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TIGSource ForumsCommunityDevLogsRadio General - the RTS where you can't see your own units
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Foolish Mortals
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« Reply #60 on: June 04, 2019, 12:09:06 PM »

Haha, thanks. I don't mind the sentiment, since it adds an extra layer and feeling that the officer sending these troops into combat is removed from the combat. In the distance you can hear the battle going on, but asides from radio messages you're not a part of it yourself.
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« Reply #61 on: July 01, 2019, 03:30:02 PM »

Devlog 22: We Hear You, HQ
Greetings troops! Great progress is being made, and we're eager to show you what we've been working on this past month.

Speech Recognition

The most exciting addition this month is speech recognition! So far the accuracy is quite good. We're still working on the mid-speech feedback, but we can't wait until people can get their hands on it.

New Level: Leonforte, Sicily

Leonforte is a medieval town perched a high hillside overlooking the approaching roads. Assoro features an ancient castle sitting atop a 1000 foot cliff. Expect the fortifications in these old towns to be formidable. The area is also littered with minefields - you've been given Engineers to clear mines from the roads. Use your scouts to hunt down and destroy the snipers harassing your engineers. Allied tanks will arrive once you've cleared the mines from the roads.

New Briefing Clipboard

Briefings are important, and now you easily examine each individual part of the briefing by clicking on the page you want to read. It's important this looks good, because if you don't read the briefing, you'll be at a significant disadvantage during the mission - knowing is half the battle!

Minefields & Engineers

Minefields are deadly obstacles. You can order your troops to walk through them, but the price is extremely high. Minefields can be used to block roads or vulnerable flanks of strategic positions. Engineer units can both place and clear minefields, and will be essential on most battlefields

Anti-tank Guns

Panzers getting you down? Are your infantry out in the open no match for tanks? Better get some anti-tank guns: packing impressive range, anti-tank guns are devastated against tanks, and can also bombard infantry at long range (and deal extra damage against stationary infantry).

Height
Height is an incredibly important terrain feature, hence why every military map has topographic contour lines. Height is so important for Radio General that we also colour the map based on the height of that terrain. Units will be able to see further and shoot further on high ground, and deal significantly more damage to units on lower ground. You'll want to position your units on the highest terrain possible. However, moving uphill is slow going, especially for vehicles.
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« Reply #62 on: August 02, 2019, 12:14:21 PM »

Devlog 23: Hitler Line

We're pushing forward through Italy, but we've come up against the formidable...

Hitler Line
Rome lies at the end of the Liri River Valley. Between us and Rome is a formidable defensive line covering the width of the valley - the Hitler Line. It is up to us to break this position.

A new type of level consisting of two parts. Part one has the player clearing minefields with an engineer, and scouting the enemy positions with a sniper. Part two (~10 minutes in) has the engineer and sniper removed, and the player is given a mighty mixed assault force consisting of infantry, tanks and artillery. The player must then carefully plan and carry out simultaneous attacks whilst bombarding targets with artillery.

In-game Manual

While waiting for your troops to move across the map, why not catch up on some essential reading? All of the game mechanics, terrain and unit types are covered in this all-in-one in-game field manual.<br />

New Historical Documents: Video & Audio

We've collected a number of public domain film and radio snippets of the time, and as cheesey and propaganda-filled as they are, they display a surprising amount of humour. Relevant documents will be displayed before a battle, and additional documents will be displayed after a battle depending on your performance.


New UI
We've got sweet-looking new UI for unit orders (above) and the player-aid menu (below).

Digging In
Infantry and engineers can now dig-in, further fortifying their position by digging foxholes and trenches. It's tiring work though, and you definitely don't want to be caught by surprise before you're done digging!


For next time...
  • More levels
  • More voice-work
  • 3D art and sound overhaul
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« Reply #63 on: September 09, 2019, 09:22:44 AM »

Devlog 24: We've got a visual on the target


This month we've been giving the game a much-needed visual overhaul. W've got a new command tent and various menu views throughout the tent.


Weather forecasts predict sunny weather


When you're not hunched over your map, you may notice the dynamic weather and day/night cycles that change depending on the mission.

