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 My original trailer is now woefully out of date as the characters, animation, audio and various other stuff has changed since release.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.

Airship Dragoon v1.4.8 And Realism Mod Released!

Airship Dragoon has been updated to version 1.4.8.

Airship Dragoon is a traditional, uber-hardcore, turn-based strategy and tactics game in the manner of Julian Gollop's Laser Squad or UFO/X-Com, or as I like to call it: a GollopLike!

Airship Dragoon v1.4.8 update is available direct from the dev at www.yorkshirerifles.com, IndieGameStand and Gamersgate now. The update for Desura usually takes about a week to filter through their system.

[EDIT]
If you're using a direct download, you can use the patch!
http://www.yorkshirerifles.com/downloads/airship_dragoon_patch_for_v1_4_and_v1_4_1_update_to_v1_4_8.exe
[/EDIT]

The full changelog is available here and details some 60 or so updates.

Amongst the changelog highlights are:

Fixed a critical issue caused by a namespace change when introducing modding during the previous update (v1.4). (Thanks to Vincent for the report and supply his save files which helped with replication and hunting the issue down)

Increased the maximum number of veterans the player can have from 16 to 30 due to it being a popular request from customers.

Added an AutoSave function that can be enabled in Options->Controls due to it being a popular request from customers.

Added a hotkey for reloading in battle. Press "r" to reload without going into the inventory, again this was another popular request from customers.

Wounded troops now show on the map so they are easier to find and rescue.

Mountainous environments have had a visual makeover to give them a more wintery aesthetic.

Added Felix Westin's changes to the lighting shader code to allow normal mapping into shadows, making them appear less flat.

Updated to version 3.5.1 of the Open Source Torque3D engine, also updated to VS2013 for compiling the exec (previously still using VS2008).

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Also released and compatible with Airship Dragoon v.1.4.8 and all future versions is the "Realism Mod Total Conversion" which swaps all of the models and textures in the standard environments for high resolution ones, for those of you whoe "like all the pixels". Personally I've always prefered an abstracted figurative aesthetic, which is why standard Airship Dragoon has always looked like it does.

When enabled this Total Conversion redirects the game to use the levels/battlefields within the mod. Please note however that due to differing pathfinding solutions and base terrains, the Realism Mod should not be used with previously saved games in Battle Mode, but is perfectly compatible to use with an existing saved game in either of the campaign Strategy Modes (eg: the hexagonal strategy world). If you've saved a campaign during a battle, I would strongly suggest finishing your saved battle and then returning to the Strategy Mode to save the campaign before enabling the Realism Mod. Full instructions on how the mod works are available in the zip file.

The Realism Mod Total Conversion is available for free: here.

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In other news, Airship Dragoon has got through Greenlight! Many thanks to everyone who voted for it.

The next job in hand is to integrate Airship Dragoon into the Steam SDK. After this I intend to release a level editor/modding tools.

Airship Dragoon Has Been Greenlit

Just a quick blog post to say that Airship Dragoon has been Greenlit and that I am now an accredited Steam developer. many thanks to everyone who voted! In the end I got through with around 6500 votes.

Here's a little graph of what happened, the first curve is all my own publicity - what little I managed of it - until https://indiegamestand.com featured my in a Pay-What-You-Want deal and did an interview at some god forsaken time of night for the UK. Usually I'm bright and bushy tailed at 3am but not that night. ;)

IGS were extremely helpful and are nice blokes with a real drive for indie games. I would recommend that any indie developer contact them, regardless of whether you need a profile boost or not.

After that was the http://www.indieroyale.com push where Airship Dragoon was featured in a bundle along side a number of other indie games. The Indie Royale is Desura based, but are more than happy to have your greenlight links and steam keys available for player choice (as does IndieGameStand).

The final jump was from the Steampunk2 bundle with https://groupees.com which saw an eclectic mix of games, music, comics and film.

I also found some publicity from a hardcore strategy site Grogheads who gave me an interview - http://grogheads.com/?p=4510 - as well as a lot of feedback.

I am currently working on the next update which has various tweaks and additions based on customer feedback and a fix for a potentially critical bug I accidentally introduced in the last update. (derp!) After this has been released I will begin to look at integrating the Steam client into Airship Dragoon.

In other Greenlit news, Frayed Knights: The Skull of Smakh-Daon also got through. Whilst Jay may have moved on to use another game engine for his future development, Frayed Knights was created with TGE 1.5.2, the for-runner of the Open Source game engine which I used for Airship Dragoon.