Category Archives: How things work

A dozen of ways to loose a unit

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

Posted in How things work, Sidenotes | Leave a comment

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

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 … Continue reading

Posted in How things work | 6 Comments

Light texture optimizations

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 … Continue reading

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

Thoughts on terrain

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

Parallelization

With more content in the game (units, houses, terrain textures) the game loading got noticeably slower. Being able to launch the game and check the changes as quickly as possible is critical for early development. It disrupts the workflow a … Continue reading

Posted in How things work | 2 Comments

Terrain textures

Past two weeks I have been experimenting with terrain textures for Alpha 7. I have a special tool to preview just one terrain tile – it makes experimenting and tweaking much simpler and faster. For example I have taken 4 … Continue reading

Posted in How things work, Live progress | 2 Comments

Changing AA lead to a crash

Alpha 5 has a bug that is responsible for almost half of its crashreports: For reasons, Windows does not allow to change windows pixel format more than once (something about it being more complicated than destroy and recreate the window). … Continue reading

Posted in How things work | 10 Comments

Okay, shadows!

Okay, shadows! Those funny dark patches behind objects that sun seems to create 🙂 Unlike real world, where sun adds lit areas on surfaces (yep, shadows are places where sun did not create illumination), in virtual world it is the … Continue reading

Posted in How things work | 11 Comments

New Caster Navigation looks promising

Reimplementing the algorithm with critical thinking over every procedure seems to be working well. Agents already avoid and push each other out of the way. And the best part – I know why they do so now. A little sneak … Continue reading

Posted in How things work, Sidenotes | 1 Comment

Another video showing off stone deposits placement and mining

Sunday is a great day – here’s another video showing off stone deposits placement and mining: As always – comments and critics are welcome!

Posted in How things work, Video | 9 Comments