Voice-acting
The first-round of voice-acting is complete, and each unit under your command will have unique voices so you can immediately recognize who's talking.


Artillery


We've implemented two kinds of artillery: on and off-map artillery. On-map artillery are regular units that can move around and be destroyed. Off-map artillery comes from longer range guns (such as warships) and can't be destroyed. We can confirm that blasting entrenched enemy positions in preparation of an assault is very satisfying.

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« Reply #64 on: October 01, 2019, 11:08:16 AM »

Devlog 25: A good general does their research

Historical Documents
Before each mission you'll be able to review some related historical documents. We've put together a nicer documents area where you can review these photos and videos.

Battle of Ortona, Italy
Dubbed 'little Stalingrad;, the city of Ortona was reduced to rubble in the fierce fighting. This is the first mission with large-scale urban combat, with the city being split into two parts. The player is recommended to encircle the city before beginning their assault, lest the enemy slip out of the city and retreat later in the mission.

Operation Tonga, France
We now move over to France. Paratroopers are dropped behind enemy lines to disrupt communication and movement in preparation of D-Day. Objectives are many, and times is short; bridges must be captured, artillery silenced and key cross-roads held. Strong winds and bad weather make this difficult, as many paratrooper units have landed off-target and are now lost.
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« Reply #65 on: November 05, 2019, 10:34:05 AM »

Devlog 26: Dynamic Campaign

Before each mission you'll select which units to bring into battle. Choose carefully - each unit has their own unique leadership personality, which have both significant advantages and disadvantages.


Units become veterans by participating in missions, and you can choose specializations for them. Each unit type (infantry, tanks, engineers, etc.) have unique specializations to choose from. Craft an elite assault unit, or train dogged defenders that are perfect for holding the line.


Mid-speech Feedback
To help players get used to commanding their troops by talking into their microphone, they are now presented with mid-speech feedback showing them what orders are available, as well as what commands have been detected.<br />

War in Miniature
To represent units fighting, you'll be treated to small battle animations on your map. For those who prefer realism, this option can be toggled off.
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« Reply #66 on: December 04, 2019, 10:36:01 AM »

Devlog 27: A Daring Raid

We've been busy this month, and will hopefully have a demo released in early January.

New Tutorial - Dieppe Raid
The previous ‘beginner’ tutorial has been adapted and turned into the much more exciting Dieppe Raid. You command several commando units behind enemy lines whilst a beach landing happens in the background. This is a much more exciting and engaging tutorial, as it was a real mission. It also delivers more emotionally, what with the historical outcome of the mission.



Postcard Documents
These postcards help bridge the gap between documents and gameplay. They give some brief info on the geographic location, and after the mission say a bit about how the battle actually went.



New Unit Personalities and Level-up Perks
Many more leader personalities have been added, making your army much more diverse. Additionally, each unit type now has a dedicated ‘level-up’ tree and unique perk abilities. Each unit level affords a choice of 2-4 perks, with the level 4 perks drastically changing how the unit should operate (ex: attack-ey or defensive).

Dynamic Campaign Polish: Players now receive new units periodically throughout the campaign. Additionally, when a mission is beaten, ‘free-play’ is unlocked: all unit slot restrictions are lifted, and the player can play the mission again to earn experience for any of their units.



Options
Rebindable keys, and tons of gameplay options are now available, so you can play the game exactly how you want to.

Roadmap for December
  • Demo for January
  • Map-editor
  • Online co-op
  • Additional levels
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« Reply #67 on: February 03, 2020, 11:13:28 AM »

Devlog 28: The End in Sight

After a brief christmas break, work continues. We were hoping to have demo released earlier in the montth, but with new art assets still streaming in and further work on the speech recognition, we felt releasing a demo now wouldn't reflect the final quality of the game. Instead we are focussed on testing and polishing the game for a March release (fingers crossed!). We hope no additional delays will occur, but we are determined to release the best game we can, and will the launch if need be.


New radio & clock

The star of the show is of course our dear old radio. It needed an overhaul, as you'll probably spend a lot of time staring at it. This new radio features clickable buttons to tune into each channel.



