End of July Update - Cityscapes

Hello all,

First off, I want to thank the handful of new supporters who (presumably) came here from the GiantGrantGames video on D.O.R.F, and thanks to Grant himself for making a video covering D.O.R.F.

Now onto the update itself; as you all voted for more work to be done on the civilian/environmental side of D.O.R.F, we've been hard at work on that front. 

Before we get into the city buildings, here's some more environmental stuff. Plain old water and shorelines:

As you might have guessed, these were an absolute nightmare to set up and get working correctly. The short of it is I used some beach foam textures from textures.com, made them grayscale and cranked up the contrast and mirrored both sides of the wave in Photoshop, and then using Sony Vegas, I created the actual back and forth wave animation and the wobbly noise effect, and then exported these black and white animations as a frame sequence. Then, using several of these frame sequences, I applied them as alpha masks with an animated texture to several polygon faces stacked on top of eachother, and there we go, a wave animation. 

Although, I should probably redo these so that the sand actually looks wet.... And I'm dreading having to make more of these, as there also need to be animated tiles for water cliffs and for river/lake shorelines (though the latter will be easier to set up given there won't be these big wave animations, being freshwater). Such terrain work will likely come way later in development though, when lots of the upcoming changes Tovl is making to the way terrain works are completed.

Also, on the mechanical side of things, you may notice there appear to be both light and dark colored water. These aren't just for visual style, but are functionally different. The light colored shallow water can still have land units wade through it, albeit at a severe cost to speed, while the dark blue deep water can only be traversed by naval units or amphibious vehicles.

Now onto the actual cityscapes and civilian buildings.

While D.O.R.F. already had quite a few slum and small town buildings, it desperately needed some big city buildings, just to further expand the sort of environments you've already seen. I've also totally replaced the previous concrete tiles, which were extremely noisy and made the game look like kind of a mess. These have been replaced by less visually obtrusive tiles, with the addition of asphalt, paved road tiles, and brick road tiles, as well as paved road street markings.

Yes, you will be able to capture that gas station and siphon the precious fuel from it for your war economy.

Civilian cars are technically units that can move on their own, but most likely will always just exist as map props, though with some scripting, some maps may include moving cars, just to add some atmosphere. We may also include the ability for the player to haul them away for scrap metal, which would be especially valuable for the Warband faction, as you may imagine.

These gigantic oil pumps can be captured by a player. While the player can build his own oil pumps over existing oil wells, capturing existing ones is obviously cheaper and easier (if there are any around, anyway), and these titan civilian pumpjacks produce crude oil at twice the rate the buildable ones do.

Nothing to see here, just some pretty fountains, although like anything involving water animations, these were also a nightmare to get working. They look cool though!

A more zoomed out shot of the big city. Like any civilian building that looks like people can fit inside of it, your infantry can storm these to turn them into makeshift pillboxes, or storm enemy-controlled civilian buildings to wrestle them away in brutal close quarters combat. City maps won't just be for show, but every building is completely destroyable, so city battles become a rat war of close combat, taking individual buildings with infantry (or leveling them from a distance with artillery). Buildings also obstruct direct fire, so any tanks and vehicles sent into cities will have to get really close, and could be easy prey for anti-tank infantry units bunkering inside of buildings

Keep in mind though, that damaged artwork for structures, and the artwork for building garrisons, has yet to be completed, as doing so takes considerably more time. In general the damage frames for buildings you've seen on certain base structures so far will be stuff that we will work on much later in development, during the polishing phase.

Also, that three-domed structure in the lower left is a technology center. Capture it, can gain some unique tech you can't get anywhere else.

Lastly, here's a funny little building, a medical clinic. Capture it and your infantry will auto-heal slowly.

There's also a few buildings I posted before, which I wasn't able to get working quite right ingame, such as the Missile Silo and Laser Cannon. Those will need some engine tweaks to get them to function correctly.

That's all for now, and again, thank you all for your continued support.