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[ryansumo]

Nice to see some more turn based games pop up on tigsource!

[danieru]

Thanks for the kind words guys, its encouraging.

This past few days I have been working on adding destructable units upon death. Its still work in progress but this gif shows off what I have today.

[danieru]

After a few more hours I got the explosions more explody. Now I am faced with the reality that filling the map with debris might negativly impact gameplay. Any thoughts dear readers? Does this look playable?

[Bombini]

Perfect readability!
Adds this small nuance of distortion which was missing!

[JobLeonard]

I'm a bit worried about what happens to performance if there's too much of it, but it looks fine

[danieru]

Ah thats good news. I'm going to keep the feature.

Performance might become an issue eventually. A normal game should not get more than 100 dead units on the map so it should be manageable. This play session I prolonged on purpose to get maximum debris.

[JobLeonard]

Maybe you can use a [circular buffer](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circular_buffer) and just overwrite the oldest debris?

[danieru]

A circular buffer is great for queues. But I'm not actually cycling objects around. The objects should get batched and fundamentally are just a bunch of transforms.

The performance bottleneck will come from physics simulation and rendering. Effectivly the question is less how to cap the performance cost but is it even needed. From a gameplay perspective it is not needed, which is the biggest driver for me. The performance cost of debris is low, I've made sure of that.

[JobLeonard]

Do you turn the physics off once the debris is lying on the ground, or can it constantly be moved around by units and other debris?

[danieru]

Physics engines work by identifying objects at rest and not simulating them. So turning off the physics would only have an effect when new objects are colliding. Which in such a case we would want to see the objects collide. So turning off physics for an object does not buy us an effect we want 

[JobLeonard]

Hey man, I'm too used to handrolling my own stuff I forget that these pre-made things have optimisations like that built in

[danieru]

Yeah eh, its pretty sweet. Back in HTML5 I had to watch everything and the speed was already sub 60. Now with Unreal it runs at a surprising speed even on my HD4000 laptop 

[SolarLune]

I'm in the minority, but it does look rather unreadable at the moment. I think turning the debris gray might help with that. Also worth noting is that if the terrain matters in gameplay, then you probably would want to be able to see the differences (city, forest, mountain, long grass, river, etc) at a glance, rather than having the debris block your view of the field.

EDIT: Oh, but it looks pretty cool and colorful as it is, of course.

[danieru]

The upgrade to Unreal 4.9 broke the textures. Its on the TODO list to fix 

But instead of that I added clouds! The cloud models are my first attempt at modeling in blender. Luckily low-poly minecraft style clouds were my goal.

Some other visual tweeks. Still not quite happy with the lighting.

[Bombini]

Not sure if you need those clouds. What would they add except being in the way?

[marcgfx]

I guess thats not the final form of the clouds? maybe it would be good if they were a lot more transparent, but I must agree that they don't really make much sense. what you could do, is just show the cloud shadow (as if they were above the camera). but I think the shapes need to be a lot more interesting for this to make sense.

[danieru]

The clouds are at 0.7 opacity, then can go more transparent. My goal with the clouds is to break the world out of the game board. Similar to how the game instructions are along the map edge. The clouds should be infrequent enough that it does not annoy the player yet still obscure the view.

The models themself could be more interesting, but this is what I have 

Can you guys think of a cool effect? I want to add things which allow the player to manipulate the world. I want the board to feel alive.

[danieru]

Today I did a bunch of behind the scenes work and fixed bugs. Biggest news is that units no longer rotate at the speed of light stopping at random orientations. Other highlights include:

1. Units capturing an enemy's city are no longer healed by the under siege population.
2. Artillery no longer counter attack direct units...

Actually all these bugs are pretty embarrassing. Its important stuff which got left behind as I worked on new systems or more critical bugs.

There is one new feature: the city contestment animation now goes faster as the closer a city is to being captured.

[danieru]

Added unit merging:


Added battle effects:


Fixed a crash when the player drew a path through a friendly unit in a specific way.

Fixed a bunch of other stuff.

Last Tokyo Indies I had a chance to let some new players try out the game. Special thanks to Alex from Friends & Foe for his excellent feedback.

From that play session and prior ones I have concluded that the bottom right and bottom left HUD elements are worthless. Players are just not reading them. The in world view dominates their attention so all game state needs to be communicated within the world. Thus things like what tiles are a factory or the defensive value of terrain need to be clearer I think.

[danieru]

Just one more thing before I roll over into the futon. A new style for the HUD: