Projekt "W"

[Sascha Willems]

Maybe some of you guys follow my Blog (http://saschawillems.blogspot.com), where I post regular updated on my current game project called Projekt "W". I haven't been posting much about it around forums and such (and also not posted much info on the story) cause I don't think that it's ready for bigger publicity yet, so I'll wait posting news and stuff on Projekt "W" until I have some demo to show off.

But to get some feedback I decided to also post it over here at PGD, so here are some infos on the game, but please note that I don't want to publish too much info on the story or the whole gameplay yet!


Background :
I had the initial idea for this game sometime around 2003, mainly because some friends and me were joking about taking over world domination (and nothing has changed about it, except that people always look kinda odd when we talk about taking world domination in public ;) ), so I wanted to make a game where you can exactly do that : take over the whole world and take no prisoners. I decided for a round-based approach and quickly put together a small game design document and a working prototype of the game. But somehow back at that time I had no good ideas and the game concept itself was clumsy and sounded like it wouldn't be too interesting at all so I decided to not put any furhter work into this project and shoot for other things (like NewtonPlayGround).
But then after doing a lot with physics (all the newton stuff) I wanted to make some traditional game again (must have been around July of this year), and besides some other ideas and prototypes lurking around in my game developement folder, I stumbled across this one again and now wanted to make something better out of it.
So instantly I started to rework the whole game design document to make the game interesting to play, and the ideas really started to flow. Up until now the new game design document is already 20 pages long and the current version of the game is already rather advanced, so this time I have a good feeling of finishing it somewhere around in 2007.


Story :
As I said above I don't want to tell too much about the story, though I recently finished all important parts of it. I want the players to be surprised when playing the game, so I'll only give you a small glimpse about the story. The story itself is mainly "my" continuation of the current world political situation with a worst-case-scenario.

The game plays in a not-to-far future (around 70 years from now) and out of all the nations around the world there are only five big nations (or call them factions) alive that actually don't really like each other. Those nations share the world and the player will take control over one of those nations and his goal will be to annihilate all others.
I find this hostile scenario in a not-so-distance future very interesting, especially since it also has ties to the current instable situation around the globe (actually as of now we're closer ot a third world war than back in the days of the cold war) and it's nothing like some far-away setting in the future or in the middle-ages. And because it's set some decades in the future it also allows me to implement units, buildings and technologies that are semi-futuristic, together with things humanity already has created.


Gameplay :
Basically this is like risk (the board-game, don't know how famous this is outside of germany/europe) but in with a lot of additional stuff. It's turn-based, so you have a lot of time to make your strategic decission, which should give the game a lot of depth. The player will control a given number of regions (depending on what nation you select) and besides defending your own regions you'll have to attack and overtake the regions of the other players, until the whole world is yours.
So you can build military units and create armies that you move around the map, you can research new technologies that'll unlock other technologies, buildings and new units. Another important part of the game is managing your regions, cause earch region has different factors that you need to balance. You'll construct buildings in those regions that influence those factors, as well as some of the researched technologies do. If you e.g. just construct huge factories you'll quickly pollute your region and loose it cause your population has died and on the other hand if you don't give your people some buildings to relax they'll uprise against you and you'll loose that region too.
So those are the basics of the game play but there are many more factets that I don't want to tell too much about, like Espionage and a global project that kind of is the apex of each nations workings and has huge impacts on the game.
Describing the gameplay as a whole is a bit complicated, but basically think of a mixture between risk, the civilization games and a bit from some of the space exploration games like Master of Orion or Ascendancy and you should get a basic idea.


Implementation :
I'm coding the game using the recent Turbo Delphi 2006 (but developement started with Delphi 7), and as all my other projects this one also uses OpenGL for rendering and also OpenAL for sound output. In terms of graphics it requires OpenGL 2.0, as it uses some advanced features for rendering a very detailled globe with a moving day-night line and a nice reflecting water surface on the floor.
The most complex part of this project is the GUI (fully OpenGL), which I wrote from scratch and includes all comon objects like labels, panels, listboxes, memos, imaged and also supports rendering 3D objects into window objects (via Pixelbuffers). It also supports transparent windows and custom skins and implements everything you know from the windows UI, like dragging windows, scrolling within e.g. listboxes and stuff. One special feature is the main toolbar you can see in the lower right wich as kind of a skinned control where the buttons nicely fade in when you hover your cursor over them.
Multiplayer is also planned (besides playing against AI-opponents), with the first demo including multiplayer via hotseat, and LAN/Internet (and even maybe PBEM) following at a later point.


Design :
Well this is actually the most interesting part of doing a game in my opinion. As I said above I have a big game design document where all parts of the game design are written down and I also have separate documents that e.g. include a list of all the buildings to be in the game. But game design also includes creating graphics, 3D models and so on, as the game's style has to be fluid. It should look like it comes from one hand, otherwise it'll brake the games "feeling. So for this project I'm doing everyhing myself, not taking any ressources from the net. I'm doing buildings in a 3D modeller, creating textures for them, rendering UI items, creating graphics for the user interface and much much more.
This takes much more time than only coding the game, but also is a part of making games that makes the most fun, cause you can live out your whole creativitiy when e.g. designing and modelling some futuristic buildings.


Visuals :
And as I posted this so late over here at PGD (it's not that I don't like you ;) ) here you'll have three current ingame shots I made exclusively for this posting :
http://www.delphigl.de/misc/blog/t_pj_wh_22dez06a.jpg (http://www.delphigl.de/misc/blog/pj_wh_22dez06a.jpg) http://www.delphigl.de/misc/blog/t_pj_wh_22dez06b.jpg (http://www.delphigl.de/misc/blog/pj_wh_22dez06b.jpg) http://www.delphigl.de/misc/blog/t_pj_wh_22dez06c.jpg (http://www.delphigl.de/misc/blog/pj_wh_22dez06c.jpg)
(click for a bigger view)
I hope you don't mind that the text on those screenshots is german, it'll have the option to switch to english language when I release it ;) .



Hopefully you didn't fell asleep while reading my post, and though I didn't tell too much about the project yet I'd love to hear feedback from the PGD community, or if you have questions don't dare to ask.

[JSoftware]

Good sir, that looks delicious. I'm going to bookmark that

Good luck. Hope you'll finish that

Edit: Ah I see I didn't read it all :wink:

[cragwolf]

Beautiful GUI, you certainly have an artistic talent that I completely lack. A shame it's Windows-only, but I suppose one can't have everything! Good luck with it, the more Pascal games, the better.

