Mircea, a three masted barque

I was in a well deserved vacation the other days.

One day I had the surprise to see a ship on the horizont. It was the Bricul Mircea, one of the most beautiful ships still in service.

During the WWII the ship stayed hidden near Braila and after the war was "taken" by the soviets. Only after repeated interventions was returned to Romania.

Pointy hex grid

Our initial approach when we started developing The Panzer Division was to use the Panzer General I look. That meant that units were 2D icons, facing either left or right.

The original Panzer General look

Panzer General II came with a better approach, displaying the battlefield from an oblique angle, and the units had a 3D look. Of course, the game was not really 3D, but it looked better anyway.

The second Panzer General game looked better with pseudo-3D units and terrain

The units could rotate to twelve different directions, six of them facing the hex sides and the other six pointing toward the hex corners.

Back when we started developing our game, we used the original Panzer General artwork . This has helped us a lot, not having to bother with a map editor and such. But after we implemented a great deal of the game mechanics, we said it's time to create our own artwork.

I started designing the units graphics, and I used a great tool for this: Blender. It's a free 3D modeler and in the past few years it has improved a lot, especially in the user interface area.

I began modeling some panzers and rendered them into 2D images from the sides. I managed to get them to look like the original PG units. But as long as we have the units modeled in 3D, it is a breeze to render them from an oblique angle and facing different directions, as they are in PG2. So we decided to take that route, and use a pseudo-3D look for our game.

The Panzer General games use a hex grid, which is obvious by looking at the screenshots above. But the hexes are aligned in vertical columns, the hexagons lying on their side. That means that the directions facing the hex sides include pointing up and down, but in our opinion, a unit facing north or south doesn't look so good.

Units facing north or south (up/down) do not look so good

So, we changed the way the hex grid is oriented and make it have the corners pointing up and down, as you can see in the image below.

With a 'pointy' hex grid, units are never facing up or down

This way, the units would never be displayed from front or back, making it easier to recognize the differences between various units of the same type.

Best Anti-Tank Gun of WWII: the German 88

© S H Photos

While the best tank of the war is controversial, I think we can find more agreement on the best anti tank gun of the WWII: the 88mm Flak.

Originally used as anti aircraft gun, the 88mm Flak became famous when used as a anti-tank weapon.

Here is an example about its efficiency. The Real Reason for the 88’s Success:

During Operation Battleaxe from 15th to 18th June 1941 the Commonwealth forces are known to have lost 92 AFVs including 82 tanks to the I./Flak-Regiment 33, a Luftwaffe mixed flak battalion with 12 88s.(7) The only other heavy flak battalion available to Rommel through 1941 was the identical I./Flak-Regiment 18. By the end of 1941 these two Luftwaffe flak battalions (authorised a total of 24 88s) had destroyed 264 tanks and 42 aircraft.(8) During this period the Allied forces had over three times as many 3.7inch AA guns available as the Axis forces had 88s, yet the German and Italian tank crews probably never even got to see one.(9)

Game Music

© @Doug88888

When you develop a game there are so many little details that set you back. One of these details is the music for the game. It can be unbelievable hard to find the best fit for the game. Especially when you have no idea what you should do.

Since Panzer Division is a WW2 game, a historical game, my first choice would be a epic background music, maybe something symphonic. But you know what? I might be wrong.

One of the best game music I ever heard is the one created for Machinarium. The game, which features the adventures of a robot in a town full of robots, has a great jazz soundtrack. Who would pick that? When you think future, robots, technology, computers what music you think would fit? Maybe electronic, maybe psychedelic, but jazz?

We have two options:

1. Find some music online. There are some nice sources - but we might choose something that others might also choose.
2. Find somebody to create the music for us. I have two musicians who might compose the music - thus creating something unique - but I'm afraid they will not create what I need.

We'll have to think some more.

UPDATE: Mr. FunkyLand has some nice proposals, check them out:

• The Tide Turns
• Tribunal

Panzerlied

Who knew there was a song for the Panzers?
The song starts at 1:30, but the rest of the movie provides a nice context. I was curios what is says, so here are the lyrics in case you are curios too:

In blizzard or storm,
Or in sun warm and bright,
The day hot as hell
Or bone-chilling be the night,
Our faces may with dust be laid,
But spirits never fade,
No, never fade;
Relentless, our tank
Thunders out on a raid.

With engines a-howling,
Fast as is the wind,
We head for the foe,
Safe, as we're in armor skinned.
Our comrades still behind us roam;
We fight the foe alone,
Yes, fight alone.
We stab through the line
To break the foes backbone.

Whenever the foe
May appear in our sight,
We'll ram throttle full,
Then we'll humble all his might!
Of what use is our life if we
Our country serve freely?
Yes, serve freely!
To die for our country,
Our honour shall be.

With tank traps and mines,
Our foe tries to impede.
We laugh at his ruses;
We know he'll not suceed.
And when, in threat, his cannons stand,
Half hidden in the sand,
Yes, in the sand,
We can find our way
Over much safer land.