The clock is an old-fashioned flip-clock featuring pause and fast-forward buttons.


NATO symbol options

If you're not a fan of pushing figurines around a map, you can instead use the more modern NATO symbols. Can you recognize all of these unit types and sizes? (no googling!)

Revamped Stats Panel & Manual
Not sure what your units do? Why not check their stats?


Still not satisfied? Maybe you should brush up on the in-game officer field manual.


Less flashy news
Online co-op is nearly finished. The map-editor functionality is finished, but now needs to be prettified.

Roadmap for February
  • Release trailer
  • Finish online co-op
  • Finish map editor
  • Localization
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« Reply #68 on: March 24, 2020, 12:34:13 PM »

Devlog 29: Release Date Announced
After 2.5 years of work, the journey is nearly over. Radio General will be storming the beaches on April 9th. Check out the live-action trailer:


Click-to-play


The campaign is all done, and we'll be ironing out the kinks in the online co-op and map editor in the weeks before release.

It's been quite a struggle and journey to get to this point. I should've tried to keep up the devblogging, but posting stuff online is so mentally exhausting for me - I definitely prefer writing code, haha.

I'll try to write some pieces about how the speech recognition and voice-acting was done for the game.
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« Reply #69 on: March 25, 2020, 12:06:31 PM »

great tut series and good game. Nicely done
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Foolish Mortals
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« Reply #70 on: March 25, 2020, 01:56:28 PM »

Haha, well the tutorial side kind of tailed-off once things started getting more complex.
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« Reply #71 on: March 31, 2020, 11:56:07 AM »

Devlog 30: Historical Research


I ended up doing a ton of research into Canada's often-overlooked involvement in WWII for Radio General.

First off, a little background. I've always been an avid wargamer, but asides from a university history course I don't have any background in WWII history. Since I'm Canadian, and there's relatively few games that focus (or even mention) Canada during the war, I wanted to focus on Canada's involvement. So to start off with, I read some excellent history textbooks on the subject:



> Canadians in the Second World War 1939-1943. Volume 1, The necessary war - Tim Cook
> Canadians in the Second World War 1944-1945. Volume 2, Fight to the finish - Tim Cook

Both books are excellent, and give detailed descriptions of operations in chronological order, and were excellent material for planning missions for my game. They also included some very good interviews with solders.



> Canadians under fire: infantry effectiveness in the Second World War - Robert Charles

A drier and more technical read than the rest, this focuses less on specific battles, and instead on studies and interviews with infantrymen. It goes the effectiveness of different weapons, casualty statistics, and patrol and movement doctrines. A surprising tidbit I found was that having tank support was often unappreciated as an infantryman - they're big targets, are very hard to communicate with, and almost always refused to advance until the infantry gauranteed there were no AT-guns nearby (so much for the cinematic scenes of infantry hiding behind advancing tanks).



> Ten decisions: Canada's best, worst, and most far-reaching decisions of the Second World War - Larry Rose

This book provides a broader context, and doesn't just focus on the battles. It covers the British Commonwealth Air Training Plan, where Canada trained 131,500 air personnel (with pilots from all over the commonwealth), and the enormous scope of producing massive numbers of corvettes to escort necessary naval convoys across the Atlantic. One of the worst decisions it covers in detail is the Dieppe Raid (which is in fact the first mission in Radio General).



To help us choose which missions were included in the game, we referenced the excellent website canadiansoldiers.com which summarizes basically every single combat mission Canada's been in.



We wanted our game to educational, and had the idea of presenting the player with real historical photos, videos and documents. Before and after each mission you're presented with relevant documents about the mission you just played.

The best source for these documents was the government, specifically Library and Archives Canada. This is a great resource, as they often include sources and context (and since it's the government, everything more than 50 years old is public domain). You can search specifically for locations. Here's some photo examples from the same location in Italy:

Private M.D. White of The Loyal Edmonton Regiment observing from a defensive position, Colle d'Anchise, Italy, 26 October 1943.

