End of September Update - More Terrain, More Tooling
As per last month's update, this month was spent continuing the titanic task of implementing more and more terrain features.
First off, cliffs are now mostly complete, save for a few visual errors here and there. Note that the odd square shadows stemming from the cliffs are a result of only the cliff tops casting shadows (while the facades do not cast shadows). Yet another issue to add to the pile.
I've also spent some time acquiring a number of 3D scans of rock formations and cliffs and altering their textures to match our current terrain. Aside from the obvious of just being map decorations, will also serve as being "sweeteners" for the actual cliff faces, giving them a more natural, organic look. Many of them are destructible as well, in keeping with the game being as consistent as possible with most map objects being destructible.
These can also look pretty damned cool with altered lighting and fog settings.
We've brought on an additional engineer from the OpenRA community to help us get a lot of these terrain-related features done more quickly, so hopefully soon we'll be able to show off the "stacking cliffs" features, as well as things like an automated road building tool. Speaking of which, we also managed to get these dirt road tiles ingame. This was a huge effort, as unlike most terrain, which is generically single-tile with some adjacency transition tiles, these road pieces are multiple-tiles per entity, requiring a lot of precision to set them up correctly. The total combination of straight pieces, end pieces, junctions, and sloped variants for many of these variants totaled at nearly 130 different types.
As can be seen, there are some errors in the seamlessness of these tiles; junctions seem to have had their transition artwork set up correctly, and thus are not seamless with straight road tiles as they should be. The sloped versions could also use a rework. More work for the polishing phase of the game, I suppose.
There's also been some additional work altering and fleshing out more vegetation types. The original trees had a swaying animation, which, while cool, was an absolute pain to set up and was pretty choppy looking, and in spite of that, took up an absolutely massive amount of the sprite sheet, due to each fully-leaved tree having an animation of 40 frames each. This is horribly inefficient, so we've redone the sprite sheets and cut out the animations. We've also exported them in an RGBA format (following an improvement to the way the render engine interprets transparency), allow for trees that blend better with the overall scene.
We also threw in some cacti for good measure.
There's also artwork for a bunch of palm and rainforest/jungle trees sitting on my harddrive that's basically done, but I just didn't have time to set them up to be used ingame as of writing this post.
On the tooling side, we managed to make a major breakthrough by fixing up and massively upgrading the game's asset editor tool. Not only can it be launched as a separate executable from the main game now, but it now has functioning depth, and can adjust the unit's full rotation, making it very useful for creating new units and ensuring that their working parts are all assembled correctly.
We also have some super early prototype concepts for faction "hub" areas. These will be a sort of pre-rendered interactive menu that exists for each faction's campaign, representing the player's base of operations. The player will be able to navigate to begin the next mission, or scroll to other menus that provide additional story information and character interactions.
That's all for this month. Hopefully in October, we can wrap up most of the terrain work, and begin producing more actual units and gameplay functionality.