[WILL]

Risk was big in North America. And I used to love playing it as a kid! ;)

In fact I got Risk 2 when it came out for the PC. :D

I'm dying to try an english version of your game. Like everyone else says, the interface and other graphics are truely stunning. In some way it also kind of reminds me of Ascendancy by Logic Factory. It was a turn-based empire game, but in space. (Anyone ever heard of, seen of played that game before?)

Can't wait to check it out myself, please do keep us up to speed. :thumbup:

[Sascha Willems]

A shame it's Windows-only, but I suppose one can't have everything! Good luck with it, the more Pascal games, the better.
Since I'm using no specific OS-features (except for some wgl-functions from OpenGL, but that's no problem) and the game uses OpenGL as well as OpenAL it should be possible to port it to Linux. But I'll wait and see if there is a demand for this, as last time I asked about porting NewtonPlayGround to Linux no one responed.


I'm dying to try an english version of your game. Like everyone else says, the interface and other graphics are truely stunning.
Rest assured, the demo will be in english and german. Most of those texts on the screenshot is just a placeholder or temporary, so translating it into different languags yet would be a waste of time.


In some way it also kind of reminds me of Ascendancy by Logic Factory. It was a turn-based empire game, but in space.
As for Ascendancy : You got me uncovered Will ;) I was a huge fan of Ascendancy and I even tried to recreated it with an older project (see this (http://www.delphigl.de/projects/ucgl/eng_index.html) for more info on that), but somehow I'm not that science-fiction guy and creating a semi-realistic setting is much easier/more fun to me, so yes, there are influences from Ascendancy (and Master of Orion) in this project.

[cragwolf]

But I'll wait and see if there is a demand for this, as last time I asked about porting NewtonPlayGround to Linux no one responed.

Depends where you ask. There aren't many people developing games or OpenGL apps on Linux in Free Pascal, but I'm sure there are plenty of Linux users who would like to play a game like yours.

[WILL]

A shame it's Windows-only, but I suppose one can't have everything! Good luck with it, the more Pascal games, the better.
Since I'm using no specific OS-features (except for some wgl-functions from OpenGL, but that's no problem) and the game uses OpenGL as well as OpenAL it should be possible to port it to Linux. But I'll wait and see if there is a demand for this, as last time I asked about porting NewtonPlayGround to Linux no one responed.

I agree that the FPC/Linux well is somewhat dry right now, but I'm trying to help do away with that with my GQ project. I'd like to see this game ported to Linux so that when I eventually switch over the the dark side, I can continue to play. :)



In some way it also kind of reminds me of Ascendancy by Logic Factory. It was a turn-based empire game, but in space.
As for Ascendancy : You got me uncovered Will ;) I was a huge fan of Ascendancy and I even tried to recreated it with an older project (see this (http://www.delphigl.de/projects/ucgl/eng_index.html) for more info on that), but somehow I'm not that science-fiction guy and creating a semi-realistic setting is much easier/more fun to me, so yes, there are influences from Ascendancy (and Master of Orion) in this project.

Wow that other game looks pretty nice too. :) Any chance of you picking it back up after Projekt "W" is completed? I've been trying to find a more up-to-date fun and challenging game like Ascendancy since I've moved to Win95 back in the day. :p

[dmantione]

A shame it's Windows-only, but I suppose one can't have everything! Good luck with it, the more Pascal games, the better.
Since I'm using no specific OS-features (except for some wgl-functions from OpenGL, but that's no problem) and the game uses OpenGL as well as OpenAL it should be possible to port it to Linux. But I'll wait and see if there is a demand for this, as last time I asked about porting NewtonPlayGround to Linux no one responed.


Well, I'm definately interrested. However, I fear I'm out, the Radeon M7 cannot do OpenGL2 :(

[JernejL]

Interesting, from what i see (cold fusion :D :D) you have to out-technology the other factions? satelites and espionage included? :D

on the other note: i'm still waiting for your email response about that raycast vehicle thing :/

[Sascha Willems]

Wow that other game looks pretty nice too. :) Any chance of you picking it back up after Projekt "W" is completed? I've been trying to find a more up-to-date fun and challenging game like Ascendancy since I've moved to Win95 back in the day. :p
Sadly no, I've layed that project to rest years ago after releasing two techdemos over at the german Delphi-OpenGL-Community. Besides the fact that I'm not really into sci-fi and I had troubles thinking of what stuff, technologies and so on to actually put into the game, there were also huge flaws in the game design. E.g. I made the huge mistake (don't ask me why) to make it a real-time game instead of turn-based. So this project won't see any ressurection, but there are a lot of projects around the net that try to recreate MoO or Ascendancy (e.g. FreeOrion).


Well, I'm definately interrested. However, I fear I'm out, the Radeon M7 cannot do OpenGL2 :(
Well, I decided to make a split at some point. Theres OpenGL2.0-capable hardware around since 2002 (starting with ATI's R300 core) and I guess when I have this one finished there won't be many cards around that don't support GL2 anymore, so that's why I made this decission.


Interesting, from what i see (cold fusion :D :D) you have to out-technology the other factions? satelites and espionage included? :D
The longer the game runs the harder it gets when you don't research new technologies, so yes I guess you'll be able to tech-out other factions, but let's wait until I've done balancing the game. And yes, espionage will also be a viable part of the game that'll mainly help you find out weaknesses of the other factions.

[savage]

Finally we see what has been brewing in the Sascha workshop!

Looks great and I've promoted the post to a news item. I'm looking forward to further updates.

[tanffn]

Now days I hardly find the time to post, but I had to give my outmost admiration(?) for this one :)
The game idea and game play sound like a very promising game, that accompanied with the screen-shots look like it can even be something I’ll enjoy playing :)

How much time did it take you to rewrite the design doc and making the game to it current state? You said you started working on the game since 2003 but stopped for X ..

[technomage]

I have to agree. This looks very promising, keep it up :D

[Sascha Willems]

How much time did it take you to rewrite the design doc and making the game to it current state? You said you started working on the game since 2003 but stopped for X ..
I made a prototype in 2003 but that was nothing too big. So I started over again in July 2003 and basically rewrote the whole game design document and the whole game itself. So to get to the current state it took me about 5 months (with some interruptions, e.g. for updating the NewtonPlayGround which took its time).


