The Boys ... And Johnny Foreigner

We've had the Brits and now we've been modeling all the other factions. All 7 of them, with unarmoured and light armoured troops, with 4 LODs each, with 4 camouflage schemes for Stealth Armour. That's a lot of LODing ...

 Originally I had envisioned the idea of having seperate models for each class within each faction. There are 7 classes and 7 factions. My 7 times table is about the only one I could ever remember as a child ... probably because I liked the number 49 for reasons of no known certainty. 49 would have been a lot of character models ... even more with light, stealth and heavy armoured types for each one ...

Thankfully I scrubbed that idea as utterly impractical before I started, and stuck to the concept of each faction having 1 unarmoured model, 1 model with a helmet for light armour and stealth armour (with a camouflage texture depending on the tactical battle environment), and a global heavy armoured model with different texture for each faction, carrying the factions flag on it's back.

This all still requires 15 character models, 4 LODs each - so a total of 60 meshes - and 49 diffuse textures plus specular and normal mapping. All of which has been a bit of a slog ...

We've had the British Royalists for a while ... even though I scrapped the models and restarted from scratch for the third time to get mesh deformation. Being British, Royalist and Steampunk meant that they had to be The Redcoats. The Brits are actually the only team not wearing Steampunk eyewear - their goggles are hanging around their necks. Light armour is defined by the African Zulu campaign pith helmet.

And here we have the standard dresscap model on the far left, light armoured model kneeling centred, and stealth armoured model on the right in green camouflage. This texture swapping makes use of the built-in "base" skin definition and swaps it on spawn for the appropriate environmental material  - green (for both temperate and jungle), arctic, arid and urban.

The Austro-Hungarian Empire was as close as I wanted to get to zi Germans without actually having zi Germans. I wanted a European faction, and the Austro-Hungary seemed the perfect choice, a regime which spans multiple countries - Austria, Bosnia, Croatia, Czechs, Hungary, Italy, Montenegro, Poland (who cannot into space ...), Romania, Serbia, Slovakia,  Slovenia, Ukraine and of course including parts of zi Germans. As all troops are randomly named with national/ethnic forenames and cities/counties/states as surnames this also gave a wide selection for variaition.

Light armour centre, unarmoured forage caps flanking the sides, wandering through a rainforest, Steampunk monacles aplenty. I did have a bit of a um-and-ah about the uniform, wanting light blue and not entirely certain about the trousers which are those "flying pants" with the winged thighs that stick out.

I turned to the interwebz for inspiriation using You-Know-Who's-Image-Search and the phrase "austro hungarian empire 19th century uniforms", with safe search on.

Now we've had unexpected things thrown up before when a search for ideas on User Interface Buttons - "steampunk buttons" brought the wrong type of button ... and the ladies who were wearing them.

These are not the Steampunk buttons I was looking for ...

And it happened again ... well ... actually it didn't, it did give my the 19th century uniforms ... just in an unexpected genre ...

This was not the context I was looking for.

Anyhow, in the end I decided on a fairly realistic colour scheme of the Austro-Hungarian cavalry - the red jodpurs/flying pants being a nice foil to the predominant light blue, and a flattened forage cap.

The Chinese Dynasty. Dee-nasty or Die-nasty? There used to be a terrbile American TV show in the 1980s called Dynasty which was clearly trying to copy and cash-in on the success of Larry Hagman and co in Dallas. Over in the UK we tended to refer to it as Dysentery :P ...

China meant being able to break away from the usual style of uniform and colour schemes and throw in yellow - technically it's light amber, to go with my repeating amber and black colour scheme that can be seen in numerous places through out the game (especially on the boobytrap warning fences).

I ummed-and-ahhed again for some time about the overall colour, and decided on a green leather vest as a not to the jade emperor. The above picture is a good illustration of how I work - slapping the models into the engine and then changing the textures on the fly to see what looks best.

Unarmoured Chinese Dynasty troops to the left and light armoured walking to the right. You can just make out stealth camouflage armour in the background. They have these small spectacles perched on their nose which are half fashionable, half granny glasses.

The People's Collective is a sort of revolutionary soviet style idea for a faction.  Not so much Reds Under The Beds more Reds In A Dirigible ... and not really red either, the British Redcoats had already commandeered red as their dominant uniform.

