Virtualizing The Virtual

Virtualizing The Virtual!? Is that a double negative? And if it is, does that mean that the virtual is now physical? If so, I for one welcome our new Steampunk Turn Based Tactical Artificial Intelligence Overlords ...

So, there I was, playing away, testing my game. It was night, poor visibility ... also probably in real life too ...
I was defending a flag from pirate assault ... back in the game now, not in real life ... when I realized that sometimes it takes a while for the Ai to get into the attack, especially when visible distance on the battlefield is very low. I had got my troops into my chosen defensive positions early on, and now kept clicking for the Ai to take it's turn and advance against my forces. And it was taking a while ...

Which is when I hit upon the idea of virtualizing the Ai's move. First check that they can't be seen, then make simulate how far along their path their current tactic can take them distance-wise, make sure that they'er not going to be spotted by the player's forces, and dump them at the end of their phase, decreasing their Action Points as if their turn had been taken normally. For the player, no more interminable waiting whilst the Ai to complete something that they can't see. 3+ minutes for the Ai turn could become 45 seconds.

And if the Ai could be spotted during their virtual movement, then play their turn as normal, have the player's trooper spot them, and let all hell break loose as normal.

Needless to say ... it turned out to be considerably more of a pain in the backside to get it to work correctly. First up my test function - 5 whole lines - worked lovely ... then when I rolled it into the full Ai thinking process - 10000 lines - I had to invert the values.

Then they kept falling through the terrain and other objects - make a check for that - then they all try and jump on each other - check for that - then they fall off the end of their path somehow - check for that - then they have the falling through terrain issue again - recheck post virtualized move for that. But finally it all works. The key of course was to slap the camera on the Ai so I could see what was happening when it all went wrong.

And so here's a little video of something that will never be shown in general gameplay - the Ai moving in dev mode.





Also I finally finished off the last of my character art - so here's a video of all of the different factions in various conditions.

Character types:
Unarmoured - with hat
Light Armour - helmet
Stealth Armour - helmet and camouflage
Heavy Armour - tin man with Regime flag facings (not all flags finished at time of video)

In order:
Regime/Faction - Environment - Weather

British Royalists - Temperate - Clear
Austro-Hungarian Empire - Jungle - Stormy
Chinese Dynasty - Mountainous - Clear
US Republic - Arid - Cloudy
People's Collective - Urban - Clear
Zulu Nation - Mountainous - Stormy

Followed by repeats of the various regimes in various environments with various weathers.

You might want to up the quality level - no idea why it's defaulted to 360p when it's in 720HD ...




I finally also finished the flags for all of the regimes - though admittedly after that video had been taken. I didn't want the flags to be particularly historical, as that kind of takes the fun out of it being Steampunk.

This is what the Single Battle Mode options screen looks like now:

From the left:
That's a stylized Imperial Engle on the Austro-Hungarian Empire

Union jack ensign and crown for the British Royalists

Traditional Chinese (Cantonese) word for Dragon for Chinese Dynasty - I came up with this after many failed attempts to make a stylized dragon design that I liked ... then thought that using the script for the word might be nice. Colours taken from the Qing Dynasty of the Steampunk peroid. They did have a dragon picture on their flag but I didn't like it.

Soviet Constructivist Colour Scheme for the People's Collective. Always knew that degree in art history would come in useful eventually ...

Slight change on the 1877 version of the Stars and Stripes by making the twin circles of stars into solid hoops for the US Replubic faction.

And finally, because of alphebetical order the Zulu Nation.

I sorted some really annoying issue with the Ai not always updating their aim aniation - probably self inflicted due to the manner in which I've changed spawning and mounting - and also made a rather spiffing icon for my game.

This being a MUCH larger version of said icon ... obviously.

I Break Everything And Then Fix It! Oh The Exciting Life Of Indie Deving!

I had a liver detox diet, lost the strange bicycle tire which had appeared around my torso, eat more fruit than anyone had ever eaten before, took up skipping - which is knackerising - bought a few crates of ale and a bottle of baffling expensive rum under the guide of death metal celloist (it was a very pretty bottle),

sat about in the garden because it had finally stopped raining in the Shire of York after the wettest Spring since 1907. And even found time to break everything that I'd done dev-wise whilst trying to fix it.

So I ended up changing my art style again ... immediately after I'd decided on what it was going to be ...

So it is now more "painterly" and less "abstract".

I'd done a bit of refractoring my working level, shrinking the size of the hedges a little and opening more gaps between them. I'd also noticed that I'd been getting a fair few failures on pathfinding with the Recast resource. My terrain is very bumpy and I'd set >1500 custom class CoverNodes about and done pathfinding between them with an automated script to test around 7 million paths. Initially I'd a rather worrying 2.5 million failures, and after a bit of saving throws in my pathfinding scripts, I'd got that down to <200k, and then thrown in a simple "move to nearest node where you can actually get a path" incase that 3.7% failure rate occured in game.

I'd improved my Ai, getting them to make decisions about when they should try and hide from the player. Previously they'd either stopped at distance if they were "support" or advanced if they were "assault". I've always been a fan of turn based strategy/tactics games ... which is why I'm making one obviously ... but sometimes their Ai has been a bit ... daft. Steel Panthers I'm looking at you. I added in a whole load of new thinking to make the computer act more in the way a player would, but still using it's randomized battle plan.