And yesterday I started to work on the next feature of the game, namely espionage. This will be an integral part of the gameplay as it'll help you in finding your enemies weak points and also allows to do some sabotage in enemy regions. I wrote all ideas down with pen and paper (brainstorming in front of the PC is always a bad idea, so I do this the traditional way), including the layout for the espionage window and then did a nice writeup on all important stuff concerning this in my game document. So over the next days I'll start implementing this feature into the game itself. But I'll have you updated on that.

And thanks for all that feedback guys!

[pstudio]

I must say that I'm amazed :shock:
The hole world domination idea really appeals to me :twisted:
And the screenshots ar beatiful. Especially the last one reminds me of CIVIV when looking on the earth.
Can't wait to see how this project evolves.

[Robert Kosek]

Sascha, that looks positively astounding! And people continue to say that OpenGL is behind the times? Ridiculous.

I would greatly enjoy PBEM features in the game, and hotseat would be fun too. Real time multiplayer... I don't know. I like to play when I've got the time, rather than several hours at a clip.

Risk is one of my favorite games of all time, along with Stratego and Battletech, so you've got me sold. If you are going to sell it I'll buy a copy; do you accept paypal or checks? :D

And I think that once you're done, that you owe us a post mortem on this one too. ;) I've bookmarked your blog just for this one game!

[Sascha Willems]

Thanks for the kind words :) And I think a post-mortem after the game is finished is something I'll want to do, as together with my blog and the almost daily backups I can nicely show the progress that the project made over the months (I just took a look at a backup that was just 4 months old and the differences to the current version are huge). But since the project still needs a lot of work I wouldn't count on that post-mortem before end of 2007 (maybe even later, I tend not to make any predictions on dates for my projects anymore).

As for Project "W" istelf - it's progressing very nice (mostly better than I initially thought) and I'm not too far away from the "feature-complete" stage, which kind-of is my first milestone, and allows the player to at least use all the features the final game will offer (though not content-complete, I still have to think about the tech-tree, model buildings and units, etc.). I even started writing down my ideas on how the AI will play this game and plan on starting work on a basic AI by the end of this month.

[chronozphere]

Dude... this looks awesome. :razz:
especially the GUI is neat... the forms look very 'draggable' to me.. yummie :lol:

Also the turn-based minigame screenies (your blog) look cool.

What kind of music are you gonna use?
Are you planning to make it yourself? :?

Good luck... hope it is finished soon :)

[Sascha Willems]

Music (and sound) is something I'll implement at a very late stage of the project, so I haven't put much effort and thinking into that. I plan on having different songs that fit the nations of the game and maybe some songs that play in certain situations like battles or such. And no, I'm not gonna make them myself cause I'm not good at making music, but some of my friends are musicians and already made music for one of my older games, so I think I can also count on them for making music for Project "W".


And I finally implemented the possibility to attack and overtake enemy regions. This was the last missing feature to make the game completely playable which also means that I can now start to work on the enemy AI :)

[Chesso]

I had a look at the blog...

It's prettyfull, me want.

:lol:

[Sascha Willems]

Those that read my blog already know about it, the project is making good progress (especially compared to some of my older projects) and I managed to get a lot of stuff done within the last few weeks.

First I implemented a basic AI, it'll construct buildings depending on the needs of a region, creates armies and (builds and) assigns units to them. It also knows what regions are most endangered and then will assign the biggest armies to that region and it'll also attack other regions. So you can now actually in fact play the game instead of just trying out the features.

Then I got my stuff done on the technology tree, which I (very much like the list of buildings) pushed back and back for a long time. But now I have most of the technologies to unlock buildings and such in the game, though the final technology tree will be around two times as "big" as the one now in the game.

And most recently I pushed myself to work on translations. At first I wanted to do this with the ITE of BDS2006, but somehow the documentation is so bad (it actually won't even mention how to exactly access the localized strings or how to switch betwen languages on the fly, if that's even possible) that I decided to make my own solution. So now I have another tab in my WeltEdit where I do localizations. It's a plain string grind, and eacht identifier (e.g. szTestString) has a single row for each language in the game. And those then get exported to XML and within the game I now only call my own function LocalStr which then selects the appropriate string for the given identitifer based on the currently set game language. Plain and simple but works.

And since reading is stress for the eyes, here is a new screenshot to relief your eyes a bit (click for bigger shot) :
http://www.delphigl.de/misc/blog/t_pj_wh_18jan2007.jpg (http://www.delphigl.de/misc/blog/pj_wh_18jan2007.jpg)


Other than the above mentioned things I really did a lot of smaller things, like preparing some features to be used by the AI (e.g. automatic battles), added some stuff to the GUI for better usability, created a lot of small icons for buttons and dialogs, etc.
And next on my list is balancing (already did some smaller changes), which includes the prices of units, buildings, etc. That's something I have to do, cause otherwise I can't continue to work on AI.

[Chesso]

Ok so I'm like half dead atm lol (had no more than a couple of hours sleep the last week) but is this like an RTS? Cause... that's some heavy stuff there lol and it sounds like it's coming along very nicely.

[Sascha Willems]

No, as I already mentioned it's a turn-based game. Making something like this realtime would overwhelm human players and leave no room for strategic decissions, so this is some old-school turn-based strategy gameplay.

[Chesso]

Oh so a similar idea however it's turn based rather than real time.

Very cool all the same.

[Sascha Willems]

I got another little "extra" for you. From the very beginning of the project I had a function implemented that could save the current "politcal" situation to a bmp with the regions colored by their owner.

So I decided to make a nice animated gif that shows how the AI will attack and overtake other nations. But please note that this is only the basic AI. The whole GIF spans 300 game rounds and a new image has been taken every ten rounds, so it shows 30 different images !

If you're interested, you can see it here (http://www.delphigl.de/misc/ai_working.gif) (~800 KBytes). Nothing fancy, but it's nice to see that my humble AI is acutally able to do something ;)

[Chesso]

Nice work.

[cragwolf]

Do you mind some criticism? In that AI map, I don't like the way you divide up the world. You seem to do it based on nothing other than area, although that's not quite true because Australia is divided up into 12 regions, while an equivalent area of southern Africa gets divided up into 5 or 6 regions. This despite the fact that the equivalent area in southern Africa has many times the population of Australia, which is barely 20 million.

I think you should base your dividing up more on population. There really is no need to divide Greenland up into almost as many regions as China! Even basing it on population might be simplistic, because natural resources would be another important factor, too. So maybe the Middle East would require more regions with this more complex division scheme. Present-day national borders reflect a mix of geographical and historical concerns. Your regional borders should do this as well, with the extra 70 years of future history in your story.

