Projekt "W" - Phase 1 - Released

[Sascha Willems]

Finally after a year of hard work I have finished Phase 1 of Projekt "W". Phase 1 is the first relase and is not a demo but a full game with no restrictions or limitations, with "Phase 2" (added features and more) to follow next year.

Up to now this has been my most complex and ambitious project and I'm happy at what I accomplished so far and I hope you enjoy playing this one too. In case you didn't read my other posting about Projekt "W" : It's a turn-based strategy game and your goal is to lead one of the fictive five nations ot global world-domination.
It has been written using Borland's Delphi (started with Delphi 7, moved to Turbo Delphi last year), uses OpenGL for graphics and renders complex backgrounds together with a detailled globe and reflecting water using OpenGL-shaders. It also uses FMOD for sound and music-output.

Get the download, much more information and a lot of new screenshots over at the game's official page (http://www.saschawillems.de/?page_id=114).

Note that I did this on my own and since this is a complex game and I don't own a full QA-department there will be bugs and balancing may need some adjustments. So if you find any problems or bugs just post them here and I'll collect the feedback for the first patch.

[savage]

This is great news!

[farcodev_]

Cool game and clean interface, in two words, good work :D

[Huehnerschaender]

Congratulations for the release!

I already downloaded and took a quick look at it. Looks very polished with nice graphics. Unfortunately I am a little stressed with some project lately so I don't have time to play games at the moment. But I will catch up on this.

Keep up the awesome work!

[Luuk van Venrooij]

Just took a quick peak here at work and I must say it looks awsome:). Can`t wait to check it out at home with a proper machine.

Congratz :P

[Sascha Willems]

Note that I just had to reupload and updated version. It seemed that I forgot to include the music files for winning and loosing the game so if you had music enabled while winning or loosing it would crash. If you encounter this, please redownload it or disable the music.
This fixed version (1.01) also fixes a crash with resolutions of aspect ratio 5:4.

[tanffn]

Congratulations! I’ve been waiting to play your game for a while now.

[wodzu]

Big congrats! I'll look on it immediately after coming back from work. Have you thought about selling your game?

Of course now when it is for free it might complicate some things ;) but what about Phase 2?

[Sascha Willems]

I'm still undecided about selling the game as I first want to see reactions for Phase 1. So when Phase 2 is finished I may sell it as shareware, though I'm not sure about is.

And please note that a patch is underway. The guys over at the german Delpi OpenGL community literally buried me under feedback and it seems that there are some problems and bugs with this release. So I started working on a patch that I may release this weekend (or early next week) that fixes most of the problems.

[Robert Kosek]

Hey Sascha, I've been playing for a bit now, and I notice the AI building lots (at least the Asian bunch) of loyalty boosters and three polluting buildings. In this case 2 mega factories and a factory. Also I notice population seems to have too much pollution associated with a 1.0 rating; at 0.7 it takes 4 air filtration plants to break even on pollution. I was playing as the oceanic front if it makes any difference. Spies are a little too easy to catch when sabotaging power though -- one spy was almost the absolute best you could get and was caught the first time with no present brigade.

Good work so far. :D

[Sascha Willems]

Yeah, those are mostly balancing issues that I still need to tweak. Especially the thing with the quick pollution increase on regions with high population is something I'll change in the future and I'll also lower the risk of spies getting captured doing their actions, it seems a bit to high now now.
And as for the building-order of the AI : It depends on the personality of the AI. If you start a game random personalities are assigned to the nations and the AI also tries to counteract effects like high pollution and stuff. But the AI is far from perfect but it's actually the first complex "AI" I ever wrote and I hope to improve it in the future.

[WILL]

Hey Sascha, great job!

Very beautiful game and interface. For the majority great UI.

There was a small bug/glitch, I encountered though. I also have a few suggestions too, just to aid to game playability a bit. I'll just list the ones that I found on my first test of Phase 1.

Glitch:

:arrow: Other windows losing for no reason; For some reason when I had the construction window open and I also had the building selection window open, I would select whatever building I wanted, but then as I hit the 'construct' button the construction window (the one showing the empty locations to build stuff) would close without any known reason. I suspect it might have had to do with something underneath the button I clicked that caused the UI some confusion as I tried moving the buildings list window around and it seemed to not happen then.

Playability Suggestions:

:arrow: Tutorials; A quick tutorial session, mode or toggle would go a long way. Just some popups that would offer some general advice on how one can archive world domination via building structures, military units, researching technologies, etc... Keeping it structured and in order from basic stuff to the more complex stuff later. I found picking up the game and just starting it as a bit of a 'blind sandbox'. It was neat and all, but I was somewhat clueless. Even though I have played Civ, MoM, Ascendancy and many others like them before.

:arrow: GUI translation; Now before I mention this one I what to say that considering that this entire game was originally written in German, it'sbeen translated quite well to English. However there is a few menus and some wording that either didn't quite convert over 100% or somethings were 'lost in translation'. Which is fine if you want to maintain that 'German flavor' but you might be putting off those potential players that are more English-fluent. I wasn't playing long enough to get a full list of places, but it would be something to look into a bit. It's really not that bad though, just can use a tiny bit of tweaking.

