts in their respective projects. As was mentioned above, we are the first ones to test out any new changes in the game, in order to see any possible problems with the changes, if they are entertaining or not, and provide this feedback to the projects producer/project lead.

We also have the opportunity to specialize in various areas. If we take Da9L as an example, he is the resident expert on AI, which means that a of the project leads can request him for a certain amount of time to have a sweep of the AI, or maybe see how the AI handles the new DLC features that was just implemented.

As two QA who are solely on HoI4 we are a part of the development team and our three main purposes are to assess the risks of the project, monitor the activity/numbers on our bug tracking service JIRA (and subsequently regress the issues) and give continuous feedback on the project, if something works better/worse and why/if it needs to be changed.

The risk assessment is where we analyze the project’s status that week, and pin down specific issues that we think (for instance) are destabilizing the build, or are crippling the AI/other essential features. We also take the time frame into aspect, if we have enough time to assure the quality of implemented changes before deadlines, and/or if a so-called “feature creep” is attempted.

If everything is working smoothly we don't really have anything to report that week, but there are usually crashes or other issues that are worth taking note of for the project leaders and managers.

Regression as such involves reading resolved JIRA issues and getting into the problem at hand and checking if the issue still exists in our latest version (which is why it’s so important when you report bugs to note what version you encountered the issue in). If the issue is fixed, we close the issue and help it pass on to the other side.

Every week we schedule multiplayer with the rest of the HoI4 team to make sure all multiplayer features are up to par (so far pretty good!), and in a perfect world we also get some scenario testing done, to uncover issues we might not have noticed otherwise. (Since one of the most dangerous things about being quality assurance is getting comfortable and losing your edge by following the same motions when you enter the game.)

As you can imagine, working on such a vast game as HoI4, our days are a blur of keeping track of bugs and trying to make sure none of the more severe bugs slip through the cracks.

Like that one time when Soviet had a coup trigger on them that turned into a civil war, and both sides ended up nuking each other to bits (needless to say, the AI received a lot of restrictions on their nuclear usage after that).

We’re therefore really grateful to the betas who provide observations and help testing the game to make sure it’s providing entertainment for as many players as possible. :)


Enclosing some tidbits of weird things that we've seen throughout the development process:


In for a wild ride...

Border updates took a break.

Who needs ships anyway!

Denied tech.

Sticky player map mode names. Myes.


(Pink IS programmer art.)


Until next time!

Read original post

Useful links
Official Website
Hearts of Iron IV Wiki
Development Diary Archives
World War Wednesday Stream archive

Hi guys!

You can now download the Clausewitz Maya Exporter, which will allow you to create your own 3D models to use in your mods for Hearts of Iron IV, Stellaris, Europa Universalis IV or Crusader Kings II (the two latter titles are not fully supported due to an older version of Clausewitz).

The Exporter is free for anyone with a Paradox Account.

We plan to release our .mesh formats to enable our community to make a similar exporter to use with other software like Blender as well.

We are really looking forwards to seeing what you, the community, can make with this tool.

Links
Download the Clausewitz Maya Exporter for free (requires a Paradox Account)
Guide on the Clausewitz Maya Exporer - this is Stellaris specific at the moment. But hopefully you can figure it out. We'll release Hearts of Iron IV instructions later.
The official Clausewitz Maya Exporter forum