Maybe one way you could justify your division scheme is by awarding higher points for conquering one region compared to another. Conquering a Middle Eastern region filled with oil reserves (ooh, but maybe we've run out of oil by then?) would gain you lots of points, and conquering a chunk of the Simpson desert or the Greenland ice cap would net you very few points. Maybe this would be a better way to do it then my suggested schemes in the previous paragraphs.

You seem to have 5 ?ºberstates: America, Europe, an east Asian state, a pan-Arabic league, and one other one. Please don't tell me the other one is based on Australia, New Zealand, and some Pacific islands. I can not see how 70 years of history can turn this region into anything other than the sleepy irrelevant backwater it currently is, reliant on the military protection of America, and the technology flow from Europe, East Asia and America.

One thing that concerns me is how you will simulate nuclear war. Nuclear weapons really screw up a lot of assumptions about military strategy. It can really restrict what countries or blocs of countries can do to each other. I hope you have thought through such strategic issues as mutually assured destruction, launch on warning, and second strike. Of course, this is just a game, based on a speculative future, so you can always assume that nuclear weapons were never invented in your universe. Nothing wrong with that!

[Chesso]

Well i'm not sure but the game probably isn't based on real life events, so it could be layed out in the shape of his name if he wanted it to.... lol.

[Sascha Willems]

The scenario of the game is semi-realistic, which basically means that I only took the current world political situation and made a scenario of my own out of it. So if you talk about how e.g. the division of the worldmap, please bear in mind that it hasn't got much to do with how our world is divided. When creating the regions I actually didn't thought of populations or other regional stuff (like e.g. natural ressources, historical importance, etc.). And then I just made the new "regions" so that they are around the same in size and such, I didn't put too much thought into newly dividing up the world.
And moreover the whole scenario is hostile. I know that such a scenario will be very unlikely cause of e.g. world economics and other ties (e.g NATO, the UN, G8 and so on), but I need such a scenario for my game idea to work.
So maybe it would be best to think of that earth as an earth somewhere around 70 years in the future but within a parallel universe, which in terms of technology evolved very much like ours but in a much more hostile way. I mean today there are still hundreds of conflicts and wars, but they're all on a more or less smaller scale.

And as for the nuclear war, you're right. At first I wanted the player to be able to build silos for nuclear rockets in each region, making up for a permanent nuclear war. But I scraped that idea, cause as you said, that would make all other military aspects useless and it would end in a fest of spamming nuclear rockets around the world with letting all other game features aside.
And so in the current game draft (maybe I'll still change this at some point) there are no global nuclear weapons when you start the game. First you have to do some research (which will take some time) and then you can set your global project to create a nuclear weapon. The global project is kinda like research, but you only have one project (out of the different ones, with each nation having special projects besides some that all nations can use) that needs a lot of ressources and time to develop. So if you have researched all needed technologies and have put all the time and ressources needed into a global nuclear weapon you can finally use it. But I'll tweak that in a way that it'll become impossible to use this in the very early stage of the game, and after one use you have to again put time and ressources into the project, so that it also can't be reused instantly.


And thanks for that criticism, as constructive criticism is something I always welcome!

[cragwolf]

Hi Sascha, it's good to learn about the thought processes going on behind a game like this, so I really appreciate your response. I think I like the way you plan to handle nuclear technology. Also I think this project already shows how complicated it can be to design a game that is even semi-realistic. The real world is incredibly complex! :)

[Sascha Willems]

Yeah that's true, and I guess that's why so many games go for a historical (like those myriads of WW2-games) or for a totally futuristic (just think of Warhammer40k, which takes places 38 thousand years in the future) theme. The current world is moving so fast that it would be almost impossible to make a realistic world-scenario, cause there would be too many changes during the time of developement. Just take a look at what happened on a world-political scale during the last two years and you see what I mean. E.g. I just read yesterday that China shot down one of their satellites with a rocket launched from ground, which makes the world-political situation even more hostile than it actually is (anyone seen CNN yesterday? China want's to ban a starbucks coffee out a holy temple and the chinese ankerman wasn't very friendly towards that western tv station).

So I just went with that semi-realistic scenario so I don't have to adjust things on a weekly basis and to also be able to put in my own take on world-politics (which can bee seen as a satiric hint towards what's happening in reality). And other than the scenario there are so many considerations to be done on a game-design basis that having to deal with the above situation would leave you spending half of the day on tweaking and changing your game-design without actually getting anything done.

And to just give you guys out there a sample, yesterday I was working again on the tidbits of the army management feature, and here is just a partly list of what things I had to take into consideration while implementing just this single feature (note : it's still not 100% finished and things may and will change) :
How many divisions can be stationed in a single player-owned region?
How big can a division become? Or should it be unlimited in size?
If it's limited in size, should the limit be determined by the strength of the units in the division or just by their number?
What should be the maximum size of the unit building queue? Or should it be unlimited in size?
What happens to units that are deassigned from a division, should the player be able to directly assign them to another division or shall they be locked for one turn?
How is health regeneration handled? Does the region need a special building for that or will there be a "natural" regeneration over time?
Should each unit gain experience in battle, or should only the assigned (if one is assigned) general of the wole division gain it? The later would make the generals more valuable, the first one the units, so what way to go?
Should each nation get it's own pool of different units, or should the have the same units (or maybe just with different skins)? Or should there just be some units that are special to each nation with a basic unit pool that is same across all nations?
How to calculate damage caused by units? How to calculate this against defensive values of units?
and so on...

And the above list is just an extract of what to take care about for just one single feature of the game. So as you can see the game design of such a big project is a huge undertaking.

[Sascha Willems]

Just a quick update again :
Progress is coming along nicely (as suspected) and right now I'm mostly working on polishing so that I can soon start to add the missing rest of the content to release the demo. This means I'm working on all that small things players won't directly notice but which are important to have a nice gameflow.

Over at my blog (http://saschawillems.blogspot.com) I did several updates and also uploaded some new pictures of buildings along with some new screenshots.

And here is one you right now can't see on my blog as it's still a work-in-progress :
http://www.delphigl.de/misc/blog/pj_wh_8207teaser.jpg
As you can see I have repalced the huge water-only plane with something more sophisticated as the water-only background looked to bland and to sterile. So now you'll have different 3D basins for each different nation. The one on the shot is the first one and will be for the new asian nation, but it's also still just a work-in-progress, the one on my HD is also a bit more detailled.

