[Warhammer Dark Omen Forum]

Warhammer Dark Omen Forum

fire weapon is in, here you can see it after the fact - as a unit of Amazon women runs screaming and aflame to the ultimate deaths.

The red dragon is much smaller and more nimble than the black dragon, making it much more useful in the air - but substantially weaker when on the ground.

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Hell yeah! Flying is done.

The next task will be the other 5 breath weapons.  I've already made a start on the fire dragon so i'll do that next.  I'll see if I can get the men to run screaming across the map once they catch light

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Tada!

Turns out there was more than 1 crash bug, when I realised that I began to make progress.  I don't think I've got it right yet but the code is a lot more stable.

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EDIT: Found the last bug and zapped it.  Now for the breath weapon whilst flying

This is absolutely the last time I use mutexes in a multi-threaded application!  I'm stuck with a mutex crash that's on day 2 of debugging!

Here's a little video of a Black Dragon single handedly taking on a Dwarven army.  The game sadly crashed on this test, something in the Dragon code isn't quite right yet.  There is still a few more features to add too, but I need to get to the bottom of the crashing first.

However, as you can see the Dragon battles are really beginning to take shape.  They're very mobile fights too, the Dragons flying around at high speed causes the unit to reposition itself - I wrote a special AI for fighting against a flying Dragon and I think it's quite cool to watch.

Although with melee weapons, the Dragon could wipe out a 1000 Dwarves and loose less than 20 odd hitpoints!  But ranged units will be on the agenda before too much longer

Black Dragon versus Dwarves	powered by Aeva

I've got as far as grabbing the units but I need to do some extensive testing to make sure it isn't crashing.  The Dragon has a habbit of flying around in circles too so I need to do some work on the AI.

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I've got the Dragon flying around and banking and stuff like that, now i'm working on the combat.  The dragons flying attack involves swooping down and grabbing soldiers in its rear claws, then dropping them.  That's a work in progress at the moment   After that I need to get the breath working working whilst airbourne too and then dying - and then, finally, the Black Dragon will be ready to show you - before I go and do all the other breath weapons!

I've been so utterly unable to make progress on the flying that I took yesterday out to play a game of Civilisation.  Now that the Greeks and Japanese are finally defeated I am back on it again trying to get to the bottom of an issue I have created in the flight logic.

Well Christmas is over, and real life will necessitate a reduction in development speed as I go back to that thankless task of earning enough money to feed myself.  However, I am keen to continue development and keep moving the game forward.

Currently I am working on the flying units, whilst the main artist for the game Steven Finney at Arteria 3D is reworking some 3D meshes for me so that I can get the cavalry and more unit types in as the game still needs more archers, cavalry, and some Elves.

So work is moving forward, but the pace will be slower now.

The dragons are a bit broken in flying mode at the moment, well I say broken like it once worked - I am developing it.  Hopefully I'll have that sorted by the weekend and if so then next week I should be able to start work on the cavalry if all goes to plan.

And to you guys.

Merry Christmas / Nadolig Llawen.

Or as it is green the poison cloud could goto the green leaving brown free.

I'm not sure a leadership change debuff would help much in gameplay terms at the moment. Dragons get easily overwhelmed against units of 300 soldiers so a dragon that munches the dead would be problematical in a gameplay sense. It needs to strike hard and fast with aoe.

Perhaps it could fire off a paralysing stomach juice that ensnares those within for some time - thus crowd controlling the mass of melee it faces.

Gold could be utlimate dragon and have combined weapons such as flame and ice, since I would like to see lightning effects kept for blue dragon.

Brown could be putrid stomach contents to demoralise the enemy (-2 on Leadership and movement), generated by sucking on the corpses of the dead.

I quite like the idea of the Gold dragons attack being indirect, a kind of buff/debuff character. Perhaps it could resurrect fallen soldiers with its breath weapon. That would make it very powerful but at the same time it would be less capable in its own right.

If I do lightning I'll need to move cold onto another dragon, perhaps black - and move it's poison onto Brown. That leaves green as acid.

I'm not sure how I'll tackle these things graphically yet. Lightning is certainly a challenge, I can't just plug it in to the particle system I wrote today, it'll need something new.

OK so, I've done the black dragon which fires off a bilious green cloud of poison, and I'm about a third done on the red dragon which breathes fire.

The question is, what should these dragons breath:

Gold
Brown
Green
Blue

AD&D gives some inspiration, but we need not follow that:
Blue - lightning
Green - acid
Gold - fire / weakening gas
Brown - acid (line not aoe)

In this game all the dragon breaths need to be AOE for gameplay reasons.  It kinda works at the moment, that as the player you get to fire off the breath weapon with two choices of attack (left/right mouse buttons) to try and catch as many soldiers as possible - and if you fail you get overwhelmed by troops and whittled down.

I like the idea of having a cold attack, so blue could be cold.  Although i'm not sure how to represent it graphically yet.  Green being acid is fine.

But that leaves Gold and Brown.

Work in progress, but I've begun the breath weapons

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