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Progress on 0.9.3

Posted: Mon Dec 24, 2007 3:27 pm
by Implode
All the proper unrest calculations are done, and you can now click on rebels to view the breakdown of the unrest calculation in the same way you can city growth and productions, so that's one big thing done for 0.9.3. All the custom new game settings screens are done too, so the one big thing I've left to do for 0.9.3 is rewriting the combat terrain generation, plus a few smaller things. So its all going ahead quite well :)

BTW, for anyone else on facebook:
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=5098895746

And Merry Christmas to everyone :)

Posted: Thu Dec 27, 2007 2:50 am
by nazlfrag
Happy new year, thanks for the progress reports. I've played around with the game so far and can't wait until it's fully realised. Best of luck for 2008!

Posted: Thu Jan 10, 2008 1:11 am
by Implode
Got the core of the new combat map generation done, and I must say its quite neat. Although I'm using the same graphics as the original, the original MoM doesn't make much variation in combat maps for different tile types. i.e. combats taking place on grasslands, forest, swamp or hills (which all use the same green tiles) all look the same.

I've experimented with this - so the server XML file specifies for each tile type how the combat maps are generated - so grasslands are mostly flat with a couple of hills and a couple of trees; forest tiles have less hills and more tress (duh! but really, forest tiles in the original have very few trees!!!); swamps have big brown muddy looking areas and very few hills; and hill tiles have a lot of hills (again, duh!) and a couple of trees. Mountain tiles have a LOT more ridges on them than the original (the tiles which cost 2 movement to walk across) since the fact that movement is difficult makes perfect sense for anyone trying to fight in a mountain range, and besides it makes them look more, well, mountainous :)

Water combats should look right too but need to get a multiplayer game going to test that (there aren't exactly raider cities in the ocean!).

Roads, city walls and houses aren't done yet. When they are I'll post some screenshots.

So :)

Implode.

Posted: Fri Jan 18, 2008 8:28 pm
by Implode
Can't believe how much grief city walls have given me. First I thought they walls actually took up a tile (diamond) and made it impassable, it wasn't until I tried to figure out how the graphics should be placed that I realised the walls don't lie IN a tile, they lie on the line between two tiles. So the tiles themselves are still passable, you just can't walk between them.

Except for the corners, which make the whole tile impassable.

Walls of fire & darkness I couldn't understand why there were no left/right corner graphics, until I realised its because you CAN stand there and so to make the graphics look right, the units need to be standing behind the front wall but in front of the back wall. So the corner wall graphics for city walls & walls of fire/darkness work completely differently. Argh!

Anyway... think I actually have the XML for how walls behave & how they need to be drawn all sorted now. Now just need to write the code! Just had to have a winge about this since its something I expected would be so simple! hah :)

Implode.

Posted: Fri Jan 18, 2008 9:37 pm
by Lucern
Thanks for the updates Implode...I googled MOM IME (as I normally do, because my bookmarks are way too unorganized) - and it didn't come up. I had that familiar panic that maybe the project was no more, like so many other promising, but less interesting MOM projects.

I'm very relieved that this isn't the case, and that some great progress has been made since I checked last month. Walls (nearly), unrest, and battle maps that are actually interesting? Sounds fantastic.

Posted: Tue Jan 29, 2008 6:52 pm
by mose
Thanks for the update and keep up the good work :)

Posted: Mon Feb 04, 2008 2:05 am
by Implode
All the combat map generation is done, it places different terrain on the combat maps correctly, and walls of stone/fire/darkness look right (even when all 3 are cast at the same time). See here.

Walls of fire & darkness won't actually DO anything in 0.9.3, they just look right. Walls of stone you can currently walk through, but I'm working on that next so they'll work properly in 0.9.3.

Posted: Sun Feb 17, 2008 6:58 pm
by Implode
All the combat map-related changes are done, at last. I still had to sort out making the walls actually impassable, and arranging the units correctly at the start. Then decided I'd had enough of units being arranged in pretty much random order, so have done something clever for this too.

I've updated the list of what'll be in 0.9.3 here. Sorry its taken 4 months since 0.9.2!! A lot of it is to do with work. Without going into too many details, I had a lull at work which lasted I'd say 2 years, where we were keeping ourselves busy with small jobs, strategic planning and so on, but basically waiting for the first killer really interesting project to come. During that time my I was craving for something challenging to keep my brain going, and I wasn't getting it at work so that's one of the reasons I started on MoM IME, so I'd have something challenging to do in the evenings instead. And wanted to keep my programming skills in use. Now I'm working on two really big projects at work and am insanely busy, not to mention my brain is pretty burned out at the end of the day. And I'm off on holiday next week, which has made be even busier with work trying to make sure projects aren't going be delayed by me being off for a week. So all in all, being able to then pick up and do work on MoM IME in the evenings has gotten a little more difficult.

But that's it, I've gotten this far, no way I'm just going to give up on it! Nothing worthwhile was ever easy :) I was determined to get all the combat map changes done before I went away on holiday so I'm really happy I succeeded in that. Will do the keyboard shortcuts next - which compared to mucking around with the map generation (which makes my head hurt! Just look in the graphics XML file for how complicated the smoothing rules for the overland map are! I'm astonished it actually works!) will be a piece of cake... so looking forward to having something easy to work on :)

Implode.

Posted: Sun Mar 02, 2008 3:52 pm
by nazrix
Hope you enjoyed your holiday and that it leaves you with more energy to work on MoM:IME :)

Posted: Mon Mar 03, 2008 1:05 am
by Implode
Actually my holiday left me sick with a really bad cold + stomach bug... but besides that, yes I've actually done really well on getting some things finished off since I got back. 3 things (I think) left to do for 0.9.3... one easy, two not so...