And almost forgot it : I recently released an in-game video over at the german Delphi-OpenGL-Community that shows the game in action. I didn't post it overe here at PGD cause the whole interface is in germa, but if you're still interested gab it here (http://www.delphigl.de/misc/projectw_alpha_012007.wmv) (13 MBytes, WindowsMedia format).
Note that it's already "kinda" outdated and misses some changes I recently made but already shows a lot of the game. Also please respect that I don't want this to be posted elsewhere or uploaded onto pages like youtube!

I would update this one more often, but time sadly permits, so you won't find each update from my blog here.

[WILL]

Thats just so cool. :)

[technomage]

Amazing :D I wish my german wasn't so rusty ;-)

[Traveler]

Just,... WOW! :shock:

[Robert Kosek]

You already know my thoughts Sascha... same as before. Stunning and awesome! I cannot wait for the final product. :D

[savage]

Looks great! As I already mentioned on your blog, if you need anything translated from English to Spanish to extend your target market let me know. My wife is a translator.

[AthenaOfDelphi]

That looks awesome Sascha... nice job :-)

[Sascha Willems]

Thanks for the feedback, and Dom I may get back onto that offer at a later time. First I want to finish the demo and see how it is recieved, after that I'll decide on the future ways of the game.

Meanwhile here is another teaser :
http://www.delphigl.de/misc/blog/pj_wh_100207teaser.jpg

This is the backdrop setting for another of the five nations (the arabic world) which was heavily inspired by persian architecture. Aside from the first four hour long try yesterday (which i totally scracped) it took me almost 8 hours to have this one look the way it's now. That's mainly because I have certain vision of a 3D model and then try to get as close to that vision as possible, including doing a lot of different version, looking at pictures of real persian buildings and creating a lot of textures so that the colors look exactly the way I want them. In my opinion this one is very close to my vision and I'll only add some minor things like some plants.

[IlovePascal]

I'll agree with Traveler


Just,... WOW! :shock:

[Huehnerschaender]

It's getting real shape Sascha :)

Fortunately I can read german *hehe* So I understand what he is doing in the video....

By the way... your game seems to be quite complex... Be sure the player keeps overview of the whole scneario... it already seems confusing, but this can be the effect of not knowing the gameplay at all :)

Anyway, it seems to be very polished and well implemented... great work! Keep it on!

[Chebmaster]

Since I'm using no specific OS-features (except for some wgl-functions from OpenGL, but that's no problem) and the game uses OpenGL as well as OpenAL it should be possible to port it to Linux. But I'll wait and see if there is a demand for this, as last time I asked about porting NewtonPlayGround to Linux no one responed.

Before trying to port, you should first ckeck if your game just runs in wine (Wine Is Not an Emulator). The modern Linux distributions can run even some DirectX8-based games. Not to mention Quake 2 and 3. If your creation doesn't use .NET or some obscure/undocumented WinAPI functions it should be playable in Linux.

For example, I now work 100% of my time in Linux. But I did all but drop the Linux-native version of my project and concentrated on the Win32 version (compile it with the help of fpc-crosswin). Because the Win32 version runs in Linux without a notch.

Maybe *that* is the reason you don't get any requests to port.

[dmantione]

Wine gives problems enough to keep the need for native ports. My experienced with some recent games posted here:
* Garland's quest: Works, a shower of messages regarding audio errors is continuously streaming to the terminal, slowing the game down.
* Fantasyland: Got it working once, then never again. Asked William for the source and compiled a native version.
* Uberchess: Doesn't work.

[WILL]

Wine gives problems enough to keep the need for native ports. My experienced with some recent games posted here:
* Garland's quest: Works, a shower of messages regarding audio errors is continuously streaming to the terminal, slowing the game down.

Ah ok great to know. :) Did you have the sdl_mixer properly installed? Thats the only audio system I have in place right now. (Incidentally without any audio tracks or sounds. :P)

Please reply here (http://www.pascalgamedevelopment.com/viewtopic.php?p=31884#31884) though. I don't want to steal Sascha's thread. :o He's been awesome helping me out with some aspects of the graphics too...

[Chebmaster]

Wine gives problems enough to keep the need for native ports.
Not if the program author did specifically test and his creation for compatibility with wine and adapt it.

[Sascha Willems]

Well it took me some time and effort to do it, but here it is :
A new video for Projekt "W" that showcases the progress on my project. It's hot from the "press" as I recorded this one just some hours ago after making three or four attempts with not-so-good outcome.

The video is almost 7 minutes long, roughly 26 MBytes big and is encoded using windows media format (WMV), so anyone having a recent media player or codec package installed should be able to watch it.

But contrary to the first video from january, this one is fully english (all onscreen texts and descriptions) and it's also narrated by myself so besides seing it in action you'll also hear me talking about it with a hopefully not too-german sounding accent ;)

But though the video is rather long it doesn't show all of the game and I also don't talk about background information. That's what I tried to do with my first attempts but that would have meand a very long (>20 mins) video which would have been 100 MBytes or so.

And please respect that I don't want this to be mirrored anywhere (not even youtube or google video) as I don't want too much exposure before I have something out of the door people can actually play instead of only looking at.

Get it here! (http://www.saschawillems.de/?p=97)

[Luuk van Venrooij]

He dewd,

I just took a quick peak @ your video and it looks very nice. Love graphics and the design. The gameplay also looks good:). Cant wait to try it.

Only thing you should add is a graphical mouse cursor instead of the standaard windows one you appear to be using.

Grz

Luuk

[Robert Kosek]

Hey Sascha, that looks great. :D And your accent wasn't bad at all, I understood everything you said without trouble at all.

One little thing you might want to change in the espionage window is "Infiltrated Spies", which implies that the spy has been infiltrated which really isn't possible (infiltration is a territorial action that cannot happen to an individual). You could say instead "infiltrated territories", or "planted spies", or perhaps even "assigned agents". Your command over English is pretty good, so I wouldn't anticipate many other little things like this. And it really is a little thing, I paused for a half second and then realized fully what you meant.

[Huehnerschaender]

Hehe, just watched your video :)

Very nice game you have there.... I am looking forward to play your demo version!

The best part of the video was the last spoken sentence :) "Gute Nacht!" thats what I say now too :) So, "Gute Nacht" and "Bis morgen"!