I ended up basing the unform on a 1930s Security Apparatus Officer. "Security Apparatus" - I think the modern translation is Murderous Jobsworth Despot. The helmet is from the same peroid, looking remarkably similar to Great War French helmets, but in shiny brass and with goggles to steampunk it all up. Everyone has a little Lenin style beard and the names are all Soviet.

The Ungrateful Ruddy Colonials didn't quite make it in as a faction name but the US Republic did. I had wanted the USA to be "damn Yankee" dark blue but was hestitant on using yellow again for trim. In the end it ended up as two tone blue, dark coat dominant to light pants with a Rough Riders style slouch hat. The helmet is a shiny brass hybrid of US doughboy hat and early prototype brodie helmet.

The US has more modern, nearly cyberpunk style, one piece, wrap-around type goggles and everyone has an Abe Lincoln beard.

Finally, the last - at least in alphabetical order - regime which the player can choose to represent in campaigns and battles is the Zulu Nation.

I had wanted to steer well clear of anything to do with lions, leopard spot cloth and the whole Africa cliche. Oh ... and Vuvuzelas ...

In the end I opted for a more informal uniform based on gentleman's attire. Shirt, waistcoat, pants, gaiters/spats and a tophat and monacle. I had wanted to include the Zulu colours of black, white, red trim, green and yellow.

Initially I had made them a lot more green ... but then they looked like drunks from a Saint Patrick's parade. Adding a lot more yellow brought them too close to the Chinese colour scheme and made them look like they were wearing the South African Foot-to-ball strip. Eventually I decided on a much plainer, white, back, green dominant colour palette. Light armour is denoted as a helmet, which is sort of an ancient Greek facemask with the plume removed.

All names are (ethnic/national) given name - (city/area) family name, including the Chinese and Zulus who normally would have family name first.

Still to do ... are the Dastardly Pirates of Pangea. The enemy the player faces in one off single battle mode and who serve as the insurgents in the Main Campaign if the natives in your captured territories become unhappy with you rule. Also still to do is the heavy armoured character which will feature the same model for all factions but with different coloured textures using the material swapping function. And 6 more weapons to model and then the Tactical Battle part of the game is done.

For the Strategy Overview Map part of the campaigns I need to create a couple of new dirigibles, texture them all, and re-texture the environment hexes. There's still a few GUIs to finalize, some audio to sort out, port it all into a final codebase and make a few more code alterations which I want.

And an absolute shed load of documentation on how to play it to write.

Data, Data, Data, 28 Items, Multi-Purpose Ammo, Artillery

Item data overload! All items finally done, at least the data and how they all work in game - still placeholder models ---> Art is last on the list. Also multi-purpose ammunition, for people who are tied of not being able to use similar bullets in multiple weapons.
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Weapons, items, armour, artillery ... done, finally. Or at least the data and testing for them all it done, if not the final 3D modeled form of them - that's for last on the list of "What Needs To Get Done And In Order To Have Done Everything". So everything is still placeholder in the visual department. No pics this time, but cue vids.

So, here's a quick recap.

There are 6 classes.

Each Class has 4 levels of items.

There's also a "generic" class of 4 items everyone can use without penalty.

Ammunition of a each caliber can be used in any weapon of that caliber.

There are booby traps which can be placed before the battle for the enemy to walk into, and thewse can be detected and captured by the Sapper Class.

Most items are weapons of some form, some are equipment, and some are defensive (like armour).

Light armour is ... er, light. Heavy armour is ... er not light. Stealth armour is camouflaged. Whilst thinking up various defensive equipment for the classes, I also thought it might be fun to have some "non-conventional". I decided on a certain type of armour, which defended the user not by stopping damage, but by reducing accuracy of the firer by dazzling them. For a visual, I decided on some sort of energy shield, and was drawn to the old WW1 battleship "razzle-dazzle" camouflage schemes - only with a bit more colour in it and a moving pattern.


Amongst the variety of standard and conventional weapons I thought up a few exotic ones such as a badly spelt "flammenwaffen" - since renamed Flammenwerfer - a lightning gun that fries things - unless they're in a faraday cage ... say totally metal heavy armour ... in which case they don't do any damage at all - various rifle grenades, portable mortars, flamerockets, sniper rifles and machine-guns ... there was also the Railgun, which punches a hole through everything for 200 metres, reducing damage as it goes.



