My New Mantra - keep it simple
Entry posted by Kronos ·
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After a few of weeks of programming burnout I am now back in action. i think I was starting to feel a bit swamped with the increasing complexity of my project amongst other things however things are looking a bit rosier now. I probably should have sat down and made a proper plan because of all the dependencies of the various elements.
My history with Leadwerks has been somewhat chequered and I have struggled for along time trying to do stuff with it in the past. However lately things just seem to be clicking so I have decided to move my main project over from Xors3d to Leadwerks. Xors is a good, easy to use engine but it has certain flaws which make it less than ideal for my purposes plus I am more of an OpenGL man.
My aim is to make a sort of strategy/vehicle combat type game in the vein of battlezone/armourgeddon/carrier command. Due to my limited programming skill I am trying to make it as simple as possible at the moment.(Still seems pretty damn complicated)
What I have so far:.
Vehicle mesh loading - Had to write my own mesh loader to overcome certain problems
Vehicle navigation - nothing fancy just point to point. I will probably have to add some simple(if there is such a thing) obstacle avoidance at some point. I have a sort of an idea about a passive avoidance system but haven't experimented with it yet.
Order System - only 4 order types at the moment (only 1 thats actually working!) - vehicles and other entities will be controlled by orders
Turret system - controls turret rotation/aiming - turrets attach to vehicles
Gun system - controls the firing ie when to fire,where to fire from, reload times, etc - guns attach to turrets
Projectile - guns fire projectiles - deals with collisions - projectile types and effects. One thing I am particularly keen to have is proper lighting on missiles and explosions ie so the landscape will light up when they fly past or explode.
Arbitrary world partition system - manages vehicles and other entities - vehicles need to know about other vehicles and buildings in their vicinity whether they are friendly or not. I call it arbitrary because the world sectors can be any position, and theoretically any size, in 3d space. There are probably better ways to do it but in keeping with my mantra i am keeping it simple,
Things to do.
Next step is probably create some different particle effects for projectiles and explosions.
Implement some actual vehicle behaviours - now that I have the order system in place vehicles should be able to issue their own orders under certain conditions ie aggressively pursuing detected enemies.
I am kind of excited as I feel I am actually quite close to having something that will soon have a life of its own, just a couple more hills (mountains) to climb.
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