Private J.A. Robb of The Loyal Edmonton Regiment looking through a shell hole in the foundation of a building, Colle d'Anchise, Italy, 27 October 1943.

A Sherman tank of "A" Squadron, Ontario Regiment, crossing a stream near Colle d'Anchise, Italy, 26 October 1943.

Library and archives canada also has a youtube channel, containing Canadian army newsreels:




We actually used some of this archive footage in our live-action trailer

.

Anyways, those are the sources we used. I'd be happy to answer any questions about our historical research.
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« Reply #72 on: April 07, 2020, 11:57:36 AM »

Devlog 31: The Journey to Speech Recognition
In Radio General, I wanted players to command their troops with their voice, like in Tom Clancy's Endwar. This was a long journey, but I'm hoping my experiences can help those who wish to follow (or decide not to follow!).

State of speech recognition in gaming:
Even though we increasingly talk to Siri and Cortana on our phones, voice commands in games have not become popular - I can list on one hand the number of games (Tom Clancy's Endwar, There Came an Echo, Kinect games?). Speech recognition in games just isn't done. There's a multitude of reasons for this: voice controls are slower than mouse and keyboard, the recognition isn't perfect, and talking out-loud isn't always ideal (you live with others/children/pets). Despite the above reasons, I still wanted speech recognition for my game.

So how does one put speech recognition in their PC game? Well, there are two obvious options. Let's go over each.

1. Microsoft built-in speech api. Windows has had voice-to-text for a while, but has expored it most recently in Windows 10. This is easy to use, but unfortunately inflexible. You can't control the words the recognition is looking, and it's only available for Windows 10. If you want mac or linux, you'd have to implement a different solution.

2. An open-source speech library (CMUSphinx or kaldi). The benefit of using an open-source library is that we can make changes to it, and it can be exported to any OS - you can make one solution fit all. The downside, however, is that the speech accuracy out of the box is... bad. It'll take some work to tune it into something usable.


We went with #2, and chose CMUSphinx since one of our team had used it before. Our game uses Unity, and and there are several examples of how to set up Sphinx in it.

Next we had to answer: how did we want voice commands to be used in-game? To answer this, we'll need a brief description of my game.

Radio General is a real-time strategy game where you can't see your units. Instead you talk with them over the radio. You receive verbal reports, and then issue orders back.



So, in-game, you're commanding 3-8 units, and you need to be able to ask them a few questions, and tell them where to go. We decided to give each unit a unique, alphabetical name. NATO wasn't formed yet, so we an older radio phonetic alphabet: Able, Baker, Charlie, Dog, Easy, Fox, etc. (I really like Oboe for O).

We decided to emulate Tom Clancy's Endwar, with most commands following this syntax:
<RECIPIENTS> <ORDER> <EXTRA INFORMATION>
Ex: Able move to J 5.

We then came up with a full list of words and orders we thought we wanted (spoiler alert: some of these were dropped), along with their importance. Here's that full list.

Finally, we knew what we wanted. Now, when running the speech recognition in-game, it provides us with a string of detected words in order. To use this string, we wrote a simple script to check if any unit names are present, and then see if any other order words are present (move to, head, report status, etc).

Out of the box, the results were horrible. It was detecting words when no one was talking, and when talking it detected all sorts of garbage words that weren't even in our game. We tried it out with different people and different microphones, and everyone agreed: it sucked. It was frustrating, and nobody wanted to use it.

We needed limit the words it was looking for, so it only looked for words needed to play the game. We needed a dictionary file. A dictionary file is a simple text file that lists the possible words that can be detected, along with their pronunciation.
ABLE      EY B AH L.
The pronunciation is broken up into phonemes. You can even list several ways to pronounce the same word:
ARE         AA R
ARE(2)      ER

This dictionary file helped - we no longer got garbage irrelevant words, however the accuracy was still very low (~70%). 70% might sound high, but it's not - imagine if a third of mouse-clicks just didn't work when playing an RTS. Players would try it for 5 minutes, and then give up.

