Projekt "W"

[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.

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




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.

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.