Category Archives: How things work

Fish count display

Posted on August 15, 2019 by Krom

Some time ago I was reworking fishing mechanics. Biggest flaw that had to be fixed – unnatural fish depletion. Now fish slowly regenerates. To make it work, waterbodies had to be made to keep track of their fish reserves. One … Continue reading →

Posted in How things work, Live progress, Screenshots | 2 Comments

Refactoring Neutral hand and alliances

Posted on July 14, 2019 by Krom

Making AI to attack neutral aggressive animals (and their dens) proved to be more complicated than I thought. Why is that? Existing AI attacks work quite simple – AI has a list of attacks it needs to run at certain … Continue reading →

Posted in How things work, Sidenotes | 5 Comments

Food values

Posted on December 12, 2018 by Krom

All Knights Province units need food to eat (well, except machines and animals). Otherwise they die of hunger. So dedicating a large portion of town to a food production is a good thing. But how much food is needed anyway? … Continue reading →

Posted in How things work | 8 Comments

Working on render quality – Part 1 (SSAO)

Posted on July 13, 2018 by Krom

Goals Ever since the beginning of Knights Province project I wanted it to be visually pleasing. Slightly cartoonish style with bright colors, semi-realistic soft lighting and shading. Ambient Occlusion (AO) is one of those shading effects that add depth and … Continue reading →

Posted in How things work, Live progress | 7 Comments

Working on Caster unit navigation

Posted on April 12, 2018 by Krom

Been working on unit navigation for Alpha 10. It is still very hard and complicated, but progress makes me happy. Made some terrain collision outlines generation code tonight:

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Fixing Delphi project compilation time

Posted on August 14, 2017 by Krom

TL;DR: When compilation time goes out of hand – prune “uses” sections. Over the time the game`s EXE compilation time grew longer and longer. Today it clocked at 70sec! Of course codebase has also increased (~350kLoc now), but still it was weird, … Continue reading →

Posted in How things work, Sidenotes | 1 Comment

A dozen of ways to loose a unit

Posted on May 13, 2017 by Krom

I’ve been categorizing and refactoring unit deaths in the game. Made this comment block in the code. Might be interesting for you to see it too: // Killing of a unit is done in 4 big steps // 1. KillUnit … Continue reading →

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Note on Knights Province animations and how they got better last week

Posted on August 25, 2016 by Krom

Knights Province needs a lot of animations. They are essential to making the games’ world feel alive.  Here’s how they work and how they just got better. Animations start with a skeleton rig. Rig is a description of how character skeleton … Continue reading →

Posted in How things work | 6 Comments

Light texture optimizations

Posted on June 1, 2016 by Krom

For today’s improvement I have added textures reuse. All terrain decals are different models. For example road decals are 6 different models (having 0 – 4 connections to neighbors in different configurations). Each decal now has UV texture of the road. … Continue reading →

Posted in How things work, Live progress, Screenshots | 7 Comments

Thoughts on terrain

Posted on May 11, 2016 by Krom

Once again I’m thinking about reworking terrain render. Introduction of terrain textures rendered old terrain render approach useless. Let’s recap how it works. Till now everything gets assembles from tiles. Each tile having from 2 to 20+ polygons to show … Continue reading →

Posted in How things work, Ideas | 3 Comments