Greetings, Commanders!
Welcome back to another installment of the Developer Corner.
When we launched the No Compromise, No Surrender expansion last year, the influx of new nations pushed our UI to its absolute limit. Through some rigorous pixel-perfect adjustments, we managed to fit every flag into the selection screen, but we have officially hit a ceiling. With the upcoming release of Thunder at our Gates, we are once again confronted with an architectural challenge: there is simply no physical space left to expand the flag grid.
A sea of nations—where do we go from here?
In the image below, the pink boundary represents the minimum screen resolution we support. This constraint prevents us from simply enlarging the window. We decided this was the perfect opportunity not just to fix the space issue, but to evolve the user experience. Our UX designers drafted a solution that addresses a common frustration: the difficulty of locating a specific minor power amidst a dense wall of flags.
Too many banners, too little real estate.
Introducing: ✨Filters!✨
The objective is to streamline your experience. These new filters will allow you to quickly navigate content, find specific regions, or identify nations you haven’t explored yet. Whether you are looking for a fresh challenge or returning to that one “guilty pleasure” nation you’ve conquered the world with a dozen times, these tools will make the start of your campaign much smoother.
Furthermore, we are making these groupings scriptable, opening up a new playground for the modding community. While we are still finalizing the official categories, we are considering filters based on geographical regions, specific playstyles, or faction alliances—all aimed at enriching the country selection process.
Beyond navigation, we want to improve how we highlight updated content. We are exploring a system to locally track which versions of a country you have completed. This would power “Unplayed Content” and “Unplayed Country” filters. However, this introduced what we call the “cold start” problem.
Hearts of Iron IV is approaching its tenth anniversary. Many of our veteran players have spent thousands of hours across nearly every nation. We want to avoid a situation where the game incorrectly flags your most-played country as having “unplayed content” just because the tracking system is new. To solve this, we will utilize data from your existing Career Profile to make an “educated guess.”
While this data isn’t granular enough to distinguish between, for example, a generic Iceland run and one using the Arms Against Tyranny focus tree, it allows us to set a baseline. If you own the relevant DLC and have played that nation in the past, we will mark that content as “already played.” This synchronization will happen only once—the first time you launch the game after the update. From that point forward, the system will track your progress precisely based on your new playthroughs.
These are our current plans to modernize the interface. We’re eager to hear your thoughts on these changes!
—
Pdxen