Red Brick Games

Continuing with the previous post, here’s a first attempt at showing terrain contour lines.

Again, the idea here is to color in “swaths” of terrain at equal heights, using a new terrain texture. So, it’s similar to a contour line, but more coarse-grained.

An in-game screenshot:

The purple-ish brown terrain, above, is supposed to be the contour line.

Hmmm…… :-/

And here’s how it looks in the replay.

Yeeesh…

Well, I may have made elevations clear-er, but it’s all still pretty subtle.

And it doesn’t seem very aesthetically pleasing.

It seems like the challenge here is to:

• make the contour lines stand out, and yet
• not look artificial or dog-ugly

I might try putting wildflowers into the “swath” texture. The flowers’ bright colors should make the contour lines stand out, while still looking natural.

(Relatively natural, anyway…these are special flowers, that grow in bands, and only at elevations of every four meters! :-) LOL. Well it’s a game, what do you expect)

Here’s a game design issue with which I’m currently wrestling.

• fact: terrain elevation is important in Orcs vs. Martians. High elevation gives bonuses to vision, attack range, and windmill productivity.
• fact: RTSs are usually played with the camera angled down.
• fact: it’s hard to see terrain elevation with the camera angled down!
• result: occasional frustration.

So I’m trying to think up some approach to help the player visualize terrain elevation better.

Should I draw equi-height contonur lines on the terrain, like you see on a surveyor’s map?

But that might be hard to implement. I’m using the Torque game engine, and I don’t think its terrain renderer could easily be modified to draw pencil-thin terrain countour lines…

In lieu of contour lines, should I draw contour “bands”? i.e., draw thick swaths of equi-height terrain, using an additional terrain texture?

Torque could do that pretty easily.

If I did that, should I draw terrain that way always? Or draw the bands only sometimes? i.e. like when planning a new building?

And if I used this additional texture to band the terrains, would it look confusing in regards to other textures? i.e., I already use different textures to denote

• walkable terrain,
• impassible terrain, and
• terrain flat enough to build on

If I threw yet another texture into the batch, would that just look confusing?

Hmm…

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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:

I’ve finished a chunk of work on Orcs vs. Martians’ replays.

Large objects (buildings, trees, ore) are now rendered as overhead bitmaps. Roads look better. And in addition, the replay now animates at 32 fps, making movement look far more fluid.

Recent screen capture:

For comparison, here’s how replays looked 13 months ago:

Game development news will resume next post.

A few pictures from my new Motorola ZN5 “Zine”.

For some time, I’ve been wanting to retire my 7-year-old digital camera, a Canon PowerShot A40. So I bought the new Motorola ZN5, a top-ranked camera cell phone, hoping to combine phone-and-camera into one.

The verdict: as you can see the ZN5’s pictures are pretty good.

But they don’t seem quite as good as my old camera, despite competing against 7-year-older technology. I was a little surprised by that–I guess there’s no substitute for a genuine camera lens and optics, which aren’t found in cell phones.

Still, for a cell phone, those are pretty good pictures.

Pics are from my modest condo–small but pleasant!