And the green grass grew all around

Experimenting with what I call 'fluff' today. There's probably a proper name for it but I don't know it. That's stuff like the grass in the picture - it has no effect on the gameplay but it makes the game look prettier.
And yes, that is a dead bear over there. It attacked me first! It was self-defence, honest!

Don't look now...

...cos there's blood everywhere! I'm sooo tempted to try and make it trickle downhill and turn the rivers red (like in the history books) but I think that might affect my ESRB rating.

More baddy baiting

It would be nice to have a taunt button. I can almost hear the bloke in the tower yelling: "You empty headed animal food trough wiper! I fart in your general direction. Your mother was a hamster and your father smelt of elderberries!"

Baddy baiting

Here's where two players can easily take out an enemy - one player draws the troops out of the village and the second player can swoop in and kill their king!
This vid also shows an issue I haven't resolved yet; at about 18 secs the camera dips below the ground and you can see water underneath. I don't much like this but I also don't much like any of the alternatives (like zooming or blocking the camera movement).
What's the best solution for this? Or shall I just leave it as it is?

House to house

Still fettling the combat system. Currently my units have an alarming habit of staring into space when they're supposed to be busy slaughtering. Idle gits.

Carnage!

 

First really big battle! Just archers & it's pretty hard to control the troops ATM - I'll have to work on that.

The grand old Duke of York

All aboard the SMW express!

It turns out the game was doing an expensive visibility check on the unit labels - most of which were too small to read anyway. I limited unit labels to a readable range only and voila! 10 extra fps. I bet there's loads of gotchas like that lurking in the code... Now, where's my shrimping net?

On the slow train...

Once I start piling stuff in the framerate starts to tumble. 14 FPS for such a simple scene? It could well be optimisation time.

Rich invaders

 

An AI king spends a bit of money on a new village. Those arrows the archers fired killed my (carelessly unprotected) king. Good thing I haven't done the 'Game Over' bit yet...

Buckets

These squares (rather unromantically called 'buckets') are how the server tells which units to check against which. Each bucket holds a list of units so the server need only check adjacent buckets to look for enemies. I had them displayed to check that caves were working properly (they weren't). By coincidence a bad cave thing emerged and attacked my archers just as I was taking this screenshot.

Catapults it is!

Thanks to all of you who voted - it's a deafening 'no' to modern warfare. SMW2 will be staying firmly in the middle ages. I shall have to start building knights and catapults...
In other news, I'm working on unit balancing. As things stand, archers are almost unbeatable!

The long and winding road

 

I think I've finally got pathing cracked (the hard bit's keeping data concurrency across a low-latency network).

Keep voting on the C21 idea I mentioned in my previous post - I'll count all the votes up on Monday and obey the will of the people - so vote now!

SMW2 goes C21?

I've been seriously thinking about bringing SMW into the 21st century. Guns, tanks, planes, mines, all that sort of thing. I reason thusly: Vehicles are much easier to build and manage than troop formations and there aren't many medieval vehicles to play with. I can get a wider range of structures to play with, like gun turrets, force walls &c. I also get a wider range of weapons... I'm very tempted!
What do you think? Guns and bombs or arrows and catapults?
Give an 'I like it' response if you like the idea of going modern (or leave a comment). I'm still on the path-finding code so I don't have to decide just yet.