Code-Black Shots (turnbased strategy game)

A place to show off your latest screenshots and for people to comment on them. Only start a new thread here if you have some nice images to show off!
Filopher
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Code-Black Shots (turnbased strategy game)

Post by Filopher »

I started a thread about the turnbased tilemanager in this forum. You can see it here: http://www.ogre3d.org/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=12952

I'll start a second thread now because I want to seperate the work on the tilemanager from the work on a strategy game called code-black that uses this tilemanager for the terrain (and ogre of course ;) ), but is an independent game after all. So I don't have to mix screenshots anymore and avoid irritating people. ;)

Code-Black is still in early development and it's not really my goal to "show screenshots" but to ask ogre users what they think of the used render methods, models, etc... I'm going to update this thread regularly with my progress and will show new screenshots. So this thread is kind of a developer diary with a lot of screenshots. I'm not quite sure if this is what this forum is meant to be used for. But I'll just start and wait. 8)


Ok, let's begin with a few screenshots (this is a screenshot thread after all):

Image

Image

Image

Image

Ok, it's not much, but there is more to come, I promise. ;)

I just want to start with some comments on the trees. As you can see in the last two screenshots I placed some green trees on the map. However it's rather slow at the moment because I placed every tree as a single entity in the scene. I thought about creating one huge "tree mesh" with all the geometry data of all trees (per map chunk) in it. I think something similiar is used in the static geometry class. So, every time a tree is added or removed on the chunk the "big tree mesh" will be updated (which is rather easy because it's a turnbased game). I even thought about grouping more different objects together as long as they share the same material. Code-Black will use hundreds if not thousand of small objects in the scene, so I think there has to be done some grouping of this kind. :?
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betajaen
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Post by betajaen »

Good Gravy, that is getting good. :D
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Post by jacmoe »

Nice! :D

About the trees:
Olex wrote:I have created a server that builds Ogre::StaticGeometry on the fly as objects go to sleep, and quickly replace them with originals when they wake up. So, if say a tank goes to sleep, it is compiled in its entirety into a batched mesh.

The results are better than I expected: in certain scenes with a lot of sleeping objects, the performance boost is at least a double.
From his Ukrainian Rumble:
http://www.ogre3d.org/phpBB2/viewtopic. ... icgeometry
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Post by Louiz ofRohr »

This thing looks really cool, dude..

The trees could grow up a little bit (not having the same height).
And it isn't necessary to place the trees like in a squared matrix..
Use irregular positioning and different heights for the trees: this will make the whole thing look even more realistic (if it is your intention)..

Well.. that was just my opinion.. anyway, you are doing a nice work there :)
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Post by sinbad »

Looking good, it's really nice to see works in progress that have been discussed in here in the past fleshing out over time.
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Post by Filopher »

@jacmoe
Thanks for the link. I'll look into it.

@betajaen
Yes, you are right. The trees should be positioned a little more randomly in different angles and with different scales. However, this is some "fine tuning" that I will work on later.

I implemented a second tree today.

Image

Image
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Post by Praetor »

Those looks awesome. There's something about them that makes them look really good. Maybe just a little shimmer, like snow is shining. I can't quite figure it out, but it looks great.
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Post by NeOmega »

If this is to be a tactical TBS, it looks great.

If it is to be a strategic TBS, the tiles are too small, or models too big.

I really like civilization, and I got to tell you, I don't like tactical TBS games that much, because they take a fast paced battle and slow it down, whilst strategy TBS games take a slow paced war and speed it up.

but purely on how the graphics look: outstanding.
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Post by celic »

Realy nice screenshots! :D
Can we see a demo soon? :wink:
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Post by Filopher »

@NeOmega
True. That's what I've done today.

Image
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Post by NeOmega »

excellent, and some randomization too.... looking even better.
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Post by DogmaD »

Looks very nice, I like your tree models :).
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Post by danharibo »

:shock:
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Post by Grom »

Dude are those trees billboarded?
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Post by Filopher »

OzwaldoRinaldo wrote:Dude are those trees billboarded?
No, they aren't. It's a normal 3d mesh. I thought about using billboards but I don't think that they are very useful in this kind of game.

I'm currently coding a slim and fast window manager. I need a special one because the windows have to do a few tricky things like hiding in a corner, zooming in when using mouse-over, et cetera...

Image
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Post by eugen »

nice:)
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Post by MadHed »

very nice, indeed!
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Post by stodge »

Awesome! Are you planning on releasing the tiled scene manager as open source?
What does the debugger tell you? You *are* using a debugger, right??
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Post by jacmoe »

stodge wrote:Awesome! Are you planning on releasing the tiled scene manager as open source?
The tile-manager really *is* open-source! :)

See the later parts of this topic:
http://www.ogre3d.org/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=12951
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Post by Filopher »

Windows can now be moved, closed and resized. I still have to implement a way to create them. One of my first concerns is a high and stable frame rate. At the moment it's about 500 fps with a 256x256 tile map and three open windows, really no rate to complain about, I think.

Image
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Post by polyveg »

and three open windows
the problem is the textoutput. you can't use ogre functions for much text.
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Post by Filopher »

polyveg wrote:
and three open windows
the problem is the textoutput. you can't use ogre functions for much text.
I thought about coding my own text functions. Most of the Code-Black windows will be prerendered and won't need realtime text input. For diplomacy and chat windows a text class derived from SimpleRenderable with a letter texture and alpha rejection should do the trick - I think. Have to experiment on that though.

The Code-Black windows are nothing less, just with a different texture. :)
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Post by Filopher »

I'm working on a new tile manager at the moment. The tile manager that polyveg and I presented a few months ago was a good start but it lacks some very important features that I need in Code-Black.

For example at the moment a tile looks like this:

Image

That's a pretty fast visualisation but also not very flexible. If you want a tile to have a discrete height value it won't work with this approach.

Let's take a look at a cross section. The numbers represent discrete height levels.

Image

The first cross section shows the old visualisation used in our tile manager. As you can see a tile hasn't got a visual height value. Instead every tile acts as a connector between different height levels. That may work for many projects but not for Code-Black.

Code-Black needs a visualisation like the second cross section where you can see the height value of a tile without problems.

So, i'll code a worldmap that looks like this:

Image
(a 3x3 grid)

For more details visit http://www.code-black.org/Forum/thread.php?threadid=407

BTW, Code-Black is now an englisch project and no longer uses german. I think I'm going to post a thread in the recruitment forum within the next days.
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Post by Chris Jones »

nice :P

good luck!
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Post by Ayudo »

Nice idea!
Though for strategy purposes i would prefere hex-fields.
Battle Isle rocked!
Very nice project you got going there!
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