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[Gregg Williams]

So here is a question for anyone that is interested in online multi-player.

What lobby features are a must have for you?

To give a frame of reference, we are thinking lobby wise along the lines of say Battle.net classic.

[Impmaster]

Ping, number of players, game mode...

[Vitali Kirpu]

So many questions!! Just finnish the game already .. i am big fan of this games!

[Gregg Williams]

Ping, number of players, game mode...

I wonder if ping matters at all in a turn based game?

Though I suppose it could possibly be looked at as a matter of connection stability, which is of concern for people getting dropped/disconnected during the game. Although to be fair ping really is a terrible measurement of "stability".

[Impmaster]

All I know is that living in China here makes me wary of high ping.

[Craig Stern]

Oh! I just noticed this. The mock-up looks really slick, and I'm loving the sprite animations!

Question: how are you planning to ensure unit visibility behind buildings?

Just finnish the game already

Well, there's one vote for setting the game in Finland.

[Gregg Williams]

Oh! I just noticed this. The mock-up looks really slick, and I'm loving the sprite animations!

Cheers

Question: how are you planning to ensure unit visibility behind buildings?

Yeah.. thats one of those million dollar questions every isometric game ends up asking itself. Most likely some sort of unit outline that will overlay over the building, or some sort of semi-transparency. Its a question we don't have an exact answer to yet, and hope to answer with a prototype sometime soon.

[Gregg Williams]

Working on the map editor more. Which right now involves figuring out how all the tiles and associated layers are going to work. We want a map editor with a lot of smart automatic features built into it, to allow for players to easily create maps.

This means creating tiles which can work nicely when randomly selected. For instance you have a road brush, and this road brush actually pulls from 10-15 different road tile variations at random as you paint from it. Likewise later in a decoration panel, you might have 2-3 additional road tiles which don't work well when randomly placed as they are very detailed or context specific and look out of place if to many are used, etc, and so the map maker needs to apply them with care.

Then you have things like auto tiling to handle terrain transitions automatically, and also prefabricated tile based objects. Like say trees which might actually need to be built via 2-3 different tile layers, to cover the base, shadow, and canopy. Instead of the player needing to manage that level of editing detail, the map editor should just let you place a tree, and handle allocating all of the right tiles to the right tile layers.

All of this also means we need ways to define this type of stuff via some sort of data format that gets fed into the editor.

[Gregg Williams]

So a couple updates here.

Craig was asking about unit visibility, and the following is one possible take on that. The movement pathing tiles could go either in the foreground like current, or be moved into the background with proper depth.  The green tile selector (attached to mouse movement) could force another building if needed to go into the black state as well.

Finally we also began testing some of the road tiles to allow for easy painting with tile randomization, along with basic tile walking to allow unit movement on the map.

[Belimoth]

So are units going to be limited to movement on roads? Or just vehicles?

[Gregg Williams]

So are units going to be limited to movement on roads? Or just vehicles?

Nah, I doubt anything will be limited to just roads. Road tiles are just the first tiles to start getting worked on. Soon enough ground tiles, and buildings and the rest will arrive, and some proper scenes should start to come together.

[Gregg Williams]

Started work on pathfinding support. Things are pretty slow right now, as I bounce between engine foundation, map editor work, and identifying even more tools that need made like tile data editors.

[jO]

Ohhhh... I saw this on Pixeljoint a while ago and thought that it would only be a mockup. Now seeing that this is actually going to be a game gets me very exicted! Keep it up

[Gregg Williams]

Ohhhh... I saw this on Pixeljoint a while ago and thought that it would only be a mockup. Now seeing that this is actually going to be a game gets me very exicted! Keep it up

Cheers

[Gregg Williams]

Some more road/street tile refinements, can't wait to start dropping buildings and foliage in there.

[Pineapple]

I want some

[pluckyporcupine]

Nah, I doubt anything will be limited to just roads. Road tiles are just the first tiles to start getting worked on. Soon enough ground tiles, and buildings and the rest will arrive, and some proper scenes should start to come together.

Rather than limiting them, it'd be interesting to see how tactics would be affected if roads gave a bonus for movement.

As for the visibility thing, I kind of like how it's done right there. It allows you to see the units, while still clearly defining where the building is. Maybe make it so that the tile you're going to move to sticks out a bit if it's under one of the shadowed-out buildings.

Oh, and the pixel art looks great.

[Gregg Williams]

Rather than limiting them, it'd be interesting to see how tactics would be affected if roads gave a bonus for movement.

Yeah I'm not entirely sure how much terrain modification will be at work in the game. We're really trying to in general focus on in-city fights to contain our project scope. That way we can try an really focus on that core experience/setting and make it really great, vs trying to just do to many things and falling short.

Oh, and the pixel art looks great.

Cheers

[Gregg Williams]

So not a ton of progress these last few days, pretty backed up with wrapping up some other projects, and contract works.

Still I sat down for an hour and whipped up a new internal tool that should prove useful.



Its functionality will probably get pulled into a more fleshed out tile info editor (There is a lot of potential data we want to associate with tiles themselves, such as walkability, destroyed states, animation sequences, if they block LOS or not, and so forth.) but for the moment this little tool will happily scan in a sheet or strip of tiles and output a file of their associated heights.

Having the height in pixels per tile is quite important when working in isometric environments. As pretty much anything that is going to be drawn over a tile like a unit, or selection cursor, etc, needs to know how tall a given tile is to properly offset its rendering.

[motorherp]

I'm not sure if you're aware of this or not, but why not use TileEd instead of creating your own tool.  As far as I can see it should support all the features you need.