Red Brick Games

Squads are turning out to be a piece of work. I was reviewing my latest batch of changes before checking them into Perforce and noticed, gee, that seems like a lot of new code. So I did some line counts - and the Squad implementation has already added 700 lines of code! And I doubt I’m halfway done.

They’re starting to work though, and they’re fun to watch. As you march a squad around, the units are constantly struggling to keep their places in formation. When making a turn, the units on the outside of the formation tend to fall behind, since they have farther to run. Then the squad slows briefly while it waits for those units to catch up. It’s fun to see.

Lovely artwork, created by my favorite four-year-old:

“Unnamed composition”
Media: crayons & markers, on Xerox paper
Size: 8″ 1/2 x 11″
Date: 2008
Price: $1,000,000

Let’s see what we’ve got here… large swath of brown in the upper right corner… kind of anchors the piece… bordered by a vibrant band of green… bordered in turn by a pretty blue… yellow in the corner, I like the way that kind of bookends it all… and the black next to that adds a nice contrast… the dark blue in the lower left adds a little tension, while providing a sense of foundation… and the overlaid hot pink-on-aqua on the left, adds a nice creative flair.

The only thing is, it seems like she could have done a little more with the interior space! Or maybe I’m just missing her creative artistic intent there?? :)

I did a small favor for a fellow indie, and he in turn made some new 3-D models for OVM! OVM now sports a UFO model to serve as the Martians’ base, and a laser rifle for Martian crewmen to hold.

I felt the placeholder art I originally had for those two items really detracted from the game’s look, even as placeholders. What a nice improvement. Thanks Thak!

If you’re interested in more of Thak’s work, check out 3dmatter.com or spellcraft.biz. He works fast - he turned out those two models in no time flat.

Progress

These last few weeks I:

• finished the A.I. personal-view-of-the-world feature
• started to separate OVM’s pathfinding code into a stand-alone library
• added new features to meta-C (my homegrown programming language, which OVM is written in)
• optimized meta-C for speed

I kind of spread myself too thin these last weeks, trying to do all those things simultaneously, and several of them didn’t go as planned. Still, I got some progress done.

A.I. personal view of the world

This is done! The A.I. now makes all important decisions based on a limited, imperfect view of the world. No cheating anymore!

This is a huge milestone, and it’s been a long time coming. I remember putting this feature on my to-do list well over a year ago. At the time I thought to myself, that’s pretty ambitious, I don’t know if I’ll get that feature in. So, I’m definitely happy that it’s actually in!

I still need to do the follow-up work of increasing the A.I.’s exploration ability; without that, as predicted, the A.I. is behaving dumb as dirt.

Pathfinding library

I started pulling out OVM’s pathfinding code for packaging as a sellable product.

Here’s what the main API currently looks like:

   F32 findPath(
      Point2F          bgnPoint,
      RectF            endRect,
      IMap*            map,
      Vector<Point2F>* path,
      ICoster*         coster = NULL,
      F32              range = 0,
      F32              maxCost = FLT_MAX
      );

It’s simply a global function that outputs a vector of way points. Maybe I’ll describe the parameters in a later post. I’m still figuring out how to make the API as user-friendly and flexible as possible, by using C++ templates, etc. Naturally, it’ll also need a friendly TorqueScript interface, too.

There will also be some utility functions and data structures, for things like iterating over the tiles crossed by a ray (useful for smoothing out the final path).

One good thing is, I’ve taken a look at some other free pathfinding packages, and it looks like OVM’s pathfinding does indeed provide features beyond what’s already out there. Got to provide value, to sell a product.

Next up: Squads

I’ve started working on giving OVM a notion of sqauds, i.e. groupings of units.

The more I think about squads, the more issues I see them impacting in the game. For example:

• making units march in formation
• reducing the number of calls to pathfinding (and hence reducing CPU demand), via squad flocking
• reducing network traffic, via squad flocking
• allowing the A.I. to temporarily subdivide a force to deal with attacks from multiple directions, via a hierarchy of squads (i.e., squads of squads), and then bring those forces back together to resume the squad’s original mission
• helping the AI manage multiple units sent to do a single job, e.g. when multiple workers go to build a new base
• allowing units to auto-explore in two’s or three’s, in addition to individually

I thought that was kind of interesting. Originally, I thought of squads as mainly relating to marching in formation. But they seem to touch quite a few other areas, at least from a programming perspective.