Valors End: Major Updates

I haven't had a chance to post in a while while exams were on. They are over now and I have had a lot more time to work on the game. Reds [Doug as I now know him] has a great model that we have finally put in. He's worked on the Idle and the Run animations which look amazing in motion. He still has to do the Death and Attack animations but he's got a lot of time to do that. He's also going to attempt to create a random terrain generator which will be amazing if he can come up with anything that's usable.

I have been hard at work on the code and have a bunch of major features done. The first major feature was that I working on was fixing up group movement. It's in a usable state right now. I have had it crash one time in the few hundred times I've used it since then so that'll be a bugger to track down but I'll get there. Units now move in rows of 5 for now. I just wanted to keep them seperated so they didn't stack and this solution works. I'll update it later to add support for dynamic row sizes so that the formation tries to maintain an even balance between width and depth.

The second MAJOR feature that I implemented was fog of war. This isn't entirely done yet but I'm about 80-90% of the way done. The only thing I have left to do is create a static image of the buildings of enemies in areas that you have previously explored but that you currently can't see. This is typical in RTS games and shouldn't be too hard to implement. Whenever I determine that a currently visible building is no longer visible (which I have), is to add a "clone" to a list of "was visible" buildings and keep those visible. Whenever a building on this list becomes visible, we search the enemy building list and see if it's still there. If it isn't, we destroy our clone and don't show any building. If it is there, we leave our clone for later use, and then just show the live building. The FoW (fog of war) is very nice to see in motion since it fades out nicely to the half black color very smoothly. Enemy units are hidden if you can't see them.

The last MAJOR feature that I got working was team colors as well as accessories for units. Reds create a shield, a sword, and a shoulder pad for the lizardman unit and gave me a code snippet to attach them to the unit. We have colors all over the unit so it's easy to tell which team a unit belongs to.

Another feature that I have working is basic combat. The units just shoot little squares at each other when they are in range but they will fall over and die when they run out of hit points. I don't have anything else to use so it's white boxes. It's fun to watch them fight each other.

I also added a directional light and turned down the global light so it adds a nice soft touch to the scene. I turned on shadows as well so they are cast onto the terrain which looks really good.

I'm going to be working on adding some chasing so that units will run towards eachother and fight when they can see each other as well as a few clean up things. Reds is going to be working on more animations as well as some map media (trees, rocks, etc) so that will really spice up the visuals of the game a lot. I can't wait to see the units swinging their swords at each other.

Death of Units
Screenshot: 1280x768x32 - No AA - Default ATI Settings