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Factions in Nova Dawn

8/31/2005

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One of my goals for Nova Dawn is to bring together the trading/roleplaying game style with a dynamic campaign going on in the background. Ideally I'd like the player to be able to move up the ranks in his own faction and eventually be able to command the entire faction. How hard this is to do in reality will become clearer later in development. At the very least I want the dynamic campaign to be occuring in the background even if the player can't actually control it directly. Each faction will have their own strengths and weaknesses and vehicles belonging to that faction will be coloured for easy identification.

My goal for the campaign engine is to get something approaching the complexity of the excellent strategy game "Warlords". If all goes well then occasionally you will accidentally come across armies of heavily armed vehicles engaged in an assualt on an enemy faction. You could even follow the force and attempt to loot the wrecks in the aftermath of the battle.

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Random maps

8/24/2005

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I've taken a screenshot of a random map generated for Nova Dawn:

White areas are snow covered, yellow areas desert and dark grey areas are mountains. Trees, rocks and ruins are represented by green, brown and black dots respectively. The rest should be self evident.

These maps are only 80 x 60 tiles as thats the size of map I'm using to test the game. The maps in the final game will be much larger. Each tile takes up two bytes so a 1000 x 1000 sized map would take up two megabytes of system memory while the game is running. I think the final maps will be about that size but I might make them bigger depending on how much memory I use elsewhere.

I'm quite pleased with the roads. I wanted them to consist of lots of nice long straights. They seem to fit in with the road warrior theme nicely and hopefully combat along the roads will be similar to the wonderful arcade game "Spy Hunter".

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I have roads

8/22/2005

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I finally worked out my algorithm for creating road networks, and got it coded up and working. It still sometimes barfs at junctions that I don't have tiles for, but I don't want to make a tile for evry single combination as the memory requirements would be huge. I'm being clever wherever I can and coding it to use existing junction tiles. Its really cool being able to drive from base to base along roads and exploring the random road network that is created every game.

Last night I put in stylus control for the car. I was going to rely on joypad control for steering so as to free up the stylus for aiming weaponry. After testing I've decided that stylus control for steering is needed at least as an option. Devices and weapons are going to be activated by icons along the bottom of the screen. I'm going to add a steering wheel icon that when activated switches control to steering. However, when other devices or weapons are selected, the only way to steer will be using the joypad. This will give an easy control method for novice players, but only by learning to use the joypad for steering and the stylus for aiming will you be able to maneouvre and fight at the same time.

I'll post some screenshots of the randomly generated maps here soon.
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Progress Report

8/15/2005

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Been doing a lot of work on Nova Dawn recently and I can now drive around a randomly generated world complete with grassland, deserts, snow, mountains, coastline, forests, rocks and ruins. The car physics and collision detection are pretty much there with the cars skidding and bouncing off each other in a nice way. I've been struggling a bit with putting in roads, I'm toying with implemeting a A* algorithm for pathfinding which I can then use to route roads. I've given up on that for the time being and started writing some simpler code to route and join up highways but left my laptop on standby without saving it and lost a few hours work. I watched Lowestoft carnival fireworks on Saturday and it made me think that I want the explosions and stuff to be really pretty. I've already worked out how to do a night mode in my head and combat at night should be quite cool.
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