Source: http://habrahabr.ru/company/wargaming/blog/231065/

Hello everyone,

recently, there was a Wargaming programming blog entry by the developers of the very popular XVM mod on how the mod was actually created. You might have heard about the Wargaming developer contest and these guys decided to participate in it as well, but they also decided to write series of posts about how one of the most popular WoT mods in the world came to be. One of the reasons this is posted in the WG programming blog is the fact that XVM developers and WG “buried the hatchet” and started cooperating more. I will not be translating the entire entry literally – instead, I will make it a bit more compact to make sense. Also, if some of the technical stuff could be translated or expressed better, feel free to let me know.

The author of the post (nickname is iBat it seems, the habr blog is really bad in not showing the author identity without manual signature) stated that he started with mods as early as 2011, when he found World of Tanks and learned about the existence of mods for it in the first place. That drove him to try various mods (including UI-changing mods) but he wasn’t satisfied and deleted all the mods after one battle until he ran into the OTM mod.

OTM means Over Target Markers and it changes the icons of the tanks (the class, hitpoints etc.) to other ones, created by players. This included for example the health bar, which at that point was not implemented into World of Tanks yet. This is how it looked:

The healthbar was the main feature of the OTM mod – at least for iBat. It was a major upgrade, because the only way to read the amount of hitpoints of your and enemy vehicles at that point was to move your mouse over them and read the hint. That made finding “almost dead” tanks somewhat difficult and OTM made it much easier. Second big feature of the mod was that it allowed the player to actually customize its appearance via editing the OTMData.xml file. The amount of customizable things in the OTM mod grew from version to version and the mod itself was popularized in Russia a lot by various video-makers, who used it. In the end, for iBat, this was the first mod that he kept playing with, he customized it for his own needs and kept it as the only mod until he ran into the second mod that he liked, which was the noobmeter.

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Hello everyone, patch 9.2 is scheduled for 28th or 29th for RU server. That means EU will likely get it on Wednesday, but that’s not confirmed yet.

Hello everyone,

yesterday I posted a set of photos from the Borden base in Canada, but forgot one of the most important exhibits they have there a single surviving Grizzly Firefly. Also, if you are wondering about the Radley-Walters inscription – no, this was not Radley-Walters’ personal tank or anything, it was just named in his honor after its restoration.

Well, here’s a bunch of photos of that tank, courtesy of NotKaminary from US server.

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Hello everyone,

Eviltim666 and general_frost recently visited Camp Borden ín Ontario, Canada and took some interesting pictures there, which they decided to share. Enjoy!

M4A4 DV (Canadian Sherman version, the DV refers to “Direct Vision” ports for driver)

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Brought to you by Darth_Woras!

Send your 9.1 (and soon 9.2) replays at darthworas@gmail.com!

Hello everyone,

the M36 Jackson tank destroyer served in the Balkan region for practically 60 years, which is not very usual for wartime tech (the T-54 medium tank for example does have a very long career as well, but that’s not a wartime vehicle, at least not in the way the Jackson was). The Jacksons participated in practically all the conflicts in the Balkan region from 1991 to 2001 and the last pieces were withdrawn from service in Serbia and Montenegro in 2005 – at that point, the vehicles had 60 years of service behind them.

The M36 GMC self-propelled guns were sold to Yugoslavia during the Yugoslav-Soviet crisis, when Yugoslavia was threatened by the Soviets and their eastern bloc allies. It all started in 1948, when Moscow heavily criticized the Yugoslav leader, Josip Broz Tito for not bowing down to Stalin and for not following his directives. Along with the threats came embargos on various things, including military technologies and arms. Border clashes between the Yugoslav and the eastern bloc troops also happened and there was a general fear that Yugoslavia would be pulled forcibly into the Soviet bloc.

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Hello everyone,

as you know, we now have a new Clan Rating available. This post is based on the Russian post , explaining the formulae of the clan rating. I haven’t seen WG EU translate this to English, so… here goes.

The basic formula is this:

where:

CR – clan rating
SR – average personal rating of clan members, calculated like this:

SRi – the value of personal rating of a player i-th player at the moment of the calculation
m – number of players in clan at the moment of the calculation

TR – team rating (see below)
C – coefficient, regulating the influence of SR on CR (currently is 1)

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Thanks to LoooSeR78V for this one!

It’s an interesting insight into how armor works in current Afghanistan – basically the Afghani soldiers keep the old tanks left there by the Soviets alive by cannibalizing others for spare parts. It’s quite impressive actually, not only the fact they keep the tanks at least running in such conditions, but also that someone actually survives the dreadful heat and dust in such a tank.