NOTE: This is NOT a finished game, it’s not even a demo … it’s not even pre-beta … its just some pixels uploaded!
[Pixel Demo build last updated 05.09.11]
Writing new path finding a.i. routines this evening …
Recently been doing a lot of reading about path finding including, A*, Navigation Meshes and Group Path finding … oh also added a high rez in-game overlay for some hud effects which looks quite nice.
The game play has also moved on with the ability to ‘capture’ powers on islands. This gives the player incentive to terror-form land to help their population capture and explore their surroundings. Had some thought’s on adding volcano’s and believe that this is simple to achieve, so will be added that by next build release.
Also to keep focused I need a roadmap list of things to do:
- Finish building GFX
- Finish populants GFX- Add HD hud overlay
- Finalize hud display and interactions
- Sounds
- Menu screens
- Island summary
- Volcano!
- Overall look and feel tighten up
- make Island level’s data
Yeah it’s not too bad. For people wandering around the best trick is to use Math.random which you can you to assign a direction to the numbers (say 1 = up, 2 = left, 3 = right etc) and then write functions telling the cpu people what to do depending on the direction.
With the mega-lo-mania game i started a few months ago the AI was a lot harder. It’s sitting down and thinnking “What would I do?” and breaking it down into functions.
Check this out, its the AI for pacman, an interesting read :D
http://home.comcast.net/~jpittman2/pacman/pacmandossier.html
And for a far more heaver read there’s this:
http://www.gamedev.net/page/resources/_/reference/programming/artificial-intelligence/ai-theory/project-ai-r545
So all the code is now converted to AS3 and the overall performance increase can really be noticed. As i geeked offin the last entry, the ms counter now barely registers 2ms even with over 100 people and 100 buildings! The conversion process took probably just over an hour, however a lot of tinkering was needed for a final version to run smoothly with all the features from the AS2 version.
(Showing 61 buildings, 41 roaming population and no slow down in the engine! The MS counter is actually 2ms it’s just when I grabbed this screen it had dropped to 0)
One of the biggest differences between AS2 and AS3 is just how strict AS3 is. All variables need to be declared and typed correctly. In the long run this is a good thing as it leads to good programming. However users of AS2 who may have become at home with AS2’s lax nature (as I had) will find the change at first frustrating. One of the biggest bits of additional code that the port needed was checks to make sure the function’s weren’t trying to access array’s out of range, something that wont tend to bother AS2 :p
Another change is the way bitmaps work and the introduction of a new object simply called ‘bitmap’. You now need to set up your bitmapData, then create a bitmap from this, and then attach this to your child! OK I’ll admit it’s only one extra line but come on! :D
In finishing up it’s fair to say that I put off opening Flash CS3 for ages, but now I have it could be that I wont go back to coding in AS2. I’ll still be using Flash 8 for drawing, but the performance increase in AS3 is well worth the investment.
Make sure you put some of your players in the mines to gather resources so you can make troops. If you invent defense troops you can place them by clicking on the defense icon
Ok, not done an update for a while so here goes …
Not much more major has been done on the code side of things however a number of tweaks have taken place. Thinking about it I have actually re-written the ‘battle’ functions as the old version on the odd occasion forgot that the battle in a zone was over! Anyway, that’s all alot better. Also only items that can be built in a zone are shown in the inventory section. Kinda handy as there’s nothing worse than spending ages researching something you can build.
Oh a graphics side, I’d like to aim to have some new character base sprites ready to roll by the end of this month (feb 2011) so I’ll see how I get on. Each character takes up 16 sprites and then you have to X that by 4 teams … so in total your looking at 64 sprites per troop character.
Also just a little thing about blitting and copying pixels in AS2. You don’t have to have a separate alpha mask image for cutting out sprites as I was getting at in an earlier post. You can reference the same sprite sheet which includes your alpha and it all works…
Land ahoy
ok, so I’m back. Even though I’ve had a week away from doing any work on this I’ve returned with fresh eye’s and I think im there in proving the concept of what I’m trying to do!
Rather than continue with this build I’m ready to sit down and come up with my own story, graphics and game play. So with that all said, here it is, the proof of concept.
Launch MLMGameDev Proof of concept
It’s important to note that this isn’t a alpha, beta or any sort of finished game. It was written in 3 weeks. It’s simply a proof of concept. For those of you that have played mega-lo-mania before you may be able to get to grips with it!
There is no end to the game, if you wipe out the other 3 CPU players then consider yourself done :D
Enjoy
Just having to take a break on development for a week as other things have come up and burning midnight oil is taking its toll. Stay tuned will be back in a week! :D
Working on the little guys that sit in buildings defending them. I had started writing these in a completely different function to the normal troops, but now I’m thinking that I need to put them into the main display list so that they are handled as normal troops.
This helps because all the throwing functions of bullets and things already exist. Troops can throw pebbles, rocks, arrows, spears, bullets etc.