City-building for VR

There are a couple of RTS type games for VR, but they’re just projections of the existing style of game, and doing this stuff by hand is clunky and annoying.

What I’d like to see is a VR-capable building game that lets you operate from the old top-down perspective for viewing the big picture, but lets you zoom on down to the in-situ level to see what the people are doing and to do things like plan/upgrade buildings, and using gestures etc to give it a cyberspace-god-like feel.

Figure: You’re standing on the gravel path watching your woodworkers heading out to chop down trees. They mumble about being hungry as they pass. Oh yeah, I could use a bakery. Circle your hand to open the blue-glowing buildings rolodex, tap your hand on the glowing bakery image, and then throw it down to roughly where you want it; use both hands to twist/position it, and then bang your fist down to make it so.

You could, of course, do all of this from the more conventional menu systems, but including the creators-eye view would just make it that much more kick ass :)

 

One AO to pwn them all…

That’s right, we toned down the number of AOs going on. Why did we increase them in the first place? Because people wanted to do their own thing. They did it, they got bored, and they slowly drifted away anyway.

The rest of us were left asking “Hey, where’s the fight?”.

But one of the game’s selling points for many people has always been the sandbox element. With small numbers of AOs, we are catering to the broader audience of people who actually want to spend their time in combat with the enemy over the people who want to win through bigger-picture machinations. At least those who want to do it on a short term scale, which covers things like “soft caps” and “sneak attacks”.

I’ve been having a lot more fun playing (on my seekrit toon) during the concentrated AO times – the people playing are largely people who want to see action, and aren’t afraid to stick it out, so the less aggressive doling out of AOs is a real boon.

That leaves a group of people who are instead saying “but I don’t want to go there”.

Someone’s been busy…

Of course, I can’t take credit for any of the eye candy, but the new capture buildings threw us a curve ball and we felt that the risk of delaying release was worth the effort of getting around to change the way capture works. I have had a burning desire to replace table-bumping with something constructive for a long time.

If the eye candy caught your eye, though, and you want to read more about it, see more screenshots and maybe a few videos… Rafter’s 1.31 preview is right here.

Where I come in right now, though, is those capture changes…

Hot Damn!

(Also in High Quality on the YouTube page – click the link under the “Views” count)

Videos like that make it suck that I only get paid to write the game and not to play it :)

Rollercoaster…

Some of you who read this and work on games yourself will probably find this a bit … eerie or weird or nerdy or something. But, I like to enjoy the game I work on. So yes, for my birthday, I stocked up on beers and chips and candy, and I sat myself infront of our game for most of the day – a good 16 hours played yesterday/this morning.

And it has really been quite phenomenal. Fundamentally, it’s still the same game it was before our last patch set of patches, but this differentiated brigades has definitely been a major milestone in the development track.

Roermond: Part 2

As requested, with voice narration – which might completely ruin it for you :)

I decided to run with the bulk of the remaining footage – runs at around 44 minutes. I had some footage of different vis levels and such but I mistook it for out-takes when I was freeing up some disk space for rendering :(

Roermond: Part 1

The first hour of the big Roermond fight from Monday. This is “buzzard footage” – not the static bunker watch of the last movie, but it’s still not Spielberg and its certainly not a promo movie. I wound up trimming the first hour down to 15 minutes but avid WWIIers – especially those who’ve fought in Roermond lately – especially Monday :)

1 hour 30 minutes of Roermond

Damn. That was pretty awesome. I missed the first 30-40 minutes of the 2 hour battle. Amazing how it surged to and fro. It’s mostly just buzzard footage – although this time I wasn’t stuck watching anything but players. I didn’t get cinematic but I got some “eye level” footage which makes the buzzard-view footage the more dramatic. Caught some awesome shots and action, caught the first foot hold, the smoke screen, storming the bridge, the sacrificial 251 runs, the lucky newbie. I was going to film the bunker capture but the Allies fell back.

There is tons of infantry fighting, there’s armor fighting going on all over the place, you can see the Axis Tier1 RDP cycle kick in as waves of Pak38s and tanks roll out, unfortunately the Allies hadn’t been daft enough to drain all of their ATGs/tanks and they managed to hold back the first wave of armor, but at the cost of pretty much all of theirs.

I switched icons on and off in a few places so you could see how dramatically different it can look when you are seeing the game thru “grunt” eyes – those are the ones that make you go “no way? but that place is crawling?!?” I also switched vis mode a couple of times so you can see how radically different dialup and broadband are…

There’s so much footage here that it’ll take me a couple of days to put it into film format, and probably a day to render the damn thing – but I’m going to.

Awesome battle! It’ll close with the huge flood of Allied troops surging from MSPs for the counter attack…

Update: Part 1 now available.

7 hours…

“So many ways, but [you] can’t run away”

Even if we’d gotten things wrong, I wouldn’t have expected to see real attrition until a weekend peak, but still; its good to see that increasing resupply from 4.5 to 7 hours didn’t cause an immediate collapse of the universe. Infact, the only brigade that ran out of equipment was the German Navy’s 5th (5zf), which ran out of Fairmilies.

So far, at least, all its done is broaden the battle trough