What's been happening? Not much. My PC has been in boxes for a couple of weeks whilst I've been moving house, this coupled with a heavy workload (but learning Android development, fun!), doing French, Russian and Ju Jitsu in the evenings (not at the same class) and attempting to draw again and remixing some tracks for a friend is making dev time somewhat scarce.
However, a commenter asks (thanks "WebSurfinMurf") whether the source will be available. Yes, absolutely. In fact, it may even be necessary to see certain portions of the game finished that I'm not terribly interested in. My plan is to do a decent tidy of the source code and then put it on a free account at GitHub, despite the fact I've been using SVN so far and have no real experience with Git... though I'm told it's easy enough.
Videos... videos! No apologies for the quality of this one, I'm using a USB2.0 video capture dongle with good old NTSC. So it looks like a lot of the US TV shows that got shown over here in the 80s. ;-)
Currently things are based on context. Click on an area of land, Captain moves there. Click on a Settlement banner, he'll recruit if it's friendly, attack if it's hostile. Likewise for entities. I'll set it so that clicking on buildings and agents goes up the heirarchy if appropriate. For buildings, clicking the workshop will initiate a workshop process, etc. No need for icons.
The resources for the project aren't too bad, but I need to strip everything out of the default Ogre media folder that isn't directly related to the project.
Instancing
A problem that's come up lately (particularly on a couple of low-end machines) is that OGRE slows down massively with multiple entities. (in Ogre, an Entity is a mesh, with material and animations, and attached to a positional node in the 3D scene). With about 50 units in a large army, and 50 units in large towns, often about 300-400 geometry batches are being sent to the graphics card. It's not really the 'amount' of triangles, it's more the fact that it's being sent in many batches, as apposed to sending a few batches with tons of triangles which is much more efficient.
OGRE has support for Instancing ( http://www.ogre3d.org/docs/api/html/classOgre_1_1InstancedGeometry.html ) , but the changes required in the code to support this are pretty horrendous and kinda break the paradigm that links game entities with their OGRE entities.
We may have to just see how it plays on people's machines to see if it's going to be an issue. Also, I'd like to keep individual entities as it makes selection much easier.
Wow, that looks fantastic. You've done a great job; it's actually visually identifiable as Powermonger to anyone who played it back in the Day.
ReplyDeleteI never played the original; but I can't wait to play your version! Looks very cool.
ReplyDeleteAbout the instancing: I second the let's wait and see approach. :-)
Hell, this looks amazing!
ReplyDeleteI can't wait till its finished.
When will we able to play an Alpha/Beta-Version?
Please, dont let us wait to long, i can't stand it if i watch this video..
I'm late in commenting on this. For not having much time you are still making good progress! The graphics are looking wonderful. I love the little farm textures, that really adds to the effect. The only thing that seems a little off (and the maybe just for me), is the stone paving in the towns. The scale seems too big on that graphic, if it could be smaller, it would look better. I think the overall graphics are very nice!
ReplyDeleteWhen you are talking about clicking by context, you say it would go up the hierarchy. For most tasks a single click would handle it, but for situations where you might have multiple possibilities withing the context...how would that be handled? An example would be clicking on an enemy village flag, you usually would want to attack. What if you wanted to barter? Make an alliance? I do use both of the features.
What about a having right click context menu for handling multiple possibilities?
Again, love what you have done so far! Please don't ever considering shelving this project...it has way too much potential!
Gosh,
ReplyDeleteI am starving to play a beta of this. Are you planing to release one? That would be great!
Regards from europe!
If you use SVN, you can make free account at Google Code (http://code.google.com). Google Code support Subversion and Mercurial, have issue tracker etc.
ReplyDeleteStill alive?
ReplyDeleteyou're video remind me what i imagine when i was playing on my amiga long time ago you put every little details (like birds ...) but with the nowdays computer i hope (and dream) that your project go live if Peter Molyneux hear me "darn look at this ! have you forget everything ?"
ReplyDeleteWow this is brilliant! Great work :)
ReplyDeleteThis is really great work.
ReplyDeleteIs it possible to get source code for original Powermonger somewhere? I mean SEGA or PC versions. I am developing simple 2-D remake of Powermonger for Java and really interested in reading the source.
seriy@inbox.ru
I'm excited to see more progress, are you still there?
ReplyDelete