[Warhammer Dark Omen Forum]

Warhammer Dark Omen Forum | Warhammer Dark Omen | Tactical wargaming and other Warhammer games
Hangover Cure...

[Smurf]

Dragons are not the only large creature in the game, and much like their winged counterparts Hydra also come in a variety of colours, as the tallest unit in the game hydra pose an intimidating presence on the battlefield, but a Dragon would make short work of one.

The Giant Bat is a great scouting unit, and if a player maintains a hatchery of them could be used to swarm opposing units to keep them busy.

The Giant Serpent is a very scary adversary with its poisoned bite, but could easily be swarmed over by a large unit.  Try to deploy it against small units, heroes, and wizards for best effect.

[Smurf]

OK I've gotten to the bottom of the shader issue and its bad news.

There's a bug in the 3D engine I am using on my particular implementation.  It's fine when used with other languages, but there is a conflict in some of the commands when using it with the language I use.  This creates an issue I am unlikely to solve with reasonable effort - and this is a hobby...  So I will not be using shaders on the mesh units.  There are shaders in the game, but they are on static elements like the water and the landscape, it's moving and scaling things that seems to cause the issue.

I don't think a fix is likely any time soon as the developers disappeared back in March, so for now I shall soldier on without them - and i'll consider either a new engine or a new language for my next project.

Even worse, without shaders I cannot do some of the special skin effects I had planned for some of these units, so there will be a greatly reduced number of Dragons and other large monsters in the final game.  No "glass" or "ethereal" dragons and hydra, and the awesome gold dragon will just be a dull matted yellow colour instead... Bah.

[Smurf]

This is what they would have looked like, taken from a tester project when I was experimenting with the technique.


Glass Hydra


Gold Dragon

[Smurf]

Breakthrough! Animation working on the mesh units!

Slideshow	powered by Aeva

Now to begin work on the game logic and start to get all these guys moving around.

[olly]

Outstanding! I Can't wait to play this game and slay some 3d monsters.



ps. I have sent you a PM with some thoughts

[Smurf]

Some weird shiznit is going down with my PM sending, so i'll paste my reply here.

I'm quite happy to discuss this openly anyway, I hope you are as i'm pasting my reply

I had considered modding, and certainly I was considering whether to use a d120 system because it is divisible by all the standard dice sizes, with stats up to 100 - again, divisible by Warhammer's 10.

The good news is, in terms of rules they are inherently not copyrightable, there just isn't a way to do so legally.  What is not legal is to copy the flavour, for instance - when Stuart Marshall re-released Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 1st Edition as OSRIC he did so with the rules very much intact, but with all of Gary's wayward flouncy writing completely removed.  Although he isn't allowed to say so legally, Gary Gygax even helped him to clear up some of the questionable rules to boot, although I dont suppose Iain Livingstone or Jervis Johnson would afford me the same kindness!

The downside is that I neither know nor care much for the warhammer rules, infact the final game is being designed for a very specific purpose.

I want to host a LAN party with my friends and have a big Mighty Empires style campaign - you'd be invited of course!  We did it once before many years ago using Dark Omen for the battles, which is what spawned my hacking of the DO game to get the big units and more gold etc.

The new game is being designed specifically for that purpose, a large scale campaign playable by half a dozen people with rapidly resolved battles, completable within about 6-8 hours play.

With this in mind the magic will likely revolve around what I can achieve with shader and particle systems - especially in light of the bug I found in the shader system.  They wont be from a warhammer spells list and neither would a warhammer spell list be very useful against such large armies.

Warhammer is a slow playing tactical game designed for skirmish sized battles, and this is a mass ranks epic battle game designed for rapid resolution - a sort of high fantasy version of the Space Marine game.

So yes there will be parallels, and it should be possible to mod the game and get quite close to warhammer - but there will be differences, not least will be the acceptance that mages in this game need to be significantly more powerful than in Warhammer, because they need to take on units of 500 men rather than 20.  Single handedly!

Once I have achieved my purpose I will see about making any modifications necessary to help you mod the game.  I will also be doing something or other to get it out on some kind of public release - the focus for the first instance though is for the LAN party.

[olly]

very interesting reading/info, what a great plan/vision, all sounds fantastic to me!

Thanks

[Smurf]

In terms of the campaign game, think Mighty Empires - which of course was originally designed for Warhammer campaigns, specifically the early version that also worked as a stand-alone game.  I think I will simplify it for the games first outing, but hopefully I will be able to gradually add in the various features of the campaign game.

The battle maps have been designed such that when they are generated the edges of the map take their influence from surrounding tiles.  So a campaign map tile that has mountains to the East will generate a battle map with a similar edge.

I may add a little more resource management in than the board game has and introduce trade routes, as thats a bit beyond the scope of a board game but could add an interesting strategic element, especially during sieges.

[Smurf]

When it came to waypoint markers, there was only one thing I could possibly choose!

[Smurf]

I have my sprite based units marching across the map now.  The units rotate and march according to their waypoint chain.  Upto 10 waypoints are visible via the white flags, although technically you can give an unlimited amount of orders - well, until the computer crashes from a lack of memory anyway!


There are several ways to do rotation in this type of game, I opted for a simple and easy to calculate method for speed, as the game needs to deal with a lot of units I didnt want to blow a lot of CPU time on unit rotations and path finding, so a soldier on the left stays on the left during a rotation even if it is 180 degrees, and then walks directly to their individual waypoint.



The responsiveness of the unit to orders, and their ability to quickly execute their chain of orders, relates heavily upon the units leadership stat skill.  Units with poor leaders also have a tendancy to march out of step with each other and look a little disorganised on the field of battle as they march.

Currently the movement routine is a little slow and this has impacted fps quite heavily, but I already know why and what I plan to do about it - I have a bit of slow code in there to calculate the altitude of the ground under the player but I am going to write a proper routine for it that will be much optimised and faster.

What I havnt figured out is what to do about the units walking through buildings.  Especially if their final waypoint is inside a building.  This requires some thought as to the best approach of what to do about it and may require some sleeping on it.

[Smurf]

I have a bit of refactoring to do so I thought I would upload the game to my SVN in case I want to go back... Anyway, it turns out I have used up well over 2.5gb of space already! So I guess this commit will take a while

I have the morning off then, time to get some paperwork sorted!

[Smurf]

Ever wondered what it would look like to see a unit of 1000 amazon warrior women cartwheeling into position?



It's taken me all day to get my new code working to read off the ground height under the units quickly, it was much more complex than I at first imagined - but I think I am there.

I turned shadows off for this test, i'm trying to stress test my new routine and wanted some FPS - but I didnt expect it to hit the 30-40fps range with all those units onscreen!

Now, I wonder if it will do 5000...

Edit: Dammit.  More work to do!

[olly]

impressive to see 1000, can't imagine 5000!

[Smurf]

Well imagine no more!

First off, here is 3000 highly disciplined Amazonian warrior women



And here's 5000 badly behaved ones



And if you give me 10 minutes to upload, i'll edit this post and add a video too

5000 Unit Movement Test	powered by Aeva

[Smurf]

The next thing I need to figure out is how to get the units to move around buildings and trees.  I don't particularly want to write a full path finding algorythm firstly because it'll be an fps hit, and secondly because the map isn't a complex maze, there are just some obstructions.  I also need to get the units to not march up a hill if it is too steep, so I am thinking of combining the two problems into one and faking the height map.

That would sort out detection of obstructions with no system overhead as it uses an existing system, but the logic of what should happen next is something I need to find an answer for.