Blog Posts

Equipment and customisation cont.

10/25/2005

Here is another graphic showing the equipment management screen on Nova Dawn.

Your vehicle, driver and gunner (if you have one) can all be equipped from this screen. Equipment shown includes body armour, various vehicle and hand weapons and a few engines including a V12 which will be extremely rare in the finished game.

Customising vehicles

10/7/2005

At the moment there are eight different vehicles available in Nova Dawn. These are bike, trike, buggy, van, coupe, saloon, truck and tank. Each vehicle will have different handling characteristics and will be able to be customised by the player. The plans below are what the player sees for each vehicle when in a garage in a base.

The icons represent wheels, engine, driver, cargo, light weapons and heavy weapons. All the vehicles have generous allocations of weaponry ranging from 2 light weapons on bikes up to 4 heavy weapons on the tank.

Back at it

9/26/2005

After a holiday its always a bit difficult to pick up where you left off. I've started with something simple and added another terrain type, marshland. Its quite fun and is another opportunity to show off the water splash effect without having to drive into the sea.

I'm planning to have a good coding session tomorrow night. My target is to get all my heads up display code working. The speedo on the right is done, there will also be a radar display at top left, damage report at top right, fuel guage down the left side and device activation buttons along the bottom of the screen.

Screenshots when its done!

Week off

9/13/2005

I'm going to be on holiday for a week as from tomorrow. I'm not taking the laptop as I think it will do me good to get away from PCs for a week. I've added in a speedometer and the next thing to put in will be the local radar display.

After that I'll work on the weaponry. Here's the ten weapons that will be available in the game.

Back on track

9/7/2005

The code to make the car react to the terrain its moving over is all working now and its looking good. The car moves faster on roads, dust flies up when you drive over desert, water sprays up when you move into water and the car slides all over when driving on snow. Its all looking good and I'm very satisfied with it.

One down...

9/6/2005

I've solved the problem I was having with my vector. It took a lot of searching, but my suspicions were confirmed, iterators on vectors are usually killed by a push_back to the same vector. This is because the vector often has to resize the amount of memory its allocating on a push_back which causes the iterator to reset. The solution was to reserve enough space for the vector beforehand so that the push didn't trigger a resize. Its working very well now and I have clouds of dust being thrown up be the vehicles. I'll use the same method to have spray shooting up when the vehicle enters water. I just need to fix the code to determine terrain type now.

A couple of setbacks

9/2/2005

I've been working on the code to make the vehicles respond to the landscape that they are travelling across and hit a couple of setbacks. The first involves identifying what kind of terrain the vehicle is on, I was planning on using the GetPixel function to determine the terrain, but this only works on the screen and not on the backbuffer and by the time I've updated the screen the landscape under the car is obscured from GetPixel. Instead I think I'm going to have to use pointer arithmetic on the tile surfaces to find the colour at a given coordinate.

The other problem I've got is with STL vectors. I'm getting memory access violations when trying to add new items to the vector that stores all of the sprites. I think the problem is that I'm pushing a new item onto the vector whilst iterating through the same vector with an iterator. The iterator seems to lose track of where its current object is. I'm going to investigate whats happening more at the weekend as I find it hard to believe that you can't push a new item onto a vector while iterating through it.

In the meantime, here's a screengrab from the game showing some trees and wrecks.

Factions in Nova Dawn

8/31/2005

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.

Random maps

8/24/2005

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".

I have roads

8/22/2005

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.