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[Reilly]

After moving you could just let the player select one of the 4 adjacent tiles to face the unit that direction.

[SolarLune]

Following because this looks pretty nice, and Advanced Wars is fairly great.

[danieru]

Following because this looks pretty nice, and Advanced Wars is fairly great.

Thanks man!

This week Uberren did up all three transport units. We were not sure what to call them but we arrived at "CargoHeli", "CargoShip", and "Convoy". Don't mind the newsletter where I called the Convoy a "Transport", I was just plain wrong   

I experimented with a background behind our logo. It turns out a 25px gussian blur looks pretty good.


The CargoHeli


The CargoShip


The Convoy


The major programming progress this week was a high-performance shader based animation framework. Or in other words: I'm abusing vertex colors to store parameters read in the vertex shader which feed into various math functions and move the vertex. This should allow us to achieve idle animations on par with Advance War's without the performance cost of full vertex morph animations.

[danieru]

Just a quick content dump this week. The particles are pretty exciting and Uberren just pushed some new textures  but those are for next week's update  .

Dynamic placement of the smoke stacks took far longer than I care to admit. Let us just say it touched the map generation code...


I got bored of our that map we've been using for almost two months so this week will kick off a goal to create one new map a week. Our first new map is Rec Isle. I have no imagination so Rec Isle just stands for Rectangular Island  .


The AA units.

The Scouts.

[danieru]

Nope nevermind, I didn't get any time away from work this week so Uberren was the only one making progress this week.

He built the team specific HQs:


Plus the Heavy Infantry:


All I got done was a single map. And I'm not even sure this map would be fun to play  :

[danieru]

Watching my brother play Arche Age I noticed something about their juicy-ness. In Arche Age's combat any damage dealt will pop a number onto the screen. This number zooms from the player's POV then "sticks" to the screen. In between the color shifts from white to yellow, unless it is a large number in which case it stays white. Then after a moment the number slides down and fades out. They have put real and effort into this animation.

And yet they just used Times New Roman! 

[danieru]

Working on the game logic these past two weeks has been fantastic fun.

We've added the following features:

1. HQs are in game. They cannot build units but can be captured for a capture victory.


2. Players can build units at factories, airports, and shipyards.


3. Specific units can only be built at specific buildings.
4. Players can win by capturing the enemies HQ or destroying their units
5. The HUD has been redesigned
6. A primitive menu system now exists
7. Proper camera controls
8. Camera follows focus and can be rotated and zoomed
9. Most units now have idle animations


10. The map editor can now place units usable at map start
11. The map editor can now make buildings owned

12. The map editor can now generate weird map shapes like donuts


13. Bridges can now span over oceans


The menus look horrible. I did up a mockup in inkscape and what we have now is the product of half day hacking css to get close. Some combination of svgs and css should get something that looks like the mockup, I hope. This is the inkscape mockup:



I would love feedback on the mockup! 

[danieru]

Wrote an initial save system. The save functions just dump the subsystems' internal state into a json object which gets passed up the heirarcy. Pretty boring stuff. The resulting save file is gigantic because the line of sight (and movement) calculation system saves 4KiB for each instance of the simulation core on a 32x32 map. This works out to 24KiB+ save files on a 4 player map. 

Such a waste. So the plan is to implement run-length compression. Since the line of sight data is almost all zeros this will save mucho data, I hope  . The map data should benefit as well.

[danieru]

Runlength encoding was a success. The straight encoding worked well: going from 4096 entries to 2516 entires. Going even further by compressing each color channel seperatly it went down to 580 entires. To go further we'll need to flush line of sight data and rebuild on each load.

For now though I really need to focus on my move. I fly out on saturday and land in narita on sunday. I still need to make a packing list, printer the boarding passes, and order a sim card.

