3rd Challenge entry - Futuristic rts game

[User137]

Sorry, it's getting along very slowly, i have been spending my time elsewhere afterall... But i decided to pick up some pace today, by finishing the things i kept having motivation problems on. When i start coding i can accomplish alot in big bursts... as long as i have slight clue what i'm doing.

Procedurally generated simplex-map terrain also with calculated light normals. Terrain and game objects all properly follow sector system now. Added simple smooth shadows before first screenshot. Mouse controls are done for scrolling/zooming the view. Doing some planning for UI on text document. I think main elements to come soon are unit construction toolboxes and mini/battle-map. It is easy to lose track on where the base is without it.

[User137]

I found out another cause for low framerate with high object amounts. I separated smoothing groups for flat faces, and this caused at worst like 800 calls to vertex array rendering per object, if each face was 1 group. I added new procedure to nxPascal model class to combine groups with same material, to 1 group. This gave a significant speed boost, and the process itself is unnoticable. While taking this screenshot with 500+500 objects, game was at full 60 fps, and 0% cpu use (some new things to be spotted there too ):


The AI behavior and its controls for player are already planned out till the end, but i hope i can implement them...

[Sascha Willems]

Looks mighty interesting. Do you think you get it done in time? Even if not try to at least make a public prototyp of it, so we can take a look at it

[WILL]

Wow, that's quite the amount of little guys on the screen.

[User137]

Now it's starting to look like a base a bit.
screenshot3.jpg

1 important part was finally making that mouse-pointing on heightmap terrain, so that i could place structures (to-be-construction yards) where i point and click. The way i did it was not how i planned to do it though, somehow found an easier way. If i start by getting mouseray - plane-intersection from zero-grid, then moving the intersection.Y to heightmap level, i can repeat the same plane-intersection 3 more times. Each time using plane that is on the height-level of last intersection point. With 4 of these checks it ends up "close enough"/"exactly" to where cursor is on terrain. It might not work if there are hills so high that you can't see land behind it, but i'm not having that kind of camera angles.

Will see how i end up making the construction itself... Showing more polygons as the progress goes? I guess it might work if i sort them in height axis. But then i also need an indicator of a construction site, possibly faded version of the model.

Also made unit construction queue, it's just not showing on screen yet. I'll add tiny numbers on the left icons to indicate how many are being produced, quickest progress and items queued afterwards. Functions are there to retreive all this data.

Seems to be roughly 1300 code lines in overall project so far... It doesn't yet feel like i'd get crushed under in the complexity, and i've been trying to make it very modular and readable. Planning all that ahead is a bit taxing too, maybe.

[WILL]

Well holy cow! Talk about taking it up a notch.

How come your other RTS game never looked this good?

[User137]

How come your other RTS game never looked this good?

Yes they did, almost the same 4 years ago (No need to embed, not related to contest)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kzDrqhHbwKw

I have uploaded first "bad" version to FTP, just to have something out there before time runs out... I realize i still have more than 24 hours remaining though. The project is moderately unfinished yet, but i have started works on the AI finally. Building production, queue displays, resource consumption things are done. Factories also assign themselves production from the queue and build the unit out from them. All construction shows a nice fade-model and uses new polygon-progress rendering. New textures are also added for the final needed steps; energizing and combat. ReadMe-file in the entry file also explains some of the basic info about game, how things should work and how you would play a finished game.

I guess musics are a must have or it won't feel like a game at all, even though there's not much to play yet Going to add that right away.

edit: And 1 thing i most likely have to abandon is UI for the AI config. Ain't nobody got time for that... But not to worry, default values for the AI config can make up for quite nice game.