Suddenly my Ai were filled with awesome and powered by buttkicking, so it was time to remove all the little helpers I'd given them previously to make them more competitive, like maxing out their stats, they now get the same chances for decent stats as the player.

Which all goes to make battles more competitive, varied and fair.

Somewhere amongst all of this I'd noticed a few bugs so I'd fixed them, and thus managed to break "many things", again mostly pertaining to the Ai. After a fair bit more hitting IDE with a mallet I got things working again as they should do.

I'd also made a start on creating some player characters - or at least a "base character". I'd looked at some of the meshes that I'd got from Evolver for use in Blender some time ago, and studied one of these as a base for rigging and animating a custom character. I'm doing a SteamPunk vibe, so everyone "struts imperiously". I'm still using Ye Olde Blender 1.44 with DTS exporter 0.964, though I export with collada for the foliage/trees/bushes so I can use vertex painting.

I'd also made a whole load of improvements to my GUIs, such as adding a new button for reserving a shot at half maximum range if you don't want your little chap to be wasting shots on things miles away that he's unlikely to hit. In "loadout" I'd also added the ability to equip one chap and then have his equipment cloned to all unequipped troops - money and individual strength/encumberance permitting - which is incredibly useful when you have a bag of Conscript Militia who can only use basic equipment until they get promoted ... should any of them survive the battle.

Still to do is a bit more Ai thinking tweaking, a bit more environment tweaking, creating some finalized models for troops and weapons, testing the assault and defend gametypes, doing the art for GUIs, and errr ... general stuff. My bug fixing list gets smaller, my todo list doesn't seem to. Oh the exciting life of Indie Deving!

tl;dr good things happened, bad things got fixed, I'm eating a lot of fruit.

Stylized Art Style is ... er ... Stylized, Plus Other Stuff

So after much "umming" and "ahhing" and even a bit of "harrmuphing", I settled on an art style I settled on an art style and booted up Ye Olde Blender and Le Gimp deux point six.




Harrumph.

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away ... well, a long time ago anyhow, in a previous project, I'd long since dispensed with the idea of using "all the pixels". To be honest, I'd never entertained the concept of using "all the pixels" and had always favoured the stylized approach eschewing grey and brown.

But stylized is kind of a broad brush ... initially I'd attempted much more cartoonish, slapping a cartoon outline shader on it, but visually, it ended up looking really busy. Eventually I ended up drawing things out hand roughly, and then applying various filters in gimp until I got something stylized and simplified which I liked. Same process for the modeling in Blender, keeping things fairly simple, and then slapping stylized, manipulated textures on them, and doing some final tonal tweaking using the "diffuseColor" in material in T3D's material editor.




Behold! Stylized terrain! Behold! Colour! ... spelt with a "u"!

Now I also have a randomized weather system which I have whined on about before. Each weather type changes the viewable/spotable distance of targets on the battlefield. If you can't see it, you can't attack it (regardless of whether you've got a weapon with the neccessary range). So we have the same scene in the pic below in all 4 weather types.

Clear - 300m spotting
Cloudy - 200m spotting
Stormy - 100m spotting
Night - 50m spotting






Apart from the ground cover (grass) which was part of an art pack and may or may not be replaced eventually and the rain texture which will be replaced soon, everything else is custom, minus the player model obviously ... but that will be on the list to sort out pretty soonish, as I'm in the process of defining an alpha/beta demo. And then ... ????, because I am working on the classic plan of:

1. Make Computer Game
2. ????
3. Profit!

It's the middle bit which is going to take some thinking about ... and of course I'm still working on 1 in the meantime. And it is 1 which has been expanded, with two new battle modes for the squad tactics battle part of the game. Technically it's one battle mode with two sides, as it's attack and defend a HQ, symbolized as the regime's flag. In the main campaign mode (big thing, lot's of dirigibles and hexes) attacking a territory (or your territory being attacked) will result in either a clearance mission or an assault/defend mission, depending on whether or not the territory is under garrison protection.

In assault/defend gametype, the attacker attempts to storm the enemy HQ by moving into contact with the defender's flag within 30 turns (more than enough to accomplish the task or be routed trying). I've got the Ai to use booby traps if they are on the defensive (can be spotted by recce and sapper classes and defused/captureed by sappers and prematurely detonated by any other explosion) and have some available, and created tactics for their defence when protecting their HQ flag.




Amusingly, whilst doing all 6 factions flags (plus pirates), I had to check which way up a British flag goes ... apparently the wrong way is an international distress symbol - but you'd need keen eyes to spot that ...

I'd also decided to tidy up the last few loose ends of my Ai scripts, mainly to do with choosing what weapon is best under certain circumstances and how best to rearm from deceased troopers, ... and promptly found some of them to be a right old mess when reading back through them. So the old flow-chart was dusted off again for a major refit of Ai decision making. Still pending.

I've also changed the pathfinding solution that I was using and have now integrated recast - which I had previously used in a few resources enabling Ai in deathmatch in Torque3D's stock Chinatown showoff map. Read the instructions carefully for integrating recast if you've got Torque and fancy ago.

No video of it all in action yet.

So, still to do ... things ... many things ... create initial custom player types with all the animations, sort out the artwork for the GUIs, bang up a playable demo, wonder about aplha/beta funding and whether to do it ... or indeed how to do it.

Harrumph, harrumph, harrumph ...