And artillery, in fact a few different types of artillery, each with different damage, blast radius, accuracy, but also a concussion radius to stun. There are rockets which are all noise and no trousers but scare the hell out of everyone nearby and cause large morale loss and panic. More standard artillery strikes and heavy mortars, guided flame bombs, and also carpet bombing by dirigible.



And for all of this hurty-hurty stuff, I needed a healy-healy system. So aid-kits are dual purpose, healing wounded squad members as you'd expect by increasing health - but also being available to create medivac. I rejigged the damage system so that disabled squad members who are not killed outright will fall wounded and slow bleed to death ... unless you can get someone with an aid-kit to heal them and call in medivac. Eventually they'll be a nice screen for this medivac but right now there isn't. Medivac-ing also boosts everyones morale a little as it's good to see your mates saved to fight another day.



And throw in a shed load of bug fixes and general improvements.

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My original deadline of completion by 1st January 2012 will be missed by a mile - but I'm still vaguely on course for completed gameplay with placeholder art. After a few rewrites that were costly in time, and the occurance of total burnout around October that caused an end to continuous crunch, it's still not a bad effort and should be completed early in the new year.

Kitting Up, Deploying Out, Inventorial reFlummoxing

Interface for "one-off battle-mode", choosing your squad and tooling them up to the nines. Also a total rewrite of the inventory system ... again.

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With the vast majority of the dirigible moving, hex gobbling, Strategy Campaign Mode gamelogic completed, it was back to the Squad Tactical stuff.

To make testing and debug rather easier I developed the "one-off Battle Mode" to cut out having to go through the Campaign mode to spark a battle. In the final version, the single Battle Mode will be the training mode for the player to familiarize themselves with squad combat, or just if for a quick and casual "get to the actung, baby" mode.

There are various preferences with this, from squad objectives of clearing the area of the enemy, to defending or assaulting team headquarters ... which will probably end up as being a sort of first to grab the enemy colours wins when I get it sorted out.

Difficulty controls how much money, veterans, quality of veterans, class based items are available. It works as a balance, "Easier" gives more of the opponent's default ratings to the player, "Harder" strengthens the opponent and reduces what is available to the player.

There are also options for terrain type and weather conditions, with weather reducing visibility and spotting chances. Weather also acts as a factor to which of the eight offensive strategies the Ai opponent squad will decide to use.



And of course the player can choose which ever of the six factions to play as.

This then leads to the "deployment and equipment screen" which is the same before any battle regardless of game mode. Here you can select which veterans, or untested militia troops to deploy, areas where they'll start, and all the equipment and ammunition that they'll be carrying into battle.

There are six individual classes of squad member - each with four levels of specialized equipment, which in Campaign Mode have to be researched and purchased, and in Single Battle Mode are dependant on the Difficulty Setting. Save for a few highly specialist items, any class can use another's equipment, but they will usually incur some form of penalty. For weapons this is usually a reduction in accuracy, for armour a penalty in the squad member's Action Points. For some very basic items there is no penalty, eg: everyone can throw the Recce's flashbang without penalty as it's used just like a standard grenade.

This equipment and deployment section brought me round to the terrible task of redesigning the whole inventory system ... again.

Terrible because apart from it being fairly convoluted and time consuming ... it's also as boring as hell.

But it does look and work better now, being much more user friendly. Gone are the segregation of weapons, ammo and equipment - now replaced with a scrollable up-down list of everything together. Originally I'd seperated so that you could have weapon and ammo displayed together - but the fact is that you can do that with this method AND show an additional 60% of items with a lot less scrolling involved to get through them all.



The squad member deploys into the game with the first weapon or item in-hand that was in it's deployment equipment list. And the deployment equipment order is now matched in the in-game inventory.

I've also prevented live explosives from being picked up. There's a two-fold reason for this; firstly, putting something that is about to explode in your backpack is a very bad idea and secondly, I wanted to eliminate the "live grenade relay" that was common in the original X-Com, were you lead scout spotted the enemy, and then the guy furthest away pulled the pin on a frag, and tossed it from one side of the map to the other, along a chain of squad members in a highly unrealistic and rather cheaty manner. This is now a no-no.