[cragwolf]

Absolutely magnificent! It looks like a professional job done by a large team. The GUI is superb. I love the graphs and statistics, that really appeals to me. Also looking forward to the military simulation side of things; you mentioned Panzer General, my favourite game. It's like you have a game within a game. Designing the AI for that must be challenging.

I like the day-night cycle, but maybe a good idea would be to see city lights during the night (maybe you already do this, and my eyes weren't good enough to see them in the video); not completely realistic, but a nice-looking effect. You certainly have some great artistic skills available to you. Will you add music?

As an aspiring amateur game developer I'm not sure what to feel: inspired to follow your lead, or discouraged in the knowledge that I could never do as well and so I might as well hang up my hat. Anyway, I'm sure there are enough "half-full glass" people out there to follow in your footsteps.

[savage]

As an aspiring amateur game developer I'm not sure what to feel: inspired to follow your lead, or discouraged in the knowledge that I could never do as well and so I might as well hang up my hat. Anyway, I'm sure there are enough "half-full glass" people out there to follow in your footsteps.

The only certainty is that if you don't try then that is 100% failure. I don't think you should ever hang up your hat as each developer brings their own unique perspective to a game.

Sascha, I've not had a chance to check out your demo yet, but will do so later today.

[wodzu]

Amazing job:) I am a big fan of MOO series and Risk and your game seems to have some ideas from those titles. I would really like to see 'Hot Seat" multiplayer mode to play a friend on one computer.

Regards,

Wodzu

[Robert Kosek]

Oh yeah, I just thought of this, but I don't know if you'd want to change it so late.

Instead of zooming by increasing the planet's size, and therefore growing into the water and perhaps out of it, you could zoom the camera's position inwards. At that point you could also add more detailed icons up close if you wanted. But you probably already thought of that.

[Chebmaster]

Both the video players on my Linux machine that support the WMV format were unable to play it. Said they need additional codec or something.

I then tried to convert it to AVI using VirtualDub (launched in wine) but I got this:
http://host-17-99.imsys.net/_share/_001/virtualdub_no_wmv.png

Why are you people so keen on using propietary formats that only M$ tools can open? :?

[Robert Kosek]

Show me a good, reliable tool for video capture that is user friendly and supports a variety of formats that is entirely free... so far, too many require a myriad of patches, or only support raw AVI. It's a mess. At least WMV/ASX is uniform, and Windows Movie Maker comes with XP. :roll:

[Chebmaster]

When I was still working in Windows, I used FRAPS (generates weakly compressed AVIs) + VirtualDub (to recompress them to DIVX). Worked finely for me.

The thing is, nobody writes the ready-to-use video on the fly, the process requires too much processing power. You first write them raw (or almost raw, as FRAPS does) with one tool, then compress/filter/resize/etc. with another tool.

[Robert Kosek]

Well, I tried VirtualDub, and for something relatively easy to use, it did require a few extra codecs. I have DivX Create 6, but it doesn't like the RAW FRAPS avi's. Something about invalid format, or somesuch. After a few failed attempts at that I gave up. (Not like I have much to encode though.) Anyway, it seems to be just a bothersome process.

Didn't mean to hijack your thread Sascha, sorry. It just bugs me at the scatterbrained nature of video conversion. :)

[Chebmaster]

Normally, you have a codec p ack (http://www.free-codecs.com/download/K_Lite_Codec_Pack.htm) installed (K-Lite, CCCP or some other thing), which includes all you need to work with DivX in VirtualDub. Heck, VirtualDub works even in Linux! A great program and very easy to use.

Next, FRAPS (AFAIK) installs its own codec so that other programs could work with AVIs generated by it.

[Sascha Willems]

I'm kinda busy the last days and weeks but I try to find some hours each day to put into Projekt W and I already made several news updates on it on my home page. Recently I wrote about the state of the game and included some new images to show the game's current progress. You can read up more on this here (http://www.saschawillems.de/?p=106).

And for your viewing pleasure here are the new screenshots (click for bigger view) :
http://www.saschawillems.de/images/projectw/t2007_05_12a.jpg (http://www.saschawillems.de/images/projectw/2007_05_12a.jpg) http://www.saschawillems.de/images/projectw/t2007_05_12b.jpg (http://www.saschawillems.de/images/projectw/2007_05_12b.jpg) http://www.saschawillems.de/images/projectw/t2007_05_12c.jpg (http://www.saschawillems.de/images/projectw/2007_05_12c.jpg) http://www.saschawillems.de/images/projectw/t2007_05_12d.jpg (http://www.saschawillems.de/images/projectw/2007_05_12d.jpg) http://www.saschawillems.de/images/projectw/t2007_05_12e.jpg (http://www.saschawillems.de/images/projectw/2007_05_12e.jpg) http://www.saschawillems.de/images/projectw/t2007_05_12f.jpg (http://www.saschawillems.de/images/projectw/2007_05_12f.jpg) http://www.saschawillems.de/images/projectw/t2007_05_12g.jpg (http://www.saschawillems.de/images/projectw/2007_05_12g.jpg)

[jasonf]

That game looks amazing.
I'm loving the whole look and feel of the game.
I'm not sure how I'd get on with the gameplay as I'm rubbish at stratergy games like that.. but the graphics look very polished.

I particularly like the water.

that Earth is cool too, reminds me of UFO Enemy Unknown.

[wodzu]

Hello Sascha.

I was reading on your site that you have fully finished AI system. Could you tell us a little more which technique did you use do construct it? Neural Networks, Genetic Algorithms, FSA? Of course if its not a secret;-)

Keep up good work, game looks really proffesional.

[Sascha Willems]

Well, there is really nothing special or even fancy behind the AI of the game. It's turn-based so there's no need for very fast routines and I also didn't use stuff like genetic algorithms or neural networks.
t's not easy to describe but basically it's some kind of finite state machine with a lot of randomness and the AI is personalized by setting different parameters (i.e. how big is the chance of attack enemies, how much of the income can the AI spent for military and civil stuff and so on). The AI also calculates priorities and risk factors for regions and will first take care of the endangered regions.

Initially I wanted to go for a neural network at a later stage but after implementing the above mentioned AI I noticed that it played well (and more important : each game is played different, so the player never knows how the AI reacts) and decided to stick with this approach.

[Sascha Willems]

Sadly I haven't had much time to update my progress on "Phase 2" over here at PGD, but if you follow my homepage you'll know that I'm still busy working on it, and fter thinking about releasing a video of the current progress made for "Phase 2" I finally got around uploading a video showcasing some of the new features. And although it's still work-in-progress for most of the things shown it should at least hint at how "Phase 2" will look like when it's released, so here you go :

http://www.youtube.com/v/ovCBDR48oYY&hl=de&fs=1

Important : Please watch the video in HD, cause SD-Quality is so bad you won't see a lot of the details.

