These weeks summer came to city, the weather is hot and distractions are plenty. Still there is some progress report (pics inside).
Unit animations receiving an overhaul. According to new rendering engine, everything should change from fixed-step to floating-step.
Let’s start a new category of posts, called “Ideas”. Here I will post ideas about the game. Here’s the first one – a new house called “Stash”.
Goal. This is a non-player structure placed on the map which can hold an amount of wares in it. Much like storehouses with coal and iron placed on the map in the older days. The difference is that the “Stash” house will serve only this role and presumably will fit in with the mission story better.
Looks are not defined, but it has to be something man-made, like an outpost or a parked wagon, maybe a tent.
Problems: How to let the player to access the wares? Building a road just to evacuate the wares is silly. Maybe have a special “raider” unit that can “steal” things from such stashes and enemy stores, a wagon/cart?
Feedback is very welcome!
Food plays major role in the game. Let’s try to understand why and what we can do about it:
There are not many news since 07/05, there were long weekend holidays dedicated to WWII victory which I spent in Belarus, seeing locals. Besides, the weather is so nice, that concentrating on programming is really hard now 🙂
Anyway, what’s been done – I’m revising unit animations and rigging. Animations will have more info in them and will be more tightly coupled with the balance, so that for example archers animation description will hold aiming moment and aiming delay. That will allow to fine-tune the balance without need to change the animation. For the moment it’s more of a thinking that coding phase.
Looking at neighbor sketch I took a try at making one of my own. Yep, I can draw a thing or two, although not as easily. It’s time to remember how it’s done after years. Hardest part is choosing the right character in the right pose. For that I browsed through several dozens of references, until the right one was found. A figure in action. Meet the archer – affordable ranged threat of the battlegrounds:
Archer
This exact archer is a good example of his kind. He has no noble roots nor fancy outfit – a true man from the crowd, who took short training courses in archery and was given a bow. His protection is very light – just basic leather coat, so that his movements and aiming are swift and precise.
Good news everyone – we have first real artwork made specially for NG!
Blacksmith is one of my favorite characters in the game, for he has this unique combination of working with cold steel and burning hot fire, creating tools and weapons from chunks of raw metal – a true artist of hammer and a man of highest respect in town.
Few days ago I have asked my friend Basy to make a sketch based on NG, for example depicting the smith. To my surprise she agreed. With a couple of references and some guidance she made this wonderful and heart-touching sketch:
Blacksmith
Smith’s strength becomes obvious when you see his huge hammer, few people can actually lift, but he operates it with ease. He is a hard-working man, with a touch of fiery fire in his beard, noble spirit and a very kind heart.
It’s been 500th commit into NG repository right this moment 🙂
With a help from Jery now we have a precise tile picking algo and a nice debug visualization of it, showing the bounding boxes underneath:
We split terrain into quadtree of bounding boxes. When we need to pick a tile below the cursor, we first check bounding boxes and discard those that don’t intersect with the picking ray (cast from cursor position). That way we effectively discard 95% of tiles and hittest only remaining few inside the hit bounding boxes. On the screenshot that is the smallest purple box around the cyan picked tile.
Experimenting with adding new kinds of towers and projectiles required to make the projectiles to work in the first place. So here is the core of any distant attacks – the arrows, now in 3D:
Colored circles below units are to separate their by types – reds are archers, yellows are footmen. Cyan and blue ones in the distance are serfs and workers.
