What's up this week? - 11/5/2012

I'm continuing my work on terrain generation. The system is coming along nicely and as I said last week I hope to be able to show something soon.

We now have a larger team! As of last week we added 2 more programmers for a total of 5. Lots of infrastructure work is happening like getting our continuous integration working. Also just generally getting people up to speed with the architecture and current codebase.

Awesome.

With this terrain generation, how easy is it going to be for modders to implement stuff like rising or falling water levels? How difficult would it be for the engine to have some simple details to expedite that, IE, destruction of non-amphibious land units or sea units/structures if the land/sea they're on is flooded/parted?

Global temperature/water changes, as opposed to localized tsunami type effects, seem like they might be a bit easier to affect, while still offering for some fun strategic elements?

Great news, can't wait for more screenshots as I'm really hopefull about this.

These weekly advancement news and your tech detailed posts are giving us such an interesting insider view of game developement. It keeps getting me excited about every bit of news we get.

Can't wait to see that marvelous hand-crafted machanism of war you're building us running live !

Keep it up !

cool! cant wait to see some visuals

exciting

weekly updates are a quite awesome idea

I hope we alpha testers will be able to try out the pre-game tech demos! If not, perfectly understood, but... there's a elegance to being able to try out the bare tech behind it all.

Good stuff guys. Can't wait to see some new visuals

Will the planets have different sizes? I don't want them to be too small that gives the feeling the bots are walking on a ball.. When zoomed in I like the feeling that the terrain is flat and not round.

It's already been confirmed they're aiming to make it scalable in such a way that you can have very, very large planets.

Love what you're doing Neutrino, keep it up!

Neutrino,

How is the geography described inside the game? Do you seed a basic sphere (generated with good old "x=(r^2-y^2)^1/2" ) and make the terrain features with additions/subtraction on each point? Or do you use a smarter way to do it?

At the most basic level, I understand that they deform a cube. However, they are allowing for 3D terrain so they must be using something more than a simple height-map. I'm not sure how exactly it is done, but neutrino described it as a "terrain displacement map", if I remember correctly.

Can't wait to change my background image, and maybe actually have a screen saver

How flexible are you making the game engine? will you be able to play on non spherical maps. e.g. Cubes, pyramids, or torus, Just picture a war raging over a Möbius strip?


If an ant were to crawl along the length of this strip, it would return to its starting point having traversed the entire length of the strip (on both sides of the original paper) without ever crossing an edge.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Möbius_strip

I understand if that's not possible on the games initial release, but is it a possibility for future development?

We are going for spheres for now but there is room for improvement on that in the future.

I can see Halo mods lol.

I'm pretty sure I read somewhere that although the maps are spherical, you would be presenting them in a manner more familiar to RTS players. Can you elaborate on this?

Of all the different possibilities for map layouts, I would be surprised if the classic rectangle weren't the most popular.

That was changed. The actual quote was saying the maps being spherical was just a trick - the manner of keeping them more RTS like would've been using a rectangular map, just that it's visually deformed and joins at the edges to form a torus.

Yes, I did change my mind on that when I decided to allow more complex topology. The trick thing also had a few other things that didn't sit well.

Neutrino, I will pay 60 american dollars for an expansion that allows us to play a match on a mobius strip the size of a planet.