Epic (working name)

[Botjer]

ok, here comes a bunch of questions.

Im working on modding this engine, but i want to make something of larger scale, is it smarter to keep the size of humans in the game and zoom out?
or is it better to make scaled down models? (Note i am making less poly intense models of my own at the moment)

If 1. How do you let the player zoom out more?

If 2. does it mess up the size system? (which i by the way havnt found any explanation for)

More things:
I want units to belong to squads, ie you build a swordsman squad you get 10 swordsmen, that when you select one of them, all in the squad get selected. do i need to program this in c++?

Building radius, a castle has a limit how far from it certain buildings can be built. Actually im interested in setting up two of these limiting radius.

I want to remove the classic building units, ie the wroker, i want to enter the castle choose to build a building, then place it, and it gets built by itself.

[Botjer]

More questions: is it possible to have different attack animations that are randomly played?

[Duke]

Well the landscape is tiled and every size one unit occupies exactly one tile and can only move from one tile to the other.
So if you make units smaler they would stand rather far appart.

Glest uses only a fixed camera set, but GAP has options in the .ini to modify it freely.

squads aren't implemented, the only thing that comes to mind is that you could make a single size three unit that just has 9 swordman meshes made into one.
Only problem, that whole squad gets damaged and all of the die at once.

In this engine Building and Units are exactly the same, only that buildings miss a walking command. So you can let a castle build buildings. you just have to set a range at which it can operate which matches your other request.
Only drawback, you can only build one building at a time.
Workaround would be to let the catle just set the building ground which could be build realy fast and then let these ground morph slowly into the actual building.

No idea about the animations.

[wciow]

If you want to make a mod with a more epic scale I would suggest zooming the camera out. This is something which has just become available in Daniel's GAE engine (stickied on the board). Glest can handle quite alot of units on screen so making it look epic shouldn't be too much problem

As for animations, this is a much requested feature for Glest but right now no-one has implemented it. Currently models are limited to one animation per skill/command.

[Botjer]

So lets say ill just program my own squad code... where do i get hold of an uncompiled version of the game?

By the way how does GAE and GAP and all those others relate to each other?

[Botjer]

Found the source code...
Now to set up visual studio, i really need to learn programming once and for all.

[ZaggyDad]

GAE and GAP are the same thing.

~Zaggy

[Botjer]

in command and conquer generals they had an object called a nexus, it was essentially a unit that hade no model. it had a number of units linked to it, and its healthbar showed all its members combined health. they used it for angry mob. Worked great unless you put the members of the nexus in a transport. then the nexus couldnt keep up with its members

[daniel.santos]

I hope this isn't confusing, the 1st part of this I actually wrote this morning and forgot to submit, doh!

Well cool, I was just hashing out some ideas about managing animations yesterday.  In the FPM mod, I wanted to have crusaders look like they are casting a spell when they are healing (we only have a static model right now) and I noticed that in the 1st part of the dying animation for guards, he waves his arms around a bit.  So I had the crusader use the dying animation and just played it really slowly so it would end before he actually falls.  It actually looks  pretty decent for a hack.  That is, unless he casts two spells in a row, whence he will slowly fall to the ground like he was acting in some melodrama and then suddenly spring back up.  I thought it would be nice if I could make him end the animation sequence a certain way through it instead of being forced to go through the whole thing.

The next item I weighed into this is how to make tileset objects look realistic in weather.  I want to implement a weather system who's parameters are defined in the tileset, where upon wind blows from a specific direction, with gusts like real weather and have the trees respond in kind as a gust travels across the landscape.  Figuring out how to calculate and mange weather like that isn't too hard its self, but I had to figure out how to implement an animation system that will make this feasible.  What I finally decided is that we need to be able to tell the engine that we want to run an animation sequence from x frame to y frame (and at least y should be able to contain a fraction) and then play in reverse.  But that alone isn't good enough, we need to also be able to dictate the speed of traversal through these frames so that we can ease into the end of the animation sequence and ease back out of it.  Or we should be able to start an animation sequence, jerk at one point, come to an abrupt halt and then slowly begin an animation sequence to another point or frame.  Unlike networking layers, this is new for me, so I would like to come up with a really good specification for managing this (this is an area where I will like to look at how other engines manage this, if any of them do).

The primary concepts here are allowing modders to make more than 100% use of existing animation sequences -- to leverage them to be able to do an array of things they may not have originally been intended for.