The next step to improve accuracy is training the model. I'll skim over most of the technical bits, but training involves collecting a large amount of LABELLED voice clips, and feeding it into a model. The labelled part is important - we need to know EXACTLY what words are said, and in what order for each voice file. If mislabelled, the model's accuracy may become even worse. Garbage in, garbage out.

Luckily, there are some free open-source voice datasets. Mozilla's common voice is excellent (and you can contribute your voice to help!), has many datasets, often of people reading books out-loud.

Our recognition accuracy improved drastically after training on these datasets, but unfortunately these datasets don't mention anti-tank guns. Or artillery barrages. Dang. So for words that were missing, the accuracy still remained poor. To fill this gap, we needed to collect data on very specific words for our game, ideally in combinations that will be used in-game (ex: a full clip saying: "deploy reserve anti-tank guns").

We needed to create our own dataset to fill the missing gaps. So whenever a tester played the game, we recorded each their voice commands. Every time they held down SPACEBAR to talk, a new .wav file is recorded and created, with the name of the file being what the speech recognition detected. This approach is absolutely fantastic - you want to train on data as close to what your players will be generating/using. Testers are actually playing the game with various microphone setups and different accents, mirroring what your playerbase will be doing. Awesome!

The problem with recording testers is that our speech recognition isn't perfect, and the labelled recording are often wrong. Remember: garbage in, garbage out. This data needs to be cleaned and relabelled. We had a person listen to each file, and correct the filename with what was actually said. Here's what the cleaned tester recordings look like.

Finally, with this excellent real-world data, we trained our model again. Part of the training process is to generate a statistical language model. This file lists a number of words, and their likelihood of appearing together (or by themselves). Think of it as a bunch of weighted terms. Here's an example of what that looks like:
-0.3860 DOG MOVE TO
-1.9542 DOG MOVE WEST
-0.3010 DOG REPORT STATUS
-0.3010 DOG RETREAT </s>
-0.3010 DOG WHERE ARE

After all this training, our testers actually found the voice controls usable (and sometimes, fun!). However, we still found giving grid coordinates to be inaccurate. Coordinates are specified by <LETTER> <NUMBER> (ex: A 6, B 9). The problem is that a lot of letters sound similar: B, C, E, G, V, T (all ending with 'eeeee'). After much debate, we grid coordinate letters over to NATO lettering (ex: alpha, bravo, charlie, delta). No, this isn't historically accurate, but you NEED to be able to specify grid coordinates with accuracy (lest you artillery your own men).

The last step is to make actually USING the voice commands in-game more friendly. This took the form of mid-speech feedback, where it displays what voice commands are available to you right now. Commands and items are highlighted as you speak, showing what remaining words are needed to complete the command. Here's what that looks like.


So there you have it! That's how we implemented speech recognition in our game. If you have a good microphone, and speak english with a Canadian accent, the accuracy is quite high. If you talk with other accents... well... your mileage will very (British accents are ROUGH).

If you want to see the speech recognition in action, you can check out Radio General with the links below. I'd also be happy to answer any questions you have. Ciao!
Website



Steam
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« Reply #73 on: April 07, 2020, 01:24:27 PM »

Yes this project is original
But mostly i respect the devs who put so much passion in creating

Congratz
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« Reply #74 on: April 08, 2020, 06:11:24 AM »

Congrats on the release! Weird how I didn't find this devlog until it was finished, such an original concept!

I'm not one to play armchair general, but I know a few people who are and I'm pretty sure they might like it so I shared the trailer with them Smiley
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« Reply #75 on: April 08, 2020, 01:18:13 PM »

Yes this project is original
But mostly i respect the devs who put so much passion in creating

Congratz

Thanks! Over 2.5 years of work. Hopefully it pays off, and I can continue making games afterwards.

Congrats on the release! Weird how I didn't find this devlog until it was finished, such an original concept!

I'm not one to play armchair general, but I know a few people who are and I'm pretty sure they might like it so I shared the trailer with them Smiley

Haha, well I became too busy to make devlogs, so no wonder you haven't seen it before.

As for the game itself, it definitely won't be to most people's tastes, but hopefully the people who like it end up liking it a lot.
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