Boring End of April Update (which should have been posted 5 days ago)

Hello everyone,

I'll try and be brief, since not a whole lot was accomplished this month due to having to deal with some external things (work, school, expenses, etc), and most of what we did complete is more in the vein of developing tools to make development itself easier.

While the shadow casting system is still being a work in progress, we needed a method to actually figure out the positioning of the shadow mesh relative to the sprite it is supposed to be cast from. In a normal 3D game this would be trivial, since the object's model would itself be casting the shadow, or it would use a simplified shadowmesh that has roughly the same dimensions as the parent model (thus there'd be no need for manual repositioning), but seeing as DORF utilizes models for casting shadows from 2D sprites (two very different things), we needed some way to figure out the positioning and scaling of the model in real time.

We had Gustas develop an ingame tool that allows the user to adjust the positional offset of things like turrets or overlay graphics on sprites, which beyond allowing for manual repositioning of shadowmeshes, also is just generally helpful when adding new units. Originally, if you wanted to add a tank, you had to basically guess what the turret offsets were, add those values to the YAML file, boot up the game, load a map with that unit in it, check it, and then if you guessed incorrectly, close the game, change the offset values in the YAML, boot up the game again, check the unit, etc etc until you got the correct values. Obviously this sucks, so this tool will massively improve the efficiency of adding new units and buildings.

 

As you can see, the tool still is somewhat buggy, with the turrets and other components appearing to clip through the rest of the object. This is due to a bug with the Z-depth renderer, which when enabled, massively lagged the game. Since it isn't super critical for the asset editor to look super pleasing visually, depth has temporarily been disabled for the editor.

Also, while this may be disappointing to some, we've been debating slashing a number of planned features for the game to reduce scope creep, since it's clear that including all the original planned features may not be wholly realistic. Specifically we will certainly be removing the concept for the subterranean mining aspect of the game, since this would be a massive project in of itself just to get working at a baseline (though in theory we could add it to the game in some post-launch DLC or update). Since much of the game's design was hinged on this system - such as gathering resources by mining for underground ore, building underground bases, sneaking past enemy defenses with underground tunnels, etc - we will need to rework some of these planned systems that tied into that underground concept. The big one is resources, which will likely be now wholly replaced with harvesting scrap off the surface. While this feature was always going to be part of the game, originally scrap harvesting was only going to be a small component of resource gathering, with ore mining being the primary method of getting lots of solid materials to refine.

This does bring up some technical and artistic problems, however. For one, resource logic currently only allows for resource piles to be no larger than a single tile, and if we're going to make scrap harvesting the focus, we need much larger piles (for example, overturned semi trucks, piles of cars, etc). Gustas and Thomas both assure me that this new logic would actually be a fairly easy to implement with the way resource logic currently works, so this won't be a huge issue. In terms of art direction, this does present a problem where scrap heaps are probably not going to be the most colorful thing in the world, and generally with RTS games, you want the resource nodes to be very visually obvious. This may be solved by just slathering key resource piles in neon-colored graffiti, to make it more obvious which piles are more valuable. In preparation for this, I've been spending some time going back and making damaged versions of civilian vehicles, so that we could have a wide variety of different types of scrap piles, to avoid repetition.



Also note that this does not mean that Oil Wells and Oil Pumps are not being removed - as they are a secondary resource type, they will stay in the game as planned. Scrap harvesting will simply be your primary resource type. In Starcraft terms, scrap and solid materials are your Minerals, while Oil is your Vespene.

I also did a little experiment with some materials rendering to include some kind of special, Tiberium-like resource, as an extra valuable thing that could exist on some maps, though it's uncertain if this really belongs in the game, considering magical alien resources are a fairly big cliche for RTS games, and including them may chip away at DORF's identity and make it seem too similar to other titles. But it definitely looks cool, though.



That's all for now. Thanks for continuing to support this project, and hopefully next month we'll have more proper features to show off.