Projekt "W"

[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. 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):






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

[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.