And that's about it for this blog. Next up is sorting out the enemy Ai team to successfully use one of the eight different offensive tactics I've come up with for them, and generally sort out the whole tactical battle system and make sure it works. Also work out a formula to how the Ai opponent decides to deploy and equip it's forces. After that it's integrate it into the campaign mode with team member promotions for successful survivors with extra experience, and adding militia who did well (got a kill and survived) to the core of veterans.

In the meantime, vidya of the above in action.

Move Rock - Circumnavigate Rock - Go Off On Tangent

Those pesky rocks eh? We all have our rock ... some of these rocks might even be real rocks ... but for most of us it's a metaphycisal rock ... or at least it's not real anyhow.

Okay ... enough about rocks, real or imaginery.

Game development is a bit like a Japanese RPG - everyone is slightly squashed and absurdly cute ... no wait ... that's not right! There's a lot of GRINDING and leveling up can get to be a real pain in the derriere. Everyone gets burned out after a while, especially when your on an "all hours the Great Magnet sends" routine.


It's even worse if you're making an MMO!

So rather than spend ALL week down the pub or ALL my time reading mildly interesting but mostly inane Wikipedia articles about what someone I've never heard of was rumoured to have done on a particular date in the 17th Century, I decided to have a look at the RTSprotoype information in the stock documentation and see how the camera system and screen-to-terrain input worked - two things which I didn't know anything about.

And from there I decided to build another Tutorial series, detailing how to create a 3rd person, turnbased, squad tactics/action hybrid gametype which follows the gameplay style of "Valkyria Chronicles" ... which I've never actually played, but have watched the whole game streamed. Originally I was thinking of writing a Tutorial for full turnbased tactical game but thought that Valkyira Chronicles" mix of turns and action was quite novel.

The whole tutorial is complete in theGarageGames Resources Section here and also in the T3D Tutorials Section of TDN.

And here's a video of what it looks like:




So, the next time you hear somebody say that :

Torque can only make Tribes style FPS games

Link them with that.


Oh hi, Catchick ... who still doesn't have a real name and maybe will always be known by what a certain Mr.Kiss first refered to her as ...

... so back to getting this demo out ... which I could've finished a month ago if I hadn't been looking for something else to do instead ... cue pub and wikipedia. The demo itself is nearly finished, it's "that close" - but you cannot see me holding my thumb and finger a little way apart to demonstrate, so you'll have to take my word that it's about four inches or ten centimeters in new money. And the demo is going to get finished and then released.

It's been a long time and a shed load of work involving a shed load of assets, but that's kinda what a FPS narrative campaign is about, and because of this I've also been thinking of "procedural content" more. In my GarageGames profile it reads:

One Bloke ... In His Bedroom ... Trying To Make Computer Games ... eventually ...

... Trying To Make Computer Games ... eventually ... was kinda in there as a joke about how long it takes to actually complete anything, but someday I'd like to edit it to read ... Making Computer Games. So to that aim, post next demo release, FPS project is going on the back burner, and an old skool (I hate that phrase!) turnbased, tactics game featuring an entirely procedurally driven campaign system will come to the fore with the intention of shipping before the year is out - in other words, six months. I did previously moot the idea in a previous blog about an X-Com style game idea I had, and my recent "Valkyria Chronicles" style game Tutorial gave a rough proof of concept for the combat/gameplay control system.



It'll still be massive - I just won't have to script every single fart an Ai makes ... but first, finish off Dubious Demo 2.1, cos this time, it's got the start of a Narrative Campaign ..

Cliche versus unCliche! Also Less Squinting and Forget How to Draw

I decided to take advantage of the New Year Sales - also getting in before VAT was going to go back up to 17.5% - to rid myself of the constantly malfunctioning Dell RAID setup which I've spent 3 years complaining about ... but not done anything decisive to stop complaining about it. Well I have now, getting a single Western Digital with more cache than the RAID, and also the new working copy of Vista ... I think it's called Windows7 ... but basically it's Vista without the bugs.

Also, whilst my folks had spent a month in the States jamming with 1950s rock stars, I'd swiped their digital TV to use as a monitor. I had quite liked this on the grounds that previously, on my old 20inch monitor I couldn't read text on the internet at full resolution and modeling in Blender was a pain. So I invested in some screen real estate and bought a 1080p TV to replace my monitor, and I can now see what I'm doing in full resolution without squinting. Or drop a resolution and everything is HUGE.