But adding the ability to select random animation sequences shouldn't be too much work, I'll try to fit that in somewhere in the near future.  I'm happy to see so many people interested in modding Glest!  It's really quite fun

Botjer, as for implementing said squads and building mechanisms, that would take modifications in C++.  Fortunately, it shouldn't take too much.  Duke already covered zooming in and out, GAE needs more work on this (I need to actually put Duke's formulas to work!!) and system size shouldn't be effected.  I found that when I zoomed out really far and had the visibility algorithm really messed up, I had a pretty bad frame rate, but that was mostly my fault.

But back to the building, I have made a few changes so that you can repair from further than 1 cell distance, the same can be done for build commands very easily, so this wouldn't be very hard to implement at all.  Thus, in the XML, you could add a build skill and build commands to your castle and just set the max-range to however far away you want it to happen.  Next, the buildings you build will need a mechanism to build themselves, which I'm already going to have to add to the engine for what we want to do in FPM with saprolings (and their progression).

On the camera thing, this should work fine as long as you use world objects and models with a lower polygon count and smaller textures.  As far as I know the engine shouldn't have a problem with scaling in this fashion but that's more of a Martino question, he would be the expert in that area.

And back to squads, do you want each squad to have a count? I'm thinking it would be better to just have individual units, but when you select one of them you get the whole squad.  You should perhaps have some type of "wrapper" object around them that can tell you their overall health, mood, etc.

[Botjer]

On the crusader healing cast. send it to me and ill make you a healing animation. Im not top notch but i have the knowhow. did my own swordsman this sunday, with animations and textures and all... its alot less work modding this than other projects iv'e been on i've put this up for far too long.

[ZaggyDad]

Could you post your swordsman (the model, not only the g3ds. )

~Zaggy

[Botjer]

post? as in pics of it?

[ZaggyDad]

No, the model. Like, a blend, or whatever it is you're using, and the g3ds.

Btw, are you using blender?

~Zaggy

[Botjer]

you dont really want the model yet, its getting a rehash, made som stupid decisions that upped the polycount. gonna redo those parts... what do you want with the model?it doesnt fit at all into normal glest. having 200 polys compared to the swordsman in glest with its 1600 or there about polys

[Botjer]

oh and im using 3dsmax 8

[weedkiller]

The hack can be done easy for this one:
You want the first X-frames right? You need to know the exact cout or try it out;
Then you convert the g3d to xml (the xml-kind which blender exports).
In this file you delete every framesets wich are higher than you wanted frame.
You could do this for the end of animation too but then you would have to edit ca. 6 framenumbers in each modelblock (vertexblock, normals-block and wathever there is)


@daniel.santos: do you think it slowers performance significantly if you add this additional function? Perhaps not as there already interpolation-calculations which surely need some cpu-power. As you know the code, how much does these interpolation-calculation take, what do you think?

Perhaps the interpolation takes only place if an animation is played too slowly and taken a animation with more keyframes which requires lesser interpolation would leed to better performance...
Ah shit ok, i think modern pc's are strong enough so this all doesnt matter .

[Botjer]

yeah i get the feeling that you need quite a crappy comp not be able to play this game...

or... well my mod might up the demands a bit but still shouldnt be a problem

[daniel.santos]

On the crusader healing cast. send it to me and ill make you a healing animation. Im not top notch but i have the knowhow. did my own swordsman this sunday, with animations and textures and all... its alot less work modding this than other projects iv'e been on  The challenge for me is working with the models because I'm new to 3d programming.  But there are actually a very large number of benefits from having such functionality.  First off though, a simple tree twitch wasn't what I had in mind. I would like to be able to blow the tree in any direction to any degree, that's a bit of a challenge. i've put this up for far too long.

I wrote a tutorial (do a search) for doing this in MSVC++ 2008, and there are project files in the GAE source tree (you would have to modify them to work with the Glest engine). But I do have to say that programming C++ is quite a step.  If you find that you are serious about it, you might consider taking a class.

@weedkiller: I don't think it will because it's interpolating every frame anyway.  As far as I know, every decent 3d engine does this (but I'm new in that area too

EDIT: fixed my screwed up

tags

[wciow]

Daniel, please post your swordman I'm very interested to see it!

The dynamic weather system seems like a cool idea. Having a map change from rain to sun on the fly would be nice. Also you could add a randomize weather option which changes the xml values in the tilesets randomly.

