Undaunted Normandy
Undaunted Normandy Digital Update
For anyone who owns a copy of the game at this point, it will remain in your library, and the community pages will stay up. However from this date we won't be able to provide any further updates to the game. The multiplayer solution is supported by a Microsoft product, and will continue to work for as long as this remains up and running in its current state.
I appreciate for a lot of you this will be very disappointing news, and I share in this completely. I had a lot of hopes and plans for the development of the game over the next few years, and it's unfortunate that these won't be completed. However I fully acknowledge Osprey Games' descision. Undaunted Normandy (and the other games in the series) are truly fantastic games and I've enjoyed the time I've spent recreating them.
I'd like to thank those of you who bought and supported the game, and hope that you have many more happy hours playing it.
Update Notes for December 1st 2024
- Scenario 4 AI Training (please note that this is currently very early training)
- Initiative card selection AI updates
- Updated title page and background music
Update notes for November 10th
Update notes for October 6th
Update notes for September 22nd 2024
Other minor fixes and graphical changes.
Developer Blog #4
The last release contained a significant improvement on the AI implementation, built using an AI self training solution. The intelligence of this solution is far higher than something that I could write when completed with a full training programme. Following the successful implementation of this for scenario 1 I started training it for scenario 2.
Training for scenario 1 shows that the German side wins approximately 2/3rds of all games (so if you want a greater challenge play as the US). However, in training for scenario 2 (where the US is trying to capture an objective and the Germans are trying to pin the US) the training process resulted in an almost 0% success rate for the German side. This was due to the training solution learning in a scenario with very differing objectives and not being able to cope. This also caused the training libraries to crash a lot.
The solution to this has been to implement two separate training agents in the environment, one to learn how to play as the US team and one to learn how to play as the German team. As a result, the individual agents are able to learn the appropriate strategies for their own approach to each scenario.
As part of the testing for this approach I've gone back to scenario 1 to run this processes, where the training is taking place (since even for this scenario the approach to winning is unique for each side). The result being that for all scenarios the AI opponent will be tuned to whichever team you're playing against.
The result of this will be a much better AI. My own long held belief (which I've written about here before) is that for ANY strategy game, the quality of AI is the number one, number two and number three priority and I'm completely committed to this. The downside is that training two sides to play a scenario individually takes a bit longer than getting one solution to play both sides, but good progress is being made. But on the upside the training libraries are much more stable in this way and almost never crash (so I can leave it running overnight).
So thats where we are right now - training for scenario 1 is still running but it's looking good and I hope to have a release out in a couple of weeks with a couple of other minor fixes, and scenario 2 training up and running again. Plus a solution which will work for training future scenarios.
Thanks for reading!
Update Notes for April 1st 2024
- Rebuild of ML training solution libraries.
- Full retraining of AI for scenario 1 (standard only - not with random VPs or Reinforcement rule)
- ML AI is now used as standard where relevant for scenario 1 - menu option removed.
- Vsync menu option added to settings
- Counter size menu option added to settings. Default is "Auto" - where a tile contains 10 counters or fewer then you see the large counter, otherwise you get the small counter. Options for always large and always small also provided.
- Unity version upgrade
- Title page visual changes
With regards to the roadmap, now that the ML training envirinment is a lot more stable, the plan is to do more training for scenario 1, and also develop the environment so that it can do training for all other scenarios.
Update Notes for January 20
Some updates to Initiative and Scout AI routines. (more to come).
Update notes for December 22nd
Update Notes for December 20th
- Added a resolution option to the settings page.
Plus other minor engine and cosmetic changes.