P.S. : If you want to get more on "Phase 2" just wait for Will to release the firsst issue of the Pascal Gamer Magazine ;)

[AthenaOfDelphi]

Looking good Sascha... great work.

[Brainer]

Looks great! :) I can't wait to see more from you.

[Wizard]

Excellent work, keep us informed :)

[Sascha Willems]

Sorry for letting this thread over at PGD collecting dust, but due to a severe lack of spare time I only got around posting news of my game on my page and my "home" community DelphiGL.

But I guess since PGD kinda relaunched it'd be a good idea to update this thread over at PGD as well.

I wrote a rather big status update on the progression of "Phase 2" of Projekt "W" over at my homepage. You can read it here (http://www.saschawillems.de/?p=530).

And along with the status update I also released a new (short) video showing a recent build of the game :


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aeH73zA2OnA


As usual I uploaded it in HD, so for the best picture please go to the YouTube page and select 720p. Sadly it's still not possible to upload videos with 60 fps to YouTube, so the animations in the video aren't nearly as smooth as they're in reality.

[chronozphere]

That is one of the biggest pascal games i've ever seen. It's so great that you have the devotion to work on it for such a long time. :o

I wonder; During all the years of development, did you often refactor large portions of your code? If I were to do a big project like that, I would constantly refactor after realizing that technique X works better than Y. My experience is that it's very tempting to give in to this, especially when working in a long time span. How do you deal with this?

Will there be an english version?

Keep us posted with your progress. ;)

[Sascha Willems]

I wonder; During all the years of development, did you often refactor large portions of your code? If I were to do a big project like that, I would constantly refactor after realizing that technique X works better than Y. My experience is that it's very tempting to give in to this, especially when working in a long time span. How do you deal with this?
Well, it's a strategy game and not a next-gen egoshooter, so that's not a real big deal. Especially since it's already making use of shaders since the initial relase, it's easy to upgrade to. But as it looks pretty good for a strategy game anyway I don't have the urge to update the technology itself all the time. One thing I did update all the time though is the user interface. It's the most important part of the game and I guess I did put thousands of hours into it. For some of the UI parts like the battle selection screen I have dozens of different designs on my hard drive and on paper, so that's the only real thing I've refactored all the time. But yes, there were several larger chunks of code I actually did refactor for better usage and code-readability, but nothing really big, though some of the things I replaced from "Phase 1" to "Phase 2" were kinda huge and made me replace and change a lot fo code. One example is the totally redone military part of the game.


Will there be an english version?
The game is english and german all the way, even during development. For UI elements you can directly set captions for both languages in my UI editor and for other strings I have a tab in WeltEdit (my data editor for the game) where I can directly make english and german language strings (actually the game supports an unlimited amount of languages, as this part of the game is very flexible) to use them ingame. So short answer : yes ;)

[WILL]

Hey Sascha have you ever considered submitting your game to the IGF? I'm quite sure that it would make an impact. :)

[Sascha Willems]

I thought about submitting it several times. But due to real-life stuff I wouldn't propably be able to keep release dates or milestones, and though the game looks pretty advanced, it's still far from finished. So I dunno about this. But maybe next year, when the game is near its completion I might submit it to the IGF.

[WILL]

...next year, when the game is near its completion I might submit it to the IGF.

I really think you should. There isn't a lot of restrictions on the amount of time you spent on your game prior to submitting it to the IGF and your game is really quite beautiful and of a professional quality. I think it'll turn some heads and will open a lot of doors for you once you do show it off in the event. I may be wrong, but I at the very least hope that I would not be. ;)

[Sascha Willems]

Projekt "W" is featured in the current printed issue of the german c't magazine!

This morning I found my free copy of the current c't magazine in my letterbox..

The c't software magazine is one of Europe's most successful computer magazines (with ~350.000 sold copies for each issue) and I'm happe to announce that my game (though it's "Phase 1", but that's the last public release) is featured on the current printed issue. It's on the software DVD and there is a small article along with a screenshot of the game in issue 24/2010 (http://www.heise.de/ct/inhalt/2010/24/6/). The article itself praises the game's great visuals as well as it's 5-player hotseat mode and goes a bit into detail on the game's different features (number of buildings, managing regions, the 5 differen nations, hiring staff, etc.).

Here are some pictures from the current issue featuring Projekt "W" (click to enlarge):

http://www.saschawillems.de/phase2/ctmag/t_ctmag02.jpg (http://www.saschawillems.de/phase2/ctmag/ctmag02.jpg)


http://www.saschawillems.de/phase2/ctmag/t_ctmag01.jpg (http://www.saschawillems.de/phase2/ctmag/ctmag01.jpg) http://www.saschawillems.de/phase2/ctmag/t_ctmag03.jpg (http://www.saschawillems.de/phase2/ctmag/ctmag03.jpg) http://www.saschawillems.de/phase2/ctmag/t_ctmag04.jpg (http://www.saschawillems.de/phase2/ctmag/ctmag04.jpg)

So now roughly 350.000 people are reading about my game and seeing it's screenshot, so I'm kinda excited right now, with the c't being the second magazine (after PGD) reporting about my game!

And yes, I would've been even more happy if it would tell about "Phase 2", but due to my timeconstraings "Phase 2" is still far off (I hope sometime 2011), but still this is a nice boost for my motivation!

[chronozphere]

This is really cool. :) Did they mention that it was written using pascal?

[Stoney]

Congratz. :)


Did they mention that it was written using pascal?
Unfortunately, it didn't.

[Sascha Willems]

Ah, long time no update on Projekt "W"'s status over here at PGD. Those of you that follow my homepage know that I'm still putting a lot of work into getting "Phase 2" finished, and I lack the time to update my HP and this thread simultaneously (together with my german status postings over at DGL), but I released a new video and thought it would be nice to show it to the PGD crowd.

The video shows some new eyecandy. Something I wanted to implement for a long time now was a proper atmoshphere for the globe, and after some tinkering around I found a very simple solution to make that one look good (it doesn't even use a shader), so the globe now has a nice atmosphere around it's border.

Also new is the water shader. I was never really satisified with the old one from "Phase 1" as it didn't look very realistic and was missing the typical specular highlights to some extend. So I rewrote that one too and I think it looks a lot better now.

