Red Brick Games

I made a number of small improvements to the end-of-game GUI.

• replay now has its own top-level tab
• tabs now have icons
• replay window has more vertical room
• score totals are shown in bold
• fixed some OpenGL glitches in the tabs

The replay used to be contained within the “Summary” tab, but that seemed counter-intuitive.

The HUD can now show all bases’ build queues, simultaneously!

What you’re looking at here is the hotkey groups, in the upper-right corner of the screen.

The last three hotkey groups (8, 9, and 0) are assigned to base buildings. Below each hotkey group is the respective base’s resources, and workers.

What’s new here is the 3rd little graphic below those: the current build order for the base.

The graphic shows the portrait of the unit being produced, the quantity in the queue, and even…a tiny green build-progress bar!

With this feature, it’s now possible to monitor production of all bases right on-screen, simultaneously. No more clicking around from base to base!

I think it’s pretty cool.

A second, smaller feature, is that the hotkey groups are now skinned with race-specific textures. The above screenshow shows the Martian skin.

The Orc skin is:

And the Human skin is:

Here’s the final (?) layout of Orcs vs. Martians‘ in-game gui:

The gui elements at the bottom of the screen are what I mean to highlight here.

The above screenshot shows Selection mode. The below screenshot shows Players mode. Players mode shows everyone’s name, race, and most importantly, upgrades.

Being the author of the game, I could describe design decisions that went into the latest changes, but I realize that would bore most people :)

However, I’ll point out that the player’s own upgrades are now visible in both Selection mode and Player mode. That way, the player doesn’t have to flip back and forth to check on his techs.

There are now also race-specific skins for Orcs and Martians (uber-yay). Orcs gets a coarse-looking wood background, and Martians get a metallic background:

Textures need more work, but I think it’s looking splendid.

I’d also like to add some eye candy to the skins. Like animated lights on the Martians’ gui controls. And maybe an occasional bug scurrying across the Orcs’ controls…in the spirit of the old Unix program, xroach! That’d be pretty funny.

I’m really liking these latest changes in my playtesting. However, I’m not sure if they achieved my original goal of simplifying the hud. Is there still too much detail there for the semi-casual player?

Here’s the latest end-of-game gui:

Mainly I centered the tabs, the title, and put the players’ names down the middle of the gui.

Also, the multi-colored progress bars now sport a specularly-highlighted bitmap, which I think looks nice. A close-up:

It grows from left to right with animation and sound, when the gui first opens. With the intent to give a more satisfying end-of-game experience.

Implementing those crazy progress bars was a chore.

For those curious, I did successfully get my development environment off my dead laptop, and onto my desktop. Which I’m glad to get done. Though now, my *desktop* is exhibiting instability issues. :-/ Computers.

Here’s the new incarnation of the game setup gui.

There are now borders around the “Rules” and “Map” sections, and the Map section is larger.

Also, in the Map section, you might notice that the complex terrain-generation parameters are gone. Instead, there’s a more user-friendly “Terrain” pop-up control:

that lets the player choose from several preconfigured terrain types. (my personal favorite being “Random”)

And if the player selects “Custom”, it brings back the old-style terrain-generation parameters:

for the power users out there.

At least, they do in my case.

Particle effects have worked out well. Here’s a particle-heavy animation of a worker building a road:

I’ve been wanting to implement those effects for a long time. The intial shovel-scrape kicks up dust, dirt flies off to the side, and when the dirt lands, it kicks up more dust. All done with particles.

All that is courtesy of a powerful “action” system that Orcs vs. Martians has. Every action, such as shoveling, can trigger a sequence of so-called micro actions. Each micro action can play an animation, play a sound, change the mounted tool, and now, trigger particle effects. Put together, actions can now consist of an elaborate sequence of audio-visual effects, as the shoveling action does in the video. The sequences are declared in Torque script for easy editing. It’s a nice, flexible system for unit animations and effects.

It all plays client-side, so all that mounting, animation, and sound happens without consuming any network bandwidth.

I’m now working on re-laying out the game setup gui, portions of the in-game gui, and portions of the results gui. It’s going well so far - things are fitting where I want them, and the in-game gui should emerge from this re-layout somewhat simpler. Some of this work is about applying some really good feedback I got from the last beta test.

Also, much of this layout work will probably be final! That’s not to say I have all the final 2-D artwork in place; I don’t. But as far as the arrangement of gui controls, their resizing behavior, etc., this will probably be a final pass for a lot of gui work. w00t.

Here’s some more nice progress! Three items:

• Improved selection rings
• Improved shadows
• Removal of buildings’ dirt mounds

Improved selection rings

I revised the selection rings for units. The new rings are sharper and easier to see from a distance, IMO. I’m still using a solid ring for normal selection, but am now using a broken ring to indicate a “hovered-over” unit, i.e. an unselected unit that the mouse is pointing to, and also for dragging-but-not-yet-selected units. I think it gives better visual feedback as to whether a unit is selected or not.

I’m still sticking with the color scheme of green rings for one’s own units, yellow for an ally’s, and red for an enemy’s. Starcraft followed that scheme and I think it works well.

Improved tree and building shadows

Before, trees cast simplistic circular shadows, and buildings cast no shadows at all. Now, trees and buildings cast correct shadows.

The new shadows need a little more work, but they’re a big improvement, eh?

Good-bye dirt mounds

Several of OVM’s 3-D models for buildings include dirt mounds. Dirt mounds usually make buildings appear to “sit” more naturally in a game scene. From a player’s point of view, the dirt looks as though its part of the regular terrain, but it really isn’t, at least not from a game developer’s point of view. It’s part of the building model itself. The regular terrain has a completely separate computational model.

Dirt mounds cause significant problems for Orcs vs. Martians:

• when a building is located at a steep cliff edge, the dirt mound juts out into space. Very unnatural looking.
  
• shadows only work on “regular” terrain, so if a building has a dirt mound, no shadow appears for the extent of the dirt mound.
• shadows are computed by making an projection rendering of the building. So if a building model includes a dirt mound, the building’s shadow includes the mound shadow too! This is bad, because it prevents a possible workaround where you hide the mound by “sinking” it beneath the regular terrain. I.e, even with the mound hidden, the shadow still looks wrong.

So finally, I took the dirt mounds out of the game. Things look considerably better now IMO.