News about Pelorea: Tactical War

Progress report
Some good progress report was made since last month report on GarageGames. Lot of work was done on the gameplay and game library, with description of the two main races and also the cards element. One milestone is to have a first deck of playable cards around mid - end August. Concerning the implementation documentation, we will follow the remarks from some GG pals, and have not only a wiki website but also a word document in order to have some reference documentation too.

Client development
Our first milestone is aimed to provide a test-bed for gameplay testing (mainly concerning game mechanism and AI) and also artists. Current topics are the board game and the procedural map creation. Board game is an hexagonal representation of the map and takes care of all interaction between players and the map (A*, visibility...) - for those interested, it is a NetObject derived class -. Concerning the procedural map creation, main concept is to use a coarse representation of Pelorea world and to extrapolate a "high-definition" map on the fly depending on the location on the coarse map. For this, we will still use the legacy terrain inside TGEA with some modifications in the base code.

Some screenshots for those who are waiting for it. In the next shots, you can recognize one map from RTS environment pack and also some model from Frogames.net human RTS pack (scaling is not good at the moment). All shots are taken from TGEA.



3D RTS view of winter map


Same view with hexagonal board overlay and visibility areas


Same map with fullscreen fx shader activated (see this thread for info)


Server development
In our first milestone, a simple server-side client is needed in order to allow players to register for the game, authentication, track experiences and also have a badge system. The web client was developped with GWT and you can see some screenshots below. All communications between server and client is encrypted with private / public key algorithms. The same algorithm is used inside TGEA when using authentication with the server.



Login screen of web client


User information editing with badge feature


Misc
We are currently translating our contract in Chinese for our new team members which will join us (mainly for 3D and one coder). Afterwards main difficulty will be to maintain a good communication with people with different background, language and culture.