Projekt Weltherrscher - "Phase 2"

[Sascha Willems]

Wow it realy looks nice!
Do you use some static textures for clouds or are they procedurally generated?

No, the backdrop is static. It's generated with this nice tool and post processed in Photoshop (the tool sadly generates some errors when creating the textures). Having a complete dynamic space backdrop with moving clouds and pulsating nebulaes sure would be nice, but that'd take a lot of time. So maybe (or maybe not) sometime in the future

That's looking loads better now, the water shader was nice but this sets the right mood

Thanks It completly changes the feel of the game. I played a bit yesterday (late at night) with some ambient space drone music in the background and boy, what a difference to the mood of the old backdrops. Right now I'm even thinking about changing the soundtrack to some ambient space drone music.

[SilverWarior]

Sorry Sacha but I was refering to planetary clouds and not Space backdrop. So how are planetary clouds being done?

[Sascha Willems]

Sorry Sacha but I was refering to planetary clouds and not Space backdrop. So how are planetary clouds being done?

Ah, didn't realize you were talking about the globe's clouds

And no, they're not procedurally generated. Just a simple texture with cloud information in one texture channgel and specular information in another color channel, which is then just moving around the globe. So no procedurally generated stuff here, though that may be a great idea. Since it's a shader anyway I could do something with noise I guess. Maybe I'll take a look into this

[SilverWarior]

When developing my entry to 2nd PGD mini competiotion (which was never finished) I have been fidling with procedural content generation quite a lot.
Amongst other things I tried generating clouds using "Perlin noise" and even got some nice results. But the problem was that then I tried rendering that texture to sphere it got disturbed due the way how spherical texture projection works so in the end it almost looked ugly.
I should probably have used several smaller textures and then projecting each of them to the sphere so the distorition would me much lower.
Anywhay procedural texture generation development is currently on hold as I first need to design a way to make nice game GUI in an easy manner.

[Sascha Willems]

It took me much longer than expected, but I just uploaded a new release of the open beta for windows and linux :

(Windows) Projekt “W” – Phase 2 – Open Beta rev. #170 (~74 MBytes)
(Linux, i386) Projekt “W” – Phase 2 – Open Beta rev. #170 (~78 MBytes)

Screenshots :



This release includes the new 360° space backdrops for the main view as well as the main menu, and the extensive ingame tutorial (70 chapters, over 25,000 words in two languages) that should help starters get a grip of the game but also includes information that experienced users may be interested in. Other than that there were some small bugfixes and changes that can be found in the changelog.

[SilverWarior]

Verry nice.
I see that you game has quite a lot of text. Have you ever considered using word compression?
Two main benefits I see in using word compression would be:
1. Less space needed for storing game texts (not really needed nowadays due to large HDD-s).
2. Ability to precalculate width for each of used word which my increase performance of automatic line war, especially if you are using bitfonts.
But there are also drawbacks of using this:
1. You need to have special routine which would decode text before it can be rendered.
2. Every small change in text requires you to regenerate word dictionary.
3. If word dictionary file gets damaged it will screw up whole ingame text.

[Sascha Willems]

Nice idea, thouth I don't think this would benefit the game at all. Line wrapping is done at loading time, and displaying text is already extremly fast as it's only a single glCallLists for a whole line or block of text. The only way of improving performance I can think of would be to put a whole memo's text into e.g. an FBO, though that performance boost could get eaten by overheads to to texture updates. There is more optimization potential elsewhere, and I've been optimizing the game to move the limit away from the CPU towards the GPU over the last years

But well, it's a turn based game anyway, and with more than 100 fps on my pretty old system in fullscreen with 4xAA is sufficent for me.

[Rodrigo Robles]

It took me much longer than expected, but I just uploaded a new release of the open beta for windows and linux :

(Windows) Projekt “W” – Phase 2 – Open Beta rev. #170 (~74 MBytes)
(Linux, i386) Projekt “W” – Phase 2 – Open Beta rev. #170 (~78 MBytes)

Yeah! I will test the Linux version right now!

[Sascha Willems]

Later than expected (partially due to a power supply failure on my PC) here's the new beta release #190 of "Phase 2". As usual it's available for windows and linux :

(Windows) Projekt "W" - Phase 2 - Open Beta rev. #190 (~83 MBytes)
(Linux, i386) Projekt "W" - Phase 2 - Open Beta rev. #190 (~80 MBytes)

Here are some highlights from this release, for a full list of changes take a look at the changelog :

• AI Builder for regions
• New soundtrack, including the game's very own theme song
• New and improved sound effects
• Several improvements to the user interface / gameplay :
  
  • Visual warnings for regions with low loyalty or high pollution levels (right to the region's flag on the globe)
  • The region list can now be sorted by different criterias (economic power, population, pollution level, etc.)
  • You can now have the units placed by the computer on the battlefield (by simply ending the placement phase)
  • Unit health is now displayed for deployed divisions in regional view
• Almost two dozens of bugffixes and minor improvements

So this release doesn't only add to the game's overal atmosphere with the new soundtrack and improved sound design, but also adds some finish with lots of bugfixes and small improvements to the user interface. What's still missing from the sound design is the battlefield. Units currently don't have any sounds assigned, but that's planned for a future release. It's sadly kinda hard finding military unit sounds that sound good and won't cost any money.

Also on the list are some missing features like the whole politics area of the game (it's partially there but disabled for the current build) and the different game modes that I intended to add at some point during game design.

I hope you enjoy this new build of "Phase 2" even more than the recent ones. And a big thank you to all the people that send me their valuable feedback on the game. That's what actually keeps me motivated