I have no idea...:

:arrow: Shaders; When I started up your game using the shader option it ran dreadfully slow. :? When I started it up without the shader option it ran much better. One might assume that I don't have the proper shader support to play this game at full quality. However I am quite able to play AoE3 with shaders and with a fair amount of other detail involved. Could this perhaps be the need to optimize your shader routines or is this just one of those games that requires the grand almighty Shader 2.0 standard found on most new cards today? I have Shader 1.1 tech on my card and assumed that it would offer me at least some support with the game.



Anyhow thats really all that I noticed as issues go. Great work so far, keep it up! :) This would make a great shareware game! Offer up a limited version and a full version. ;)

[Robert Kosek]

One suggestion for Spies, Sascha, is to make counter intelligence important. This way spies are likely to succeed without counter intelligence in place, and perhaps regiments can serve as an anti-spy garrison. So a spy could be a passive or active defense, giving low ranking spies more importance for garrisoning your location.

Pollution from population is insane! I had 1 cryo housing building, 1 cloning lab, 2 anti-matter power plants, and 5 teleporter systems to reduce pollution. (IIRC I had the power perfectly balanced but I don't remember the figures now.) And pollution raised at almost a 0.1 rate per turn after all those pollution reducers with ~1.4 population. :shock: Edit: 1.1 population creates more pollution than 6 teleportation systems can reduce (24 pollution units!!!)...

Right now the most efficient monetary system I have found is a combination of either: 3 Nuclear Reactors
2 Cold Fusion Reactors + 1 Wind Plant
2 Anti-Matter Plants + 1 BunkerWith: 6 Hydroponic Farms
6 Genetic FarmsWith genetic farms this garners 3.5 resources a turn, plus has no pollution or loyalty problems. You can just as easily build a civilian forum at the location as you can a bunker.

Also, scientist staffs deplete too quickly! Goodness, I've only got 2 low ranking scientists with 1 higher man doing my research. To compensate I've got 2 territories with 2 Anti-Matter plants and 6 AI Auk-things to keep ahead of my opponents.

[WILL]

Oh... one other thing I noticed. When you set spies to 'espionage' buildings and divisions, why would the intelligence gathered previously be lost or unknown the next time to try it? it's unlikely that that information would be lost would it? I think this should be changed so that gathered intel is added to existing information rather than completely changed. It'll make more sense that way.

[Sascha Willems]

Shaders; When I started up your game using the shader option it ran dreadfully slow. :? When I started it up without the shader option it ran much better. One might assume that I don't have the proper shader support to play this game at full quality. However I am quite able to play AoE3 with shaders and with a fair amount of other detail involved. Could this perhaps be the need to optimize your shader routines or is this just one of those games that requires the grand almighty Shader 2.0 standard found on most new cards today? I have Shader 1.1 tech on my card and assumed that it would offer me at least some support with the game.
OpenGL shaders have been a bad thing from the start, at least the HLSL glSlang. Not due to the design, but cause of the hardware vendors and especially ATI with their crap OpenGL drivers. And another bad thing about them is that glSlang is actually OpenGL 3.0 (for all the features) so if your card supports only shader model 2.0 stuff like early-out (e.g. if-else) won't work (and is emulated by just overwriting results) and the card needs to unroll loops. So on most cards that support 2.0 OpenGL HLSL-shaders will either not run like supposed or very slow. So you can't compare with Direct3D-games as MS did a better job with the shader stuff there than then OpenGL ARB did. So this is sadly out of my hand.


Tutorials; A quick tutorial session, mode or toggle would go a long way. Just some popups that would offer some general advice on how one can archive world domination via building structures, military units, researching technologies, etc... Keeping it structured and in order from basic stuff to the more complex stuff later. I found picking up the game and just starting it as a bit of a 'blind sandbox'. It was neat and all, but I was somewhat clueless. Even though I have played Civ, MoM, Ascendancy and many others like them before.
A lot of people are requesting this, including tool-tips on all the stuff in-game. But I'm actually against it. It's a lot of work to implement. And since there is a very detailled manual I don't think that I'll implement a tutorial or extensive tooltips. Although I may put a small introductionary mission with Phase 2 that at least shows the basics of the gameplay.


GUI translation; Now before I mention this one I what to say that considering that this entire game was originally written in German, it'sbeen translated quite well to English. However there is a few menus and some wording that either didn't quite convert over 100% or somethings were 'lost in translation'. Which is fine if you want to maintain that 'German flavor' but you might be putting off those potential players that are more English-fluent. I wasn't playing long enough to get a full list of places, but it would be something to look into a bit. It's really not that bad though, just can use a tiny bit of tweaking.
Yeah, translations are not the best. But translating all the stuff is the second-most boring part of developing a game so I didn't put my full attention to this. At one point though I'm gonna redo a lot of the translations.


One suggestion for Spies, Sascha, is to make counter intelligence important. This way spies are likely to succeed without counter intelligence in place, and perhaps regiments can serve as an anti-spy garrison. So a spy could be a passive or active defense, giving low ranking spies more importance for garrisoning your location.

