Hey there! In this thread, I'll post some screenshots and random thoughts of the new stuff coming up for the next version, let's say it'll be the beta 0.5.
There's no release date for it yet, as there's quite some things still to implement. As you probably know, I'm working on a new map in which I pursue to introduce some new game mechanics and a greatly different play style from the previous "vanilla" map.
As you can see in the screenshot, the most important new feature at this point is buildings of arbitrary shapes, which are basically made by combining several rectangle buildings. Recently I've been mostly working with getting the AI capable of navigating around these kind of shapes and to get them to realize where they can find cover in these new corners. It's beginning to reach a playable state now, but some oddities still exist to fix.
The bases in the map are/will be very closely positioned, which appears to generate quite big battles even with very low soldier counts. My development PC (with ATI Radeon HD 4800 series, AMD Phenom 9550 Quad-core 2.2GHz, from around 2008) started to seriously hog down with around 70 nearby active soldiers, so I had to spent several days to optimize the animating system and a bunch of other things. The great thing is that I got it going from below 20fps to 60fps again by moving more processing over to the GPU using shaders - bad thing is that it won't help much those who'll play the game with old low-end graphics cards.
Next thing to start working on will be the theme, fresh textures and colors. I'm looking forward to get the ground floor of the buildings to look like shops, add balconies, have some kind of fake signs and ads all over the place, maybe add some tables and chairs to make some places look like restaurants, you know, details. The lighting and fog could use some variety too, so that not all maps would look the same.
I also want to get that dock/pier -object thing done for 0.5 already, it should fit the theme that I've got in mind quite nicely.
Ladders and getting on roofs will likely not fit into 0.5, but will follow shortly for 0.6 or whatever the next version will be called.
Update 10.10.2011:I decided to concentrate on the other things first before starting to work with the textures, so I mainly spent the week with the platform object and mortars.
The platform object (previously also known as dock/pier) is shaping up quite nicely and can be used to create these evenly leveled platforms extruding out from slopes, making it ideal for piers and other structures on shores. Here's a shot in which it's used as a basis for a building, with a fence.
The other thing that I've been having a blast lately is the mortar fire. Now it just lacks the logic of how often the player(s) and AI can use it and some radio chats to visualize the actual fire command being issued and to let the player know when the mortars have fired their round. After that it should be pretty ok to play with - of course more nuances can be added later.
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