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Development Update - 14 December 2012


Chris

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Time for a quick development update! It's approaching Christmas but we've all got another week or so to work until we disappear off. What've we been up to recently?

We've been working on a variety of things. I guess the biggest change has probably been the level design system. This has become far more point-and-click, making it much easier to generate levels. Previously, props and walls and buildings were set at the sub-map level and this meant that moving them around in the Level Editor meant editing the submaps (which had to align perfectly to look correct). It was very time consuming, and not exactly user-friendly.

Now we have a layer system, with the Ground tiles and then the Wall, Prop and Building layers on top of that. The game can deal with transparency - so if a wall sub-map has no ground tiles painted on it, it will draw the information from the Ground layer below it (for instance a field). You can see how this is much better than having to paint all the walls and props on the field directly, as you had to in the previous setting.

Naturally this has both caused a lot of bugs and meant we've had to redo a lot of our maps, which has taken up quite a lot of time. This hasn't been helped that our ground combat coder has had workmen in his house for the past week and hasn't got much done in terms of fixing up the bugs. We're getting on top of them now but it's been pretty slow on the ground combat front for the last few weeks.

For the Geoscape, we've done a bit of work on the balancing of the invasion and the research tree but that will continue in more detail once the ground combat missions are all loading up properly. We've also started work on implementing the new UI, but unfortunately we didn't fork the code before we did that so the release of our latest build has been delayed. The new topbar is in the game, but the graphics need to be reworked as we were experimenting with image scaling. Having an unusable topbar is not something we want in a public build, obviously!

Aaron's been busy on the Xenonaut base tiles, and has now completed all of the starting rooms. You can see a few previews of them dotted around on the main news blog or on other sites; basically they look pretty awesome. They're also animated (consoles etc), but the animated tiles aren't displaying properly for some reason. We're trying to get that fixed up. He's also been working on the big brothers to the little Light Drone that you can see in the terror missions, also animated.

Rendering has also been going fairly well. All the Xenonaut vehicles are now in the game, an entire new alien race has been rendered out and the Light Drone big brothers are also ready to go into the game this weekend. I think there's only one major alien race left to render...a rather annoying glow effect I can't quite figure out how to get rid of is giving me trouble with them, but I'll fix that up soon no doubt.

The new UI for the ground combat is finished and in the game thanks to Giovanni. Again, this took a long time - there's issues with image scaling in the engine, so we've been scaling the images perfectly in Photoshop now and it means they don't appear at all warped. The image clarity for the pictures of the weapons and the various icons should be much sharper than before, unless you happened to luck into the right resolution before (actually a couple more icons still need to be updated but 99% of it is done). So, yeah - it's not the biggest thing in the world, but the visual quality of the game has increased another notch.

We're now working on the new launcher too, as the existing one doesn't work on Mac and looks horrible. The new / final one will be much nicer and hopefully will have an animated background (of the same image) too. That'll be arriving in the New Year though, I'd have thought.

Finally, we've had GJ over in London for the last couple of days to talk about the AI. Progress on the AI has been a bit slow recently, partly because GJ has been busy with his masters studies and also just because the AI is hard. Anyway, we've chatted through at length the sort of feel we want for each type of mission, the different AI behaviours we need for the various alien / friendly units in each mission type and good ways to generate that. I know we've been promising a better AI for some time yet and it's not quite materialised, but I'm hopeful it's not too far away now.

I think that's about it. Not sure when V17.5 is coming out, but hopefully soon. Beta is coming together too, but we have to get the new level system working better before we can really get to grips with testing and balancing the research tree (though we have done some of that already). Thanks for your patience. I'll do another update before Christmas too.

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There's nothing that commenters like better when they can criticise the writer of an article. Believe it or not, Chris, but any more articles you write for RPS will likely have a larger audience, as more people will want to get in on the act.

Being fair though, the commentors on RPS are a pretty good bunch and generally have solid points when they offer critiques, unlike other sites which are full of riff-raff.

It was a good article though Chris.

Edited by Buzzles
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Oh yeah, the commenters who corrected me were 100% right. It's a little embarrassing I made the error about surrendering losses, if I'm honest - I expect the High Council of Accountants will be in contact soon, asking me to return my sceptre...
That's five minutes of my life I won't ever get back. :) No wonder you decided to go into game development.
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Finally, we've had GJ over in London for the last couple of days to talk about the AI. Progress on the AI has been a bit slow recently, partly because GJ has been busy with his masters studies and also just because the AI is hard. Anyway, we've chatted through at length the sort of feel we want for each type of mission, the different AI behaviours we need for the various alien / friendly units in each mission type and good ways to generate that. I know we've been promising a better AI for some time yet and it's not quite materialised, but I'm hopeful it's not too far away now.

Chris, is it planned to have the 'better AI' in the beta?

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I expect the High Council of Accountants will be in contact soon, asking me to return my sceptre...

I Lol'd hard, I lived in the UK and guys... I know tax officers make no mistakes, we will all lose our sceptres sooner or later hahahha.

Nice update, in my opinion the AI should be a big priority :) I want those da*n aliens to give us a hard time.

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The data exists: there is declassified information taken by US satellites and currently archived by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Adminstration.. They do cool things like night-time light of the world But.... you have to pay. Quite frankly, the cost of getting that data could be ruinious.

EDIT: Having taken a closer look at the site, it seems that digitization of satellite imagery begins at 1992. So, if Chris wanted that info, he'd probably have to pay even more to get the 1979 images digitized. Not a very good use of time or money, tbh.

Edited by Max_Caine
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If anything's going to make you reduce the speed of the game, it's watching Earth change from day through twilight to night.

Seeing the city lights appear across the globe, watching the little flashes of nukes on sites you couldn't be bothered getting to because you were watching the globe....it's relaxing just thinking about it.

On the other hand a "Global Blackout" news report stating that all earth residents should turn off lights at night, in case of alien attack might save some time and money.

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On the other hand a "Global Blackout" news report stating that all earth residents should turn off lights at night, in case of alien attack might save some time and money.

I like it. Only it would go tits up when you land on a terror site and all the lamps are on. Except you add another note, saying that the Xenonauts get the lights turned on when they land. That's a lot of time and text for something most people probably won't care too much about. :P

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