If I had a hammer...

Lots of furtling under the bonnet today, tidying up the poly-picking for buildings and adding the functionality to the allow players to build things (if they can afford it).
The plan is that players can build buildings and these will gradually generate resources. The resources are collected (or stolen!) by the player who commands the unit which is closest to the building, so players will need to post guards near buildings unless they want it to get robbed.

Mines and barracks

This is the model for the barracks (looks a bit too much like the farm to me!) and over there in the distance is a mine. You need barracks to train recruits into soldiers, and mines to get coal, iron and (very rarely) gold. I don't know if a smelter or a forge is necessary - maybe just 1 coal + 1 iron + 1 recruit = 1 soldier. Hmm...

T is for 'chat'

Why the 'T' key is generally used for chat in games I don't know. Maybe it's short for 'talk'?
Anyway the chat system is in and seems to work.

As you can see I modified the GUI a little as well.

Ugh! It's all GUI!

Here's a first go at a GUI.

I think I'll have to make custom images for the GUI. Currently I'm just using the same textures as the units themselves. 
Also in the picture you can see my attempts at palisades. I need to put some thought into how they can fit together nicely without having to use loads of models.

Let Battle Commence

A raiding party found my village better defended than they expected it to be!

Unfortunately for me the AI players currently have unlimited resources so I could only keep them off for a few minutes - as soon as I wiped one unit out another took its place. I think I need a town wall.

Housekeeping

Most of today was wasted in timesome meetings so I only got a chance to do a few housekeeping tasks. Good thing I had this guy looking out for the village while I was away!

Down on the farm

Farms provide recruits for new units or to make up the numbers of units which have taken a kicking. The more farms you have the bigger the army you can sustain. This should allow for a range of playing styles - do you have a small army with lots of reserves or do you use up all your recruits in one go to make a huge army?

Who's who?

Today was about getting labels into the landscape, not such an easy task in LWJGL. How nice it would be to have a drawString(text,x,y,z,size) method somewhere! Anyway, at the price of using a monospaced font it's not so hard.

One problem is that names overlap when units are close to eachother, so at some point I'll have to do a 'dontOverlapNames' routine. Tsk! There's always something else to do...

New archers

I got a free model from TurboSquid and recoloured the uniform to make my new archers.

I'm not sure about the blue boots, but these archers certainly look better than the previous ones I was using.
I think I need to add some plants or something to make the ground texture a little less bare.

Transparency troubles and archer attacks

Most of today was spent trying to fix a transparency issue where images had a white 'halo' around them. I had to put in a texture effect controller to remove this - not ideal but it works...
More fun was to be had giving the archers arrows to play with. They seem to like it!

Now I've smartened up the goblins the existing troops are looking a bit rubbish. I'll have to give them a lick of varnish as well.

Meet the neighbours

Artwork is the bane of any game programmer's life. How many times have I wished I'd listened during art classes! Oh well, I'll had to make do with what I've got and hope these goblins are scary enough.

Towering achievements

Watchtowers can now be placed - I wonder if troops will be able to use them?
Also much tinkering with a horse animation. Horses are not at all easy to draw, so I got a bit of help from M. Muybridge;

Clouds, coppicing and clashes

Units now take a dislike to each other and start giving it some.

I thinned out the trees a bit, added a shrub or two and added some pseudo-clouds that loiter around the camera. It'd be nice to make it rain occasionally.

Camera capers

The code to create and move units was the easy part - most of today was spent fiddling with the camera; trying to get it to both follow a unit and also move freely when required. It's not at all easy getting something that 'feels' natural. More work needed here I think!
I also tweaked the grass texture to make it a little less bright & added a day/night cycle.

Give me land, lots of land...

The Stickmen Wars 2 feasibility test just had one simple square of landscape which was a bit limiting. What if I could make an infinite landscape for the game? The latest version of the 3D engine jPCT, a bit of Perlin noise, a bit of vertex manipulation et voila!

Hmmm, seems a bit small and bare - what if I enlarge the landscape mesh, tart up the textures and add a few trees?

That's more like it! And you can stroll for thousands of kilometers in any direction and the landscape just keeps on going. We could have some really big wars here!

Mind you, there's a lot of polygons in that landscape so I had to use LWJGL (a java binding to use OpenGL on the graphics card) to get high enough quality graphics. I left the software renderer in as a fall-back but it doesn't look half as good.

Stickmen Wars 2 begins!

Follow me here as I try and build a game of strategy, slaughter and survival: Stickmen Wars 2

The original Stickmen Wars was a fairly simple game written some time ago. Two sides, red and blue, battle it out for ultimate supremacy. Later a multiplayer version was added.

 The next stage was a feasibility test for a 3D version of the game. Not very pretty, but it showed that 3D wars were possible...

Now read on!