[.Uberren]

Hi all,
I'm the artist working with danieru on this

Just wanted to post some gifs I made of the idle animations for a couple of the units.  There are some issues, such as the differing colours of the outline and the fact that the outline doesn't actually follow along with the animation, but those will soon be fixed

I spent quite a while trying to figure out how to get some good quality gifs of the animations going, trying many screen capture devices and then converting the video files to gif (the image quality would end up terrible).

But I found a method that works pretty well, so I will post what I did:
-I downloaded a program called WebmCam.
-followed the install instructions and got it set up with ffmpeg.
-opened the WebmCam program and then into settings.
-set up the temp folder and made sure to DISABLE the deletion of frames after filming.
-record the screen.
-access the temp folder and then drag and drop the recorded frames into Gimp.
-resize, etc etc.
-export as gif.

So...hopefully this will be useful to someone trying to find a way to make gifs of their screen.
One of the downsides of this is...the timing is often off from what appears on your actual screen.

Anyway, speaking of gifs, here they are

[danieru]

Today I shifted a bunch of rending code out of the giant render object. Now the shader and material stuff is out into its own object. Likewise there is now an object which owns the webgl context and two seperate objects which utilize this context.

As usual shifting 1k+ lines of code causes some bugs, but those have been squished. Tomorrow I hope to unify our input handling. We need some form of input focus stealing. Right now the menus do not acquire the arrow keys from the human player. Thus you can still move units with the menu up.

[danieru]

I'm alive at least. Sorry this is mostly a personal update. I just moved to Tokyo from Canada so I'm going through some culture adjustment.

It has a cool control panel with a button to fill and heat (at 40c) a bath.

The TV banners in the trains have ads for the New Nintendo 3DS and the stations have posters for Smash Bros 3DS.

The money is too large for my wallet. Yet in turn the receipts are much small than Canadian receipts.

Japan still has 1 penny coins so I've started a "worthless coinage pile". These pennies are actually made of aluminum.

Wondering around Akihabara I found myself in a 5 story story dedicated to computer parts. One floor was half computer cases and half monitors. 

Also all the doors and handles open the wrong way. Same thing with walking. Everyone walks on the left just like the cars. Also when walking down the street cars will pass you with a foot to spare. The road is that thin.

Every show has a picture-in-picture view of some person's face as they react to the thing being shown.

Immigration was pretty fast and easy though. No line up, a quick photo and off I went. Much nicer than waiting 3 hours in the american "extra inspection" room and missing my flight.

[danieru]

Guess what I found in Akihabara! 



Sadly they did not have any Famicon consoles.

[danieru]

This week we've been refining our geometric style and rounding hard edges.

We did have a false start working on the cliffs. Our first attempt had the cliffs baked into the terrain.


That approach has the fatal flaw in requring 100+ variations for every terrain and building type. Pushing the cliffs into the ocean tiles should solve this.

[.Uberren]

Some new tiles for our armies to fight on

[danieru]

Here are those cliffs ingame along with alterations to our movement range display graphic thingy:

[danieru]

Today I experimented with shader based perlin generated water effects. I was not able to get an acceptable effect so today was a bust.  I'll see what Uberren's opinion is but we'll likely use something texture based if we do anything new.

[danieru]

Somehow while writing the weekly newsletter I thought it would be a good idea to explain how 3D has made development easier for us.

The entire thing is a good 500 word essay  . If that does not scare you away then feel free to check it out: http://eepurl.com/6hkt5

Today's accomplishment is a semi-intelligent system for guessing what unit the player wants to use next. We then move the cursor to this unit, saving the player from navigating across the map. This is one of the things which annoyed me about Advance Wars. I hated marching infantry units to the frontlines. You had to move the cursor back and forth for each infantry. Now the process takes half as much time. Once you've moved one unit the cursor jumps to the next unit so your effort is only required for one leg of the trip.

If the system suggests the wrong unit it will learn from the mistake and not suggest the same unit next turn.

[BeaKManiak]

Looks fantastic! I loved Advance Wars and this is looking greater every day. Keep up the good work!! 

[danieru]

Wow thanks man. I was actually kind of worried we did something wrong and scared everyone away.