And last-but-not least I also changed the day/night transition on the globe. Up until now it was the realistic way moving around the globe. That looked great but wasn't in line with the background's transition from day to night, so now the globe also has a full transition.

So here is the video (keep in mind it's still a WIP). If possible watch the 720p HD version :
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yrCViY-4_Q8&hd=1


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yrCViY-4_Q8&hd=1

[Traveler]

Really very nice. The day/night cycle looks terrific.
How far along are you in development? Any chance of a v1.0 any time soon? :)

[WILL]

Very nice Sascha. Wow!

Almost makes me wonder what a 5-year long PGD Annual competition would look like. ;)

I can't wait to see how the final version of this game will turn out. You really should submit it to the IGF when it's done. You'll blow away... somebody for sure. Piece of art.

[Wizard]

Brilliant work!!

[Sascha Willems]

Thanks for the praise guys.

As far as a release, I can't really tell. I try to work on the game every day, but due to a lot of real-life obligations it's often not possible to do a lot of progress at all for days, so I can't really tell when a release is happening. But different to "Phase 1" (back in those days I had much more time for coding) I plan on releasing at least one beta before releasing a final version. Mainly to get feedback and to find out balancing problems (I'm already having nightmares about correct game balance, the more units, the more techs, the harder it gets).

But the problem is that after "Phase 1" was out I started to work on all changes for "Phase 2" at the same time, and now that I only have so little time I regret it as I only can work on one new aspect of the game ot once and it often takes weeks. If I knew back then that my spare time would become so rare I would have taken a different approach where I'd implement one feature after another. But well, I couldn't forsee the future back then (if I could I would be rich by now I guess ;) ) so I'll have to deal with it. But yes, I'm getting closer and closer to finishing at least the beta and actually all of the features of "Phase 2" are in, but some still need a lot of work and content. And I also will have to put a lot of work into the AI, and doing AI is nothing funny.
Another big problem (or more annoyance) is Turbo Delphi (BDS 2.6). Even with all fixes and DelphiSpeedUp it's totally overwhelmed with a big project like this. It has memory holes so big an elephant could jump through, and I usually have to restart it several times each programming session, cause after a while it hogs 1.4 GBytes of memory, which is it's limit and then crashes with no warning that it ran out of memory and closes itself. The longer I work in one session the slower it gets, and each tabswitch in the IDE (!) produces memory leaks (several KBytes per switch). At some point jumping in the source with CTRL+click will end up at random spots and even reverting via CTRL+Z will stop working. It's sad, but this is something that also slows down progress.

[paul_nicholls]

Looking awesome mate! :)

EDIT: I don't know if you use installed components in TurboDelphi, but I wonder if you could convert the game to Lazarus?

cheers,
Paul

[farcodev]

This phase 2 video really blows me away, awesome work Sascha ! ;)

[Sascha Willems]

EDIT: I don't know if you use installed components in TurboDelphi, but I wonder if you could convert the game to Lazarus?

Yes, I tried (several times. Some time back and recenlty with a current release of Lazarus) and I don't think Lazarus is suited well for such a big project. Though it didn't crash as often as Turbo Delphi but FPCs linker is rather slow compared to the one from Delphi (though that's a minor issue), but the biggest drawback is debugging. Delphi's debugging features are fantastic, and especially when doing complex AI stuff you can't visualize it's great to have such an advanced debugger, and that's the biggest thing I miss when using Lazarus. So for the time being I only use Lazarus for smaller demos and stuff.

[paul_nicholls]

Yes, I tried (several times. Some time back and recenlty with a current release of Lazarus) and I don't think Lazarus is suited well for such a big project. Though it didn't crash as often as Turbo Delphi but FPCs linker is rather slow compared to the one from Delphi (though that's a minor issue), but the biggest drawback is debugging. Delphi's debugging features are fantastic, and especially when doing complex AI stuff you can't visualize it's great to have such an advanced debugger, and that's the biggest thing I miss when using Lazarus. So for the time being I only use Lazarus for smaller demos and stuff.

Yeah, I have noticed that the Lazarus debugger (GDB) doesn't work so well sometimes too...

Also a big annoyance for me is that most of the time ctrl+click on a variable doesn't do anything (or let you in the first place), and typing a variable name then the '.' doesn't seem to bring up the list of properties/methods/fields :(

cheers,
Paul

[paul_nicholls]

Yes, I tried (several times. Some time back and recenlty with a current release of Lazarus) and I don't think Lazarus is suited well for such a big project. Though it didn't crash as often as Turbo Delphi but FPCs linker is rather slow compared to the one from Delphi (though that's a minor issue), but the biggest drawback is debugging. Delphi's debugging features are fantastic, and especially when doing complex AI stuff you can't visualize it's great to have such an advanced debugger, and that's the biggest thing I miss when using Lazarus. So for the time being I only use Lazarus for smaller demos and stuff.

Yeah, I have noticed that the Lazarus debugger (GDB) doesn't work so well sometimes too...

Also a big annoyance for me is that most of the time ctrl+click on a variable doesn't do anything (or let you in the first place), and typing a variable name then the '.' doesn't seem to bring up the list of properties/methods/fields :(

cheers,
Paul

[Sascha Willems]

Just a quick headsup after a longer period of silence to show you guys that "Phase 2" is still alive. I've posted a new video of the current build :


http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=IhfTTDKkPWw&hd=1

As you may noticed I redid the whole user interface again, as the "old" design didn't prove to be as smooth and user-friendly as I wanted it to be, so heavy-harted I threw it away and did a new UI from scratch. But the good thing is that I also redid the UI for the mainmenu, battlefield and endgame, so that the UI now feels and looks like it's made from one piece, giving it a "noble" look throughout the whole game.

Other than that a lot of things happened behind the scenes, especially when it comes to performance. The UI was performing pretty bad and shifted the performance limitateion to the CPU, so that even a new graphics card didn't change the FPS much. So I spent several weeks optimizing it (caching texture IDs and vertex arrays, display lists, optimized hit tests, etc.) which made up at least 200% better performance depending on the scenario.

There is still much to do (especially in terms of content), but it's steadily growing towards at least a beta release. Can't say when due to the fact that real-life is taking a lot of time, and I often prefer to relax from it in front of my PS3 instead of hacking lines of code into Delphi. But it's moving along and looking great, so hopefully I'll have a beta ready for early 2012!

[paul_nicholls]

Very nice indeed! :)