3rd Challenge entry - Futuristic rts game

[User137]

Will see what kind of enjoyment level i can achieve with this, or will it again leave a technical and dry experience...

Progress so far, i've implemented some game objects and models (10 different units, 2+1 temporary models). Their ingame properties are configured in ini file. So much configuration options are in ini, that one could almost redesign the whole unit concept without touching source code. So with these working, i have first units on screen, with physics enabled. It is slightly different from the walker demo, basically i am simulating units with different mass. Sector system is also stable, but it's not used everywhere yet. Maybe i'll hold first screenshots till later, there is really not much to see yet

[WILL]

Will see what kind of enjoyment level i can achieve with this, or will it again leave a technical and dry experience...

This is a questions I ask myself a lot with pretty much all of my own projects. And it's a good question to keep asking from time to time. I would suggest to be sure to try your ideas before you outright discount them. You never know how all the elements of your game will fit together as a "whole experience" until it's there and you have a decent session of testing to see where your pros and cons lay. Like soup sometimes all it needs is a little "salt."

[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.