As for the wind, the thought of making 8 animations for every tree and plant seems a bit daunting and would bloat the game out, since each tileset would be much larger. It may be easier to implement a physics library which works with models vertex (since g3d doesn't have skeletons).

Also my recent work making the pet models for the path of nature got me thinking about the possibility of including some wild animals in Glest. I know this has been discussed before on the Glest board but never actually got done.

[Botjer]

well if you arnt interested in global winds and only want the magician effect all you really need is one set of animations in 8 directions, any tree within range plays animation pointing away from the origo (mage).

When it comes to effects, turn down the bright lights and fire effects and up smoke, dust, pieces of flying earth and chaking or even disintegrating trees... its ALOT cooler...

nah i dont have time for classes, and itll take something like half a year before any starts better to just get with it. i got two books and im learning it now. got a friend whos a really good programmer ill bug him


starting to plan:

Epic
An rts game on a grand 4X scale (eXplore, eXpand, eXploit, eXterminate).
Fantasy.
Each player plays a ruler(magician?). Objective of game to fulfill one of the games goals.
Goals: Exterminate enemy, most points at end of time, Victory locations, Diplomatic victory.
Factions: Men(several?), Elves, Dwarves, Orks and whatever…
Buildings
Starts with a castle, built by? Noble?
Castles are the center of the town, here you build all the parts of the city and its resource area.
Castlebuildings are upgrades for the castle, they are actually never visible(not atm anyways).
Castlebuildings are:
Barracks
Armory
Blacksmith
Mages tower
Stable
City, is the area surrounding the castle. City buildings are built in castle menu but placed on the map inside the castles Cityradius. Citybuildings look like whole blocks of buildings, to make the cities large.
Citybuildings are:
   Housing(increases population limit)
   Market(more income)
   Walls?(protection)
   Guild(Upgrades, higher production)
   Church
   Academy
Resource area, is a limited area outside the city radius, here the player can build resource buildings.
Resource buildings are:
   Village, depicted as just a small village of farms. (food production)
   Mine, placed on mineral resources. (Gold or Iron production)
   Quarry, placed on stone resources. (Stone production)
   Sawmill, placed close to woods.(Wood production)

Units: Basic rock scissor paper with one basic jack of all trades unit. Units are built in squads, each containing several members, creating large armors.
Human units, revolve around the pikeman/halberdier(?), Swordsmen and archers are good against this unit. Cavalry is good against archers and swordsmen. Swordsmen are good against archers.
Plan:
Step 1. Basic units and buildings.
   Planning basic human tech tree
Units: Spearman, Swordsman, Archer, Pikeman, Cavalry
   Buildings: Castle, Housing,
Step 2. Basic set up of game.
   New mod.
   Factions.(Two identical human)
   XML for buildings.
   XML for units.
Step 3.
Resources
Some resources only effect the city they are in, these are called city resources, some are added to the treasury and can be spent anywhere, called treasury resources.
City resources
Population: Created from food. More food = faster population increase. Population effects the time that castle produce and build.
   Food: Created by farms connected to castle. Increases population. FAMINE?
Treasury resources
Gold: Created in cities from trade improvements and population. More population and higher upgrades = more gold per second. Used in unit production and upgrades, and some buildings.
Wood: Produced by sawmill in woods. Used in building and some unit production.
Stone: Produced by quarries at stone resource. Used in building.
Mana: magic (to be specified later).
HUMANS
   Units
Pikeman: Good vs Cavalry, lightly armoured, weak attack vs infantry.
Swordsman: Good vs Pikemen, at par with archers, medium armor, medium attack. Resilience vs shooting.
      Archer: Good vs Pikemen, no armor.
      Horseman: Good vs archers on par with swordsman. Medium armor.

   City buildings
      Castle:
      Here is where you build all other buildings.
      Internal buildings are upgrades.
      All units are built here.
      Upgrades:

      Housing
      Market
      Church
      Guild
      Academy
      Warehouse
      Harbor
   Resource buildings
      Village
      Mine
      Quarry
      Sawmill

[Botjer]

by the way. if im not to learn programming. i need someone to program for me.. HINT* HINT*

[@kukac@]

I really like this idea! Sadly, I don't have much time to help you, but maybe I can help you with XML coding in some of my freetime.

I hope this project will work.  

[Botjer]

html programming?

[@kukac@]

XML, sorry  

[Botjer]

xml is the fun part even i can do that  ^^