After a bit of "faffing", I got the brightness, contrast, colour to be the same as my monitor.



I feel a sudden need to explain that I don't really have the illustrated desktop background ...

Right, that's my budget for the next decade blown - back to deving.

I'd needed to come up with some sort of bad guys of a scary humanoid nature. So, I started on the Cliche. Scary Humanoid Monsters come in a variety of cliched forms ... they're cliches because they're humanoid and thus familiar, they look a bit like "us" because that's basically what they're based on (not to mention often in film they actually are a guy in a sweaty rubber suit), they are familiar and yet alien.

They are most often slow moving hunters, stalking their prey, creeping out of the background to eat/maul/shag the stupid human who is centre screen, waving a flashlight around to draw attention to themselves (apparently it all adds tension). They do come in sub-sections, zombie, Nosferatu (as opposed to sparkling vampires ... bawwwww!), and the humanoid alien monster aka guy sweating in a rubber suit.

Mostly I just plan the visual stuff in my head and then model/texture it stream-of-consciousness style. However I decided to do a bit of pre-planning.



Which is when I forgot how to draw ...

The problem with the humanoid alien is that there is no way of avoiding the cliche of a certain HR Giger designed humanoid alien. It's either that or Blue Space Furries --- or a guy with pointy ears and blue blood.

At first I wanted a fairly smooth mix of grey bone and pink skin - and tried to swipe the mouth shape from the "pink thing" in Pan's Labyrinth. I didn't quite manage to get the same "choked look", but never mind (probably should have bloated the tongue out more).

Anyhow, this all caused plenty of frustration and I just couldn't get something that I liked --- so instead I decided to do something that was bearable, ditched the smooth bone/skin idea (the whole "grey" thing stank too much of cliche for this particular cliche) in favour of a rough, almost oxidized look with a hefty metal shine. Animations seemed okayish, I wanted a it to sort of strut or "mince" -- yes, "mince" -- as it lopes slowly(<--cliche) torwards at it's prey.



It's got big hands ... all the better for flailing around and battering the player ... like a zombie ... Giger's alien ... the rest of the slow moving humanoid monster cliches. So I decided to throw in an unCliche ... which might actually be a cliche in itself ... or ... something ...

Anyhow, the slightly glowing bits are the hint, and they wash around the model's body. Fade isn't currently functioning, so it's a bit on/off when it happens.



The initial tests were just based on collision events, and then redone so that it attacks via a raycast based on range from target (only about 4 metres). Purple Swirlyness, some damage via a smartbomb effect (doesn't hit teammates) that goes out to an area of around 8 metres rather than just hitting it's target, lots of impulse, no clawing. And as an added cliche - ondeath, it goes out with a bang! Energy Explosion Audio provided by my GPU fan running Torque - and then flanged in Audacity (if it sounded like that normally I think that there would be something very wrong!).

All-in-all, not as bad as it could have turned out, and the colourful explosion effect is quite nice, distracting and I think can generally cause some confusion in-game. Guess I need a variation on the theme, players love variety, and some sort of fast-moving-but-easier-to-kill-hunter-cliche is probably on the cards, some more humanoid aliens that can use guns, and then the really awkward task of making some scary starfish aliens which really look alien (pulls out the Lovecraft books) --- hope I remember how to draw by then ... I'm really out of practise.

And what they look like in action against a conventional army.

Integrated AI Routines Test

A(nother) test of pathfinding (from previous post) which is now using Astar, my new targeting and combat routines, and a basic "Teflon" script to stop the AI bumping into each other and getting stuck. They do try to check for a clean shot but I've still had to use a friendly-fire suppression script for blue-on-blue projectile collisions, especially with the spread of shotguns.

I had followed a tutorial on how to make decent quality videos for posting on YouTube, but it's still not great quality once uploaded. The audio files are placeholder sounds scrounged from games I own. Sorting my own audio out is currently a low priority. Getting a working-but-dubious-demo is the priority.



Not a commentary on China and Tibet. It's just riot coppers fighting armed civilians (who need their LODs fixing).

Red Team vs Blue Team basics

My first battle test, built to test AI team based code and their targeting and accuracy system. No real pathfinding, just basic avoidance of the lone building.