Legends from the Lost Realms Progress
The Graphics Engine
This project actually started as a way of learning how to code using Open GL, so the graphics engine was the first part to take shape. At this point in time the graphics engine is stable, more or less complete, but not polished enough to be considered finished. It is also unoptimised and while things run well on my computer (some people claim it is too fast!), people with less powerful machines might find things a bit slow. So far the graphics engine includes,
- 3D terrain using multi-pass texture blending and lighting
- 3D objects (buildings, etc), again with texture and lighting effects
- High resolution billboard textures for trees, characters and armies (with full blending for trees)
- Weather effects
- Smoke effects for warning beacons and fires
- User interface controls
- Support for a variety of resolutions and colour depths
- Engine independent data, with all textures, terrain data and object data being held in a variety of different data files, allowing for easy modificiations
Further develops will include,
- Minor improvments to texture handling for objects
- Better handling of character billboards (full blending and better positioning, this being dependent on gameplay code)
- Minor polishing of the user interface graphics
- Better handling of lighting effects to improve the transition from day to night
Multiplayer Games
The structure of the game code has undergone a few changes recently to fully incorporate both single and multiplayer games. The following types of multiplayer games will be available,
- Hotseat play where players share the same computer, taking turns to play
- Play by e-mail, with save files being passed via e-mail from player to player
Basic Gameplay
Controls for movement, end of turn and character selection are all working well. In addition a basic level of character interaction has been completed (although this can be improved on). Fatigue and moral data elements are in place, but not yet used as this needs to be incorporated at the same time as the combat system (again the data structure are ready for this, but there is no code using this data yet).
Scenarios, Save Games
Scenarios are already possible as are loading of save files (as the format for scenario and save files is identical), but saving of save files is not yet possible (although this is fairly trival to sort out). Save game functionality (and handling of multiplayer save games) will be the last thing to be implemented for the simple reason that I don't want to add this until the game data files are 100% stable.
Artifical Intelligence
This is going well. An event handling system is already in place, this being used to control the high level AI strategy (as well as cut scenes etc that add a bit of flavour to the scenarios). At the moment the lower level per-character AI is under development. A working version of this is actually complete, but in certain cases it slows down to a crawl, something that is unacceptable, even for a turn-based game. Improvements are possible here, but it may be necessary to re-code at least part of the AI engine to get significantly quicker processing.
Ideas and Comments
If there are any features you feel must be included in this game or if you have any comments then please contact me at [email protected]
