P.U.R.E. 0.8 RC3

[Decimator]

How did you implement ground decals previously and now? When I was working with them I had to offset them from the ground to avoid the z-fighting. (it did end up looking good)

[Argh]

Previously, it was just experiments with GroundQuad and with useBuildingGroundDecal. useBuildingGroundDecal went through a lot of different fixes before 0.77 was released- at one point, it was really 'orrible, in terms of effects and looks.

Now they seem to work all right (at least here, on this hardware), except that they're not being shaded correctly based on the sun light when shadows are on. It's a relatively minor problem, though, and I can live with it until it's fixed and a new Spring version's available, which based on what it looks like the developers are doing... may be months.

[imbaczek]

...may be months.

god please no. we've all seen what it leads to and it's not pretty.

[Argh]

god please no

Seriously, that's how I feel about that, too. But from what I'm seeing, it looks like you guys are ripping up a lot of the internals and trying to finally get zerver's stuff working, and I'm feeling a bit trapped here- I want dynamic lighting and some of the other cool things I have working now that won't work in stock 0.77b5

I don't really care too much, for RC4, but with RC5 and Final (yes, there's a real "final" planned) it's pretty critical that I guess right about what's going to be available when, instead of ending up with a release like RC3, where over 1600 people have downloaded the game, maybe tried to play online (in the Test Server, where hardly anybody goes) and left It's no way to build an audience or get more people to be interested in Spring.

[Argh]

Water Tower's finally done. Has a nifty death event, too I'm still working on industrial whatsits and thingamabobs.

[LordLemmi]

omg amaizing

[KDR_11k]

I think you need to slap some ground decals under your city blocks, it looks kinda bad when the road and buildings are just pasted on top of the regular map texture.

[Cremuss]

o_O

That looks really good !
Nice job

[Machiosabre]

I've always wanted to have war in sim city

[Argh]

I think you need to slap some ground decals under your city blocks, it looks kinda bad when the road and buildings are just pasted on top of the regular map texture.

Yeah, I'm thinking that the houses need a "driveway", and the buildings need "sidewalks". Not a big deal.

[Masure]

Again : really nice. You're pushing onto those things that Spring mapping was lacking.

[FLOZi]

Great work Argh.

(No really)

[AF]

Maybe small things like billboards mailboxes, and assorted furniture like maybe some houses have bouncey castles or trampolines, conservatories, little details that are small and could be done with block colour or a tiny texture.

[Argh]

Sure, sure. A whole set of mailboxes and a fricking picket fence could be on a single 128, it's not a problem, especially if they're treated as Features after creation. Same goes for lots of other small crap. The only real issue is time- that, and certain stuff, like the larger industrial buildings, etc., are non-trivial modeling / skinning work.

That, and Features lacking a decent death method. Maybe I should go put in a feature request.

[Argh]

Adding some driveways for the houses and some concrete around them really helped this feel a lot more real. Good call, KDR. The driveways were a royal pain in the neck to get adjusted, though- next time, I'll do it a different way.

Rearranged the "downtown" so that it's more appropriately-sized. Now I have to build the industrial park on the other side of the map.

In case you're just catching this thread, these are all shots from my in-game map editing environment, World Builder. These scenes were all built in-game, using a simple WYSIWYG system. Mappers will be able to simply go in, write their elements, and hit a button, which outputs the appropriate script to generate everything exactly like it was designed, every time.

World Builder is not just an editing environment, however. Currently, it has the most powerful procedural tools available for populating a map with content (and you can go into a map with a random populator and then save the results, if you want to use that as a starting point, or run certain pre-packaged random generators directly in World Builder), and it uses a fairly nice system for handling LOD, increasing performance over anything else available for this engine, while keeping the current advantages of using Units (animation, death events, sound, CEG, Lua tie-in, etc.).

So, basically, World Builder is a collection of very powerful tools for mapping and game design. Game designers just have to add a small amount of SDK material to their games to make them compatible, and mappers can work directly with the Editor and the current version of the Content package.

[Masure]

Please screenshoot some fight on that map I wanna sex

[Argh]

Later. I have more important fish to fry right now, I'm doing a major cleanup of the game's code today.

[Zoy64]

there need to be death anims

[Argh]

there need to be death anims

Er, for dying units? I suppose so, but most of the time, it'd be a waste of processing time, imo- you'd hardly see it, before the explosion blotted it out. I suppose I could do it differently, with a death animation, fade to clear and drop-through-the-ground, like a lot of games do, but I'm not entirely certain I'd be happy with the results, and it would be a ton of work per unit.

I'm going to do a testing session on the new gameplay for a few hours, either Sunday or Monday (probably not Sunday, I promised somebody I'd get something else done then) and before I do, I'd like to hear some feedback about the balance mod. I'm pretty disappointed that nobody's given me a bit of feedback, and it's been a week.

Did it work, does it suck, what if anything should be different, in terms of fundamental battle balance? Did the fixes help or hurt economic stuff? Speaking of which, Overmind is going to use a new-ish system in the next version- I'm converting them to use the LoTR II ground-conquest system... but I'll talk about that later. Let's just say that it's just a perversion of stuff that's already in Spring, with minor Lua hackery, and while it will change the way the game gets played, it's not a negative thing, just a change in emphasis.

[Decimator]

I think he's talking about the buildings, Argh.