I haven't posted in a while since University life keeps me really busy. However, a lot has happened since the last post. The first and most important thing would be a new team member, bringing the grand total to two. Reds, as is his online nickname, has joined as an artist/would-be coder. I don't know where his coding skills are but I do know his art skills and I am more than thoroughly impressed. I was originally intending this to be a solo project since I didn't think it would interest anyone else but apparently it did. The art content was a major concern as I was basing the game on free content that I could find online which would not provide a consistent look and feel to the game. Reds has been hard at work on our first unit model which is a lizardman.
Which leads to the second development of the game and that is theme. I had no original theme for it, just two opposing sides, but Reds has come up with Lizards vs Beasts. He thinks he can pull the art off for it and from what I've seen, it'll be amazing so we've decided on that. I am really happy with that decision. He's animating the model right now and it's looking really good. He has seperated the weapon and shield as well as a shoulder pad so that we can use replacable items when you upgrade a unit (a long away feature) which is amazing. In total, I am thoroughly excited to have someone as talented as him join my little hobby project. I think this could be really something interesting.
Now for the milestone itself: Navigation. That's right. I have path finding around the map working. You can select a unit, right click somewhere, and he'll find his way there. Buildings mark themselves on the map as in-passable so any unit can weave in and out of buildings to find his way to the destination. As it stands now, units just walk through each other on their way to the destination which turns out not to be as bad as I thought it would originally be. I may leave this as is.
I'm using the A* algorithm which has many references online, beginning with a
GamaSutra article. From google, many more resources can be found. The approach I took was to divide the map up into tiny little tiles, each about 1/4 the size of a unit. This will also allow me to use a mipmapping approach, when the time comes, to the pathfinding so that each "patch" in the terrain will have it's own higher resolution of tiles and I can use the patches as a low resolution test to begin with. This should give a huge speed increase when it's implemented, if we need it.
Each of the buildings automatically marks the tiles on the terrain that it covers so I can have buildings that can more (not sure what right now but the feature is there..) and they are padded a bit to prevent units getting too close. Over all, it works really well. I've eliminated any bugs that I know of but I'm sure Reds will be able to find at least more which is excellent. I have a lot of ideas about optimization for it but currently, its still fast and works great. We'll see how this goes when we have 100 units in the game.
Milestone 12 also has had some progress done towards it (which is actually shown in the screenshot). The milestone was to have formation movement. This turns out to be a lot harder than I initial expected but I've got a very solid base right now to build on. I have a few more features to put in, like various formations, and I think it will mostly be ready for prime time. Currently, I am just using a hard coded formation of the "line" formation with a width of 5 units. The actual formation class will allow the width to vary so that it doesn't create a small width with a huge number of rows but it also doesn't create a large width with only 1 or 2 rows. Somewhere in the middle is the desired option.
In the screenshot, I selected the units and told them to move towards the white box (it's a debug item to show where you click). The units were originally all spaced apart in an uneven manner but they moved into their intended formation when you right click. This keeps units off of one another to a large degree. Obviously, other groups can overlap any other group but this may prove not to be a problem for the most part, depending on how we decide to do unit creation (single units or predefined groups of units which stay in groups). Either way, this was a major feature and it's almost done so I'm happy considering how I haven't had any time what so ever to put into this. This has been through the work of many "I have 20 minutes before class" sessions but it's finally coming together.
Major eatures left in group movement are:
Various formations
Movement to the closest possible destination if desired isn't walkable
Orientation of a formation
Screenshot: 1280x768x32 - No AA - Default ATI Settings
