digital wargame engine test board
Community Forums/Graphic Chat/digital wargame engine test board
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 Hi guys! This is just a test I did in the wargame campaign and scenario creator I'm making. I'm using the Devil Shadow System in it too. The game will be played in 3D on illustrated 1" grid boards, with 'cardboard' and 'plastic' scenery on it. The boards sit on a table, in a room. The players can move freely around the table, and zoom in and out, moving their playing pieces, rolling dice, and trying to achieve their team's objectives. |
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| Looks good! I obviously don't know the framerate of this, but I would assume if you turned off shadowing on the table and used lightmapping (assuming the light positions/intensities never change) on it you would get some extra speed. |
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| i like the idea of the table and extra depth it provides. its not just a board game floating in nothingness. |
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| Wow! I like it... except... if I play it, I'll constantly wonder about the rest of the room! Love the depth a lot. |
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| Plash: I just went into the program, and checked to see if the table casting shadows had any impact on performance, but when I disabled shadows on the table, there was no visible change to frame rate. I could probably lightmap the table, but the board itself would be too hard, as terrain can be changed or removed during the game depending on what the players do, (ie, building turn to rubble) so scenery casted shadows could change during gameplay. It gets great framerate on my current computer, about half on my older computer, and pretty low on my laptop, when shadows are turned on. My current computer is an Intel Core 2 Duo E8400, 4GB Ram, and a Geforce 9800 GT graphics card. It gets 60 to 75 fps on average. My older computer is an AMD Athlon 64 3500+ with only 2GB Ram and a Geforce 7800 GTX. It gets 20 to 35 fps on average, depending on how much is placed on the board. Since it's not an animated action game, if it drops to 20, it's still completely playable on that computer. My laptop though, has Intel Core2 Duo T5750 2Ghz, with onboard X3100 GMA graphics, and only 2GB of RAM, and only manages 9 to 25 fps depending on how much is on the board, though sometimes it gets glitchy. When it drops to 9 fps, the whole thing stutters. Of course, turning off shadows completely alters fps, the laptop goes over 60 fps with shadows off, so that is an option for laptop users that don't have dedicated graphics, or userd on older computers who would rather have 60+ framerates than lighting/shadow effects. I don't actually have any idea what the average spec computer would be nowadays though. |
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| I could probably lightmap the table, but the board itself would be too hard, as terrain can be changed or removed during the game depending on what the players do, (ie, building turn to rubble) so scenery casted shadows could change during gameplay. Right, my only thought was for the table :D My laptop though, has Intel Core2 Duo T5750 2Ghz, with onboard X3100 GMA graphics, and only 2GB of RAM, and only manages 9 to 25 fps depending on how much is on the board, though sometimes it gets glitchy. When it drops to 9 fps, the whole thing stutters. Yeah.. Those integrated cards reallly blow. |
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| Ryudin: You can freely look around, so you don't have to look at the table. I'm thinking of making 'theme rooms', ie, some guy's basement, some guy's garage, some guy's lounge room, a gaming convention table, etc, so you can play in different environments :) |
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| Hello Mr. Mecha ist this a Battletech Game? It looks great. If it playes in the Battletech Universe i will be pleased :-) Tell me if you need something ... |
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| Hi Sung! I was originally creating a "battletech board game in 3D" program, which I posted some youtube videos of, called Battleforces 3D, but due to 'licensing' and copyright issues, I cannot pursue that project anymore. This is what I'm doing instead, making a program that lets people add their own graphics and story, and play in their own game universes, a sort of 'construction set'. I'll also make some game worlds of my own as add-ons for those who just want to play games, and not make them. But the project is no longer a Battletech project. One of the reasons is that firstly, I cannot make any money from anything I make if it relates to Battletech's official universe, and secondly, if I distribute the game and it features battletech related art or story, the owners of Battletech can sue me in court. However, perhaps in the future after it's completed, if people like and use my programs, I could try and convince the battletech owners to let me release a battletech universe add-on for my program. |
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| Hi MisterMecha, sounds great. I like also boardgames. I played them couple of years. Such as Eastern Front. I worked on a boardgame 3 years ago but my part stopped doing on it and for me it was to difficult to develop it alone. The game was called Frotnlines: operation iraqi freedom   On wargamer.com there was a small preview http://www.wargamer.com/articles/search.asp?search=&atype=124&orderby=1&Author=Sean+Drummy&from=28+APR+2006+&to=&results=-1 I was doing all the Graphics and Arts. |
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| Nice!!! I will follow this for sure. |
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| I love the style of this. Playing a virtual tabletop wargame :D |
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| Hi MisterMecha Nice looking table, I've always liked the idea of virtual tabletops. You might want to check out http://racingspidergames.com/devBlog/ where they are working on a Virtual Tabletop as well. Good luck with your game. Cheers GrumpyOldMan |
