Knights Province devblog

GUI improvements for upcoming Alpha 7

Posted on August 16, 2016 by Krom

Added soft shadows around game panels. Also made panels to come to front and overlap other panels when clicked:

Posted in Live progress, Sidenotes | 6 Comments

Getting back to the game

Posted on August 14, 2016 by Krom

This weekend was devoted to getting back to the game

What has been done towards Alpha 7:

Allowed to select enemy and neutral houses and units and see their generic info
Added entrance element to house plans fences
Added neutral player in MapEd, animals could be placed only for that player now
Had to revert terrain smoothing, it worked wrong on fences. Proper solution is planned
Fixed 1 second minimap update delay on mission start
Worked on moving all data files into a package
Minor updates for some maps
Fixing GUI errors and crashes in MapEd
Fixing houses/units names (changing pigs to cows, skins to cowhides, etc.)
Improving statistics menu layout
Optimized flags rendering
Added flags to almost all houses and house placeholders
Tinted bottom edge of fake houses for better lighting feel
Tweaked warriors HP display
Fixed idle warriors animation loop and also made all warriors to idle not in sync

All in all that resulted in 73 commits, and now the game is at r4093.

Posted in Live progress | 3 Comments

I’m going through some busy times which put Knights Province development on a lower priority for now. Haven’t touched the game in 5 weeks and looks like won’t be touching for another few. On one side it’s a bad thing, because I’m loosing momentum and development schedule slips (Alpha 7 gets delayed). On the other hand there’s a good side – I will have a fresh look on the game when I get back to it.

Stay tuned for updates!

Posted in Sidenotes | 5 Comments

4000 commits, yay!

Posted on June 21, 2016 by Krom

Did 4000th commit into Knights Province repository yesterday – another milestone! 🙂

Took me some 2,5 years.

Posted in Sidenotes | 9 Comments

Reworking fighting mechanics

Posted on June 18, 2016 by Krom

This week I was working on new fighting mechanics for Knights Province. I want fights to be a little less random. Hence units will have a lot of hitpoints and proper damage range.

Should these numbers show to a player? We’ll see about that later )

Posted in Ideas, Live progress, Screenshots | 21 Comments

Wallside texture

Posted on June 5, 2016 by Krom

This weekend I spent at one of my favorite activities, which I turn to very rarely – painting textures. Here is wall side texture – at ~70% done.

I’m painting in Photoshop at x4 scale and then resize the image to actual size. Second window is helping me see overall image lighting and details (how they will look in actual size).

This is how texture looks mapped onto a wallside decal model:
And this is in-game shot:

You can notice how grass texture pixels appear here and there on the wall. This is deliberate, to make the wall to blend in with the surroundings. On dirt or wand there will be dirt or sand pixels respectively. I’m still uncertain about stretched pixels on wall teeth – terrain textures are mapped planar. Will see about that later (maybe I could simply disallow terrain textures on decals if the stretching is more than e.g. 300%).

Posted in Live progress, Screenshots | 5 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. Which lead to one common texture being loaded 6 different times.

Now with textures reuse – all road decals reference one single texture.

P.S. I’m not quite happy with the road texture, it is likely to be changed before Alpha 7.

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