Projekt Weltherrscher - "Phase 2"

[Sascha Willems]

With 2012 ending soon I decided to release a new version of the "Phase 2" beta. You can grab it grab it here (Revision #125).

Contrary to the last release this one doesn't include bugfixes but adds a new feature and new content :

• Detached manual battles
  As the manual battles in Projekt "W" could almost be made into a separate game I decided to add a new entry to the game's main menu that allows you to setup a manual battle and play it without having t play a "real" game". So from both the single- and multiplayer menu it's now possible to start manual battles detached from the main game. A new dialogue will show up that allows you to customize all of the battle's aspect. Starting from the setting, to the nations involved and also including complete control over how many and what units will participate in the battle
• New maps
  I also added half a dozen new maps for the manual battles that'll get selected at random. The last release only included 6 maps, so the number of possible maps for the manual battles is now doubled.

Screenshots :



I hope you enjoy the new features and have a happy new year

Edit : I noticed that the last video of PjW was from November 2011, so I decided to cut together a new video showcasing the most recent version. You can watch it here : www.youtube.com/watch?v=_LmWSjU-vTU&hd=1

[Sascha Willems]

So 2013 is here, the open beta is running good and people seem to like the game.So for 2013 I plan a final release (after all the years of hard work and endless weekends that made it look like the game would never become finished) and there isn't that much left to do :

• Sound design
  The game is severely lacking in this area. I noticed this will playing a small indie strategy game where the sounds perfectly fit the scenario and added to the overall atmosphere. That’s pretty much missing from “Phase 2″ currently, and this is one of the bigger issues I’ll take care of.
  
• Politics feature
  I mentioned this in several posts and the button is already there in the current beta build, but the feature is still in design stage. My plan is to add more personality to the game so the player feels more like the leader of a nation rather than “just” building stuff and moving divisions.
  
• Ingame tutorial and documentation
  “Phase 1″ had an ingame tutorial that lead the player through the most important aspects of the gameplay. This is currently missing from “Phase 2″, but something like this is a necessity for such a complex game. The html manual include is already a step in the right direction but not sufficient in my eyes.
  
• Add more content
  Although already stuffed with a lot of content (currrently the development directory inlcudes almost 800 MBytes of drafts, artworks, models, textures, designs, etc.) there are still areas where content is lacking. Battlefields for example still lack variety in 3D models and I also want to add some more buildings, technologies and global projects.
  
• Remove backwards compatibility for shaderless GPUs
  Wheen the original game launched there were lots of GPUs that didn’t support shaders, so there is still code in the renderer for these cards. But nowadays even the cheapest GPU is capable of shaders (inlcuded integrated GPUs), so I want to remove this legacy stuff and then also use shaders to opimize rendering in certain areas.

These are the most important points on my agenda, though I still have some plans left after the first final release (except for patches). I may implement a complete network mode in addition to hotseat multiplayer and I also want to make it compile with Lazarus so that I can also release a linux and MacOSX version (or maybe even more). Though these points aren't written in stone as I'd like to move on from Projekt "W" at some point in the near future and start working on something else.

And btw. the game is now also listed on the IndieDB. I hope this will broaden the audience a bit and make more people play it :

[Rodrigo Robles]

I think this is one of the best indie games I ever seen. It's feature full and polished.
A Linux version would be fine. I tried it under wine and the game almost work, but at some points graphics didn't show and I couldn't make an extensive testing.
Porting to Lazarus can open the multiplatform world and make it runnable in many platforms, including iOS and Android.

[Sascha Willems]

Well, that'd be my ultimate plane. I think a game like this is perfectly suited to be played on a tabled, so getting it up and running with Android (or even iOS) would be great. But I know that means a lot of work, but getting it to compile with Lazarus would be a big step in the multi-platform direction. And that's what I'm currently doing (out of curiosity), though Lazarus has it's share of problems with such a big project. Converting it fails each and every time with a different error, so I'm doing it by hand now. The biggest part of this will be adjusting the XML-parts, cause the Delphi XML-functionality differs from the implementation in Lazarus. But that's nothing that can't be done

And thanks for the kind words, always good to hear positive stuff on your own projects

[WILL]

Not to sound like a broken record of late, but... your best bet to get your game to run and perform well on ALL mobiles platforms (especially Android) is probably Oxygene.

Lazarus is great and all, but frankly it's Android support is not 100% Android compatable and if you do manage to get it going for *some* Android devices it would only work on the hardware that you designed it for. Your best bet, from any compiler on Android is something that compiles Java btye-code and the only Object Pascal compiler that does that is Oxygene for Java.

As Paul and I are both discovering that does mean you'll have to do some porting work on your code to make it more Java-friendly, but in all honesty depending on how you've written your code, it might not be that bad.

And as far as iOS and Mac OS X well Nougat works rather well and also compiled native code using XCode. I've tried it out and found it to be rather easy to setup once you know how. Personally, you'll have a much easier time with Oxygene for all things Apple overall as it uses Xcode, which allows you to do all your provisioning and submit to the App Stores via iTunes Connect. I'm not sure if there is an easy way to do that with Lazarus.

[Sascha Willems]

Well, that's what I feared (but thanks nonetheless for this valuable information). I only took a quick glimpse at the android support that FPC has to offer some months ago and it seems that not much has changed, so I guess I'll have to look elsewhere for that. But who knows, maybe Embarcadero's announced Mobile Studio (iOS first and then Android at a later point) will be the "weapon of choice" to get the game to android.

But what I can achieve in the short term are additional ports for Linux and MacOSX (glCapsViewer for example already supports these), and I'm pretty sure the changes I make to the project to get it to compile for Linux and MacOSX will make it easier to get them onto other platforms as well, so the time invested won't be wasted.

Right now I'm replacing all platform specific stuff. For the past 5 days I've been replacing all Delphi XML-Stuff (which is pretty nice to use but is based on MSXML) with the OpenSource NativeXML that needs no external libs and should work on all platforms. Though this affects several thousand lines of code it should be the biggest step towards getting the game to compile with FPC. The next step then is getting the rest (e.g. OpenGL render context creation) to support multiple platforms and I'll at least be able to offer versions for Linux and MacOSX.

Android may then follow at a later point, though I guess I'll have to put in a lot of work for the GUI the be usable with touch-based devices.

[WILL]

I will still say that with Free Pascal and/or Lazarus you have next to the best portability for your code though.

And even if you can't figure out how to rig your game for the App Stores on Mac, there is still gamer communities like Steam where I'm sure publishing doesn't require Apple's more strict validation process. You can also release the game under both Mac and Windows in parallel there too which would be easier to manage having only one distribution system to deal with.