Cut And Thrust And Bleed And Ack-

A melee of Norse versus KievRus versus Saxons at the back

Warbands now look the part, with each individual faction having it's own style and shield markings, because in the middle of a disorganized melee it's not always easy to tell who the hell is who.

So, without further ado, let's have a quick rundown.

 

Avar Warband

The Lombards - could have been the Franks but France features more later on

The Saxons, featuring the cool Sutton Hoo helm

The Norse, not a horned helmet in sight thankfully

KievRus

The Magyars, pre-paprika

The Normans (boo!)

 And so we have our initial warbands, and I am only up to the 11th Century. Whilst shields and helmets tend to be unique to each faction, the lower ranking peasant levies do tend to rather look the same, so I might have to add warband specific patches. Back in the days of the Anglo-Scot Border Reivers warriors would wear the cross or saltaire on cloth pinned to their armour ... usually with the other flag on the back incase they wanted to swap sides mid-battle ...

With all the warbands now equipped - at least except for bows as I haven't out the code needed for archery just yet, but it is coming - I needed to bring home the awesomeness of hitting someone with a poleaxe. For this I hunted around for some of the old death animations which I had got for Airship Dragoon and modified them for the new rigging system which my current models use.

 And so the whole thing comes together with slashing sounds, the ring of parried metal, fountains of blood and the screams of the mortally wounded!

Pumpkin!

And of course it has been All Hallows Eve. Can you believe that there are some folks who carve a pumpkin but don't scoop all the food out? That was 1.5kg of seasonal veg going waste! I bag it up into portions and stick it in the spare freezer ... which turned out to still have last year's pumpkin in it because I'd forgotten all about it. More pumpkin on the menu now!

Next up for Untitled Medieval Warband Game - a land fit for heroes! Time to make an actual level with terrain and points of interest for looting, to give raiding parties something to raid.

Emergency July Blog: Fancy Ribbon FX: The Ribboning

No dev blog this July? Ah there were multiples last month ... but let's sort that out.

Some time ago I'd asked/pleaded/badgered (delete as applicable) Tim from MaxGaming Tech (whose mech combat game is on steam now) on their IRC channel (irc://irc.maxgaming.net/garagegames) for some old code for attaching fancy ribbons to moving objects in a FreeSpace type manner. He duly obliged and after a cursory look at it all and some grumbling about a lack of code comments - I make gameplay, fancy C++ and rendering stuff isn't my area of expertise - I ended up being snowed under with other dev related things.

Originally I'd envisioned using the ribbon effect for a tech demo of another game concept but continued Airship Dragoon dev had put the kibosh on that.

However noting that Lukas of WinterLeaf had created a ribbon emitter based on the stock particle emitter. This was quite cool and a quick compile later I had a Nyan Cat trooper running about. Scrounging other peoples' code snippets is one of the joys of using an Open Source Game Engine! :P


Turned out he wasn't actually supposed to be trippy Nyan Cat colours after all, and the shader was taking the colour from the normals rather than the colour because the addresses in the rendering code were not matching order. I nodded sagely in pretense that I knew what any of this meant while other people asked me to swap code lines around and report the effects. That fixed, it was a pretty simple job to create ribbon types based on ammunition types for all weapons. Swag.



Whilst testing my latest build I annoyingly found that the instanciating file for arid level 2 had corrupted for reasons beyond mortal man's understanding (stares suspiciously at the stars and blames the Reptoids/Cthulhu/Ming) and whilst collision for troops was working it wasn't passing collision for raycasts or projectiles. Simply updating the file and resaving it fixed this annoyance. All this and a few other tweaks and fixes for minor issues will be finding their way into the next update/patch.

Right now I am mostly working on the forthcoming Steam build. My original trailer is now woefully out of date as the characters, animation, audio and various other stuff has changed since release. It's also boiling hot even in my dreary little bit of Yorkshire and my ancient PC coughs and splutters as I run Airship Dragoon full screen with the settings on high to try and get some decent video footage.