Pollution from population is insane! I had 1 cryo housing building, 1 cloning lab, 2 anti-matter power plants, and 5 teleporter systems to reduce pollution. (IIRC I had the power perfectly balanced but I don't remember the figures now.) And pollution raised at almost a 0.1 rate per turn after all those pollution reducers with ~1.4 population. :shock: Edit: 1.1 population creates more pollution than 6 teleportation systems can reduce (24 pollution units!!!)...

Right now the most efficient monetary system I have found is a combination of either: 3 Nuclear Reactors
2 Cold Fusion Reactors + 1 Wind Plant
2 Anti-Matter Plants + 1 BunkerWith: 6 Hydroponic Farms
6 Genetic FarmsWith genetic farms this garners 3.5 resources a turn, plus has no pollution or loyalty problems. You can just as easily build a civilian forum at the location as you can a bunker.

Also, scientist staffs deplete too quickly! Goodness, I've only got 2 low ranking scientists with 1 higher man doing my research. To compensate I've got 2 territories with 2 Anti-Matter plants and 6 AI Auk-things to keep ahead of my opponents.
Those are mostly balancing issues, and from all the feedback (including yours) it seems that balancing needs some adjusments. For now I won't comment too much on balancing issues but I'll collect feedback instead and see what I change to make this better. So thanks for those hints!

And for counter-intelligence : Phase 2 will include counter-intelligence buildings that'll make it harder for your enemies to do espionage and sabotage on your regions. This feature just didn't made it in time to be included with Phase 1!

Oh, and I'm glad you seem to like the game so far and a lot of thanks for the feedback.

P.S. : I'm working on patch 1.1 that I want to release this weekend. It fixes a lot of bugs with the army management and already changes some minor balancing issues like lowering pollution increase from high population.

[Mirage]

The game looks very good.
It crashed when I launched it and kept crashing until I changed my regional settings to US English. Sascha, did you test the game when decimal separator is "," instead of "."? I think the problem is here.
A tutorial would be very useful for a freeware game and absolutely necessary for a shareware one. Have no idea how to play it. :)
GUI screens/menus are fading too slow IMHO.
Anyhow, good work!

[Sascha Willems]

There should be no problems with the decimal separator. I'm running a german OS and the decimal separator over here is also a ',' and I'm also taking care of different decimal separators in the code itself so it shouldn't matter what language your OS is set to. So that's very odd, but I'll see if I can do anything about this.

[technomage]

I just got to try this, nice work. :D

[Sascha Willems]

Patch 1.1 is released!
As already noted there were some bugs and problems with the initial release that did no good to the overal gaming experience. So short after the initial release I started work on this patch and here it is. If you arleady have version 1.01 (hotfixed one) installed just download the patch, otherwise get the full installer package.

See the changelog for 1.1 (http://www.saschawillems.de/downloads/pjw_patch11_changelog.txt)
Patch from 1.01 to 1.1 (Win32 installer, ~3.5 MBytes) (http://www.saschawillems.de/download/35)
Projekt "W" - Phase 1 - Version 1.1 complete package (Win32 installer, ~30 MBytes) (http://www.saschawillems.de/download/34)

[Sascha Willems]

Note that I recenlty had to release another patch (1.11) cause the game could crash when attacking a region with an empty division (the AI often assignes empty divisions in advance, so if you play alone this was a severe bug).

If you have 1.1 installed, you just need to replace the .exe of the game :
Installer Exe-Patch to 1.11 (~500 KBytes, ZIP) (http://www.saschawillems.de/download/36)

If your version is older or you haven't installed the game I also have updated the complete installer package :
Win32 Installer for Projekt “W” - Phase 1 - Version 1.11 (~33 MBytes) (http://www.saschawillems.de/download/34)

Note that I'm working on an additional patch, but that patch will mainly adress balancing issues and make the user interface easier/faster to use, so version 1.11 is almost bug-free and enjoyable.

P.S. : Just saw that it broke the 200 downloads :) After the next patch I'm gonna submit it to several freeware sites and see how feedback turns out.

[Sascha Willems]

Patch 1.2 is done!
This patch brings a lot of changes and additions. Most notable one is the addition of an extensive in-game tutorial, that'll teach you all of the game's basics. So if you had problems getting into the game this tutorial should help you get started.
While going through my code I also noticed that there were some bugs and problems reltated to the AI and army management, and after some almost sleepless nights I (hopefully) got ahold of all those bugs. The positive side of this is that the AI should now work as supposed and that it should now be more of a challenge.
For the rest of the fixes, changes and such please take a look at the changelog.

See the changelog for 1.2 (http://www.saschawillems.de/downloads/pjw_patch12_changelog.txt)
Patch from 1.11 to 1.2 (Win32 installer, ~4 MBytes) (http://www.saschawillems.de/download/37)
Projekt "W" - Phase 1 - Version 1.2 complete package (Win32 installer, ~34 MBytes) (http://www.saschawillems.de/download/34)

[WILL]

Hey Sascha, any improvements to this game lately? :)