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| I am looking forward to this. |
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| You going to add a hex grid capability to this? Or just squares? |
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| My original program idea was hexes, but at the moment, I've moved to squares. I'm thinking of making it an option in the editor, which type of grid to use for a campaign setting; hexes or squares, but I'm still trying to work out how I would handle movement, line of sight, etc, if it was on a hex grid. On a square grid, it's really easy to work out. I've scaled everything so that 1" = 1 blitz game unit. The board is placed so the bottom left corner of the board is at 1,1, being the a square in the first row, and first column. So, simply checking the 3D coordinates of the mouse cursor at any time tells me exactly which square it is pointing at. Ie, if my mouse cursor is at the 3D coordinates 5,6 then I know it is 5 squares across on the board, and 6 squares up on the board. I need to give some more thought as to how to determine what hex the cursor would be pointing at, if I went with hexes. Here's an update picture. I did a little work on the test environment around the board this morning. Coffee mug, can of soda, an open DWE Handbook, and some dice. Threw a door in one of the walls too so the players don't feel locked in :)  |
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| Sung complete THAT game MisterMecha when will this be finished it looks good :) |
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| No idea on a finishing time. Only started a couple weeks ago. Could be a month from now, could be end of the year, depending on how fast I work, and how few bugs and problems I encounter while making it, and how many additional options work their way into the editors. So sorry, no idea on when I'll finish it. But progress is going good so far! |
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| That room is too tidy for a wargamer, where are the piled high pizza boxes, the boxes of tin soldiers, plastic kits still in their shrinkwrap, polystyrene blocks in boxes to use as terrain. Silliness aside - it looks very good, and is something I've wanted to do myself from time to time, however I prefer to be able to wargame with 'real' tin soldiers looking over beautifully modeled terrain, and be able to leave it in a messy state filling the lounge room for the next 3 weeks before playing again. |
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| I know what you mean. Even though I don't get to spend much time playing with my minis, I love collecting them. I actually came up with this game idea after numerous "when are you going to clear up that table!" comments going about the house. I thought - there's got to be a way I can set up some scenery and play a game, without continually being told to put it all away because someone was coming over :) |
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| I've started making it optional to have either paper standups, or actual 'miniatures'. Here's some I've been working on. (Haven't made a shadow for the larger one yet). I'm using rectangles with an alpha-mapped texture on them for shadows now, instead of using real-time shadows. Doing it this way, the frame rate count is sooo much better than it was. On my laptop, I couldn't run the program with shadows on, now I can, which means it works good on my laptop, as well as my gaming desktop now. Anyway, here's a shot showing two of the miniature designs for my sci-fi campaign that I'm working on to go with my digital wargame engine. One team has small, light, agile mecha, in large numbers, while the other team has a handful of heavier armoured mecha with high firepower. Textures on the M-Zee war machines are not necessarily final, but that's how I've got them looking at the moment.  |
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| They look wonderful, especially the blue humanoid robots/mechs. I like the look of this very much. It would really work well on a big screen. One of the advantages of pen/paper/mini wargaming is the visual aspect which is often lost when going to PC wargaming despite fancy animations and effects because you are restricted to a tiny viewport on a screen cluttered with all manner of icons. What would be really nice would be to have a projector, positioned on the ceiling pointing down at the table, using a wiimote to select and pick/up move pieces. |
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| I'm very exciting of that what i see! Very nice Mister Mecha. |
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| Nice job. I was working on something like this, but I lost my source. I was trying to recreate amiga game called Mechforce. I look forward to this!! Jason |
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| How is this progressing? |
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| Slowly, sorry. There's been some family/health issues over the last month, and I haven't been able to spend much time working on it. But I'm still going! |
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| Sorry - looks like because I didn't update my website over the last few weeks, the 'free web hosting' service provider I was using deleted my account and website!!! Supposedly they would send a warning email before doing such things, but I never got one, so I think I'll find a different hoster and make a new website at some stage. |
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| I am sorry to hear about the health issues. I wish the best for you with that. ;) |
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| I could host it for you, in return for a small ad or two on the page :) Email me if interested. Dan |
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| might be worth getting rid of those generic looking textures. How about a carpeted floor and and table with finer grain Also the grass is really acidic looking. perhaps a bit more warm yellow colour |
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