And should at long last,
Fickle Lady Luck leave,
And we remain here,
Leaving family to grieve,
A bullet with our name on it,
Find us and seal our fate,
Yes, seal our fate,
Our tank will our grave be
On that final date.

How we chose HTML5 to develop Panzer Division

The story is quite simple, we wanted the game to run on the iPad. On the iPad you can either run:

• native apps from the Apps Store - developed with Xcode in Objective-C
• web apps - developed in HTML5

None of us had Macs at the time so a native app was out of the question, we could only choose HTML5. After an initial evaluation of HTML5 we concluded we could give it a try. From that day we move forward with it.

As expected, not everything is peachy, we had to redo the rendering several times because of the performance on the iPad 1 and I'm not sure we won't do it again. And we still have problems with the sounds. But we are still optimistic.

PhoneGap : from web to app store

While we'll use for development just plain text editors and browsers, we do plan to use PhoneGap to build our app to a native app that can be published in a app store. PhoneGap provides some nice APIs that fill the gap between native and web apps.

For desktop version we plan to create wrapper apps around WebKit or Chromium libraries.

Store and marketplace

We cannot afford to have fancy stuff like DRM, licence keys, purchase mechanism, etc. We also cannot afford to test on every browser ever made, so we decided to use existing app stores, that is to publish our app in one or more of the following stores:

1. Apple App Store
2. Chrome Web Store
3. Mac App Store
4. Google Play
5. Amazon Kindle Fire Appstore
6. Microsoft Marketplace
7. Mozilla Marketplace

The good news there are quite a few places to publish Panzer Division. An even better news is that the app must run only in WebKit (stores 1-5), Internet Explorer 10 (store 6) and Firefox (store 7).

So we decided to focus initially only on WebKit and to periodically test in IE10 and Firefox. If the compatibility issues can be solved quickly we solve them, otherwise just move on.

IE 6,7,8,9 must die

The biggest advantage of a web app is that it theoretically can run on any device that has a browser. Theoretically. In practice most of the browsers are just a pain in the ass. Panzer Division will never work on them, we will not even try.

We know, "Requires browser XXX to run" is lame in 2012 but we do what we have to do: be pragmatic and accept the reality that we don't have time or resources to support the others.

Keep the faith

Even that we use HTML5, we hope the players won't be aware of that. Hopefully we'll make Panzer Division feel like a native app. If not for iPad 1 at least for some of the other options.

The most produced panzer tank of world war II

It is indisputable that the allies have built the largest number of tanks during the second world war. The production numbers for their most used models, such as the Soviet's T-34 and Western Allies' M4 Sherman tanks dwarf those of the most produced German Panzerkampfwagen.

Germany's most famous tanks were the Tiger and Panther models. But, unlike their counterparts in the allied armies (T-34 and Sherman), they were not the most used tank in the German army. That honor goes to a model designed before the war broke out.


In his famous book, Achtung Panzer!, Heinz Guderian described his vision of a successful warfare strategy, that goes under the name of Blitzkrieg. Among other things, he outlined the roles of primary battle tanks and support tanks. The primary battle tanks would constitute the mainstay of the armored divisions and fight the enemy's tanks, while the support tanks would attack anti-tank guns and fortifications.

Two models were designed before the start of the war in order to fulfill these roles: Panzer III and Panzer IV. Being designed as the primary battle tank, Panzer III was intended to be build in larger quantities than the slightly heavier Panzer IV. Anyway, in the first year of the war, including the invasion of Low Countries and France, the Germans would wage their armored battles using mostly the Panzer I and Panzer II light tanks. This is because the army wasn't yet properly equipped for war, so they had to win the first campaigns with tank models that were actually designed for training and reconnaissance.

A lot of these small tanks (Panzer I) were used in the successful campaigns of 1939 and 1940

But fortune favours the bold, so the Axis managed to decisively win these first campaigns. They also used the Panzer III and Panzer IV variants, and they found out that beating allied heavy tanks like the French Char B1 and the British  Matilda wasn't an easy feat at all. It seemed that their guns (the 37 mm caliber of the Panzer III) just couldn't penetrate the armor that the allied heavy tanks had.


Naturally, the solution was to upgrade the guns to larger calibers, but the Panzer III  could only carry up to a 50mm gun, because of its smaller turret. In order to cope with increasingly frequent T-34s in the battlefield, they had to use larger guns, like the 75 mm KwK 40 L/43, mounted on the Panzer IV G model. So, gradually, Panzer III was taken out from production, and they started making a lot of Panzer IVs.

New panzer models have appeared starting in 1943: Tiger and Panther. Now the Germans finally had some tanks that were superior to the allied armor. But they kept manufacturing an improved version of the Panzer IV tank until the end of the war, and still fielded a lot of these on both the western and the eastern fronts. There were probably several reasons for this, including the use of the already existing production lines.

Production of tanks gradually increased during the course of the war, except for the last few months of the war. This was in spite of allied aerial bombing campaign that seriously disrupted the existing production. The Germans found ways to make up for the damaged factories and streamlined the manufacturing process. In total, they build around 9000 Pzkw IV tanks, making this model the most produced panzer tank of the second world war.

Version H was the most produced Panzer IV model