Pelorea: Tactical War - Board Map System

Intro
Since last time, players that had opportunity to test our alpha release sent us many comments. Among those comments, some were particularly aimed at the fact that the game pace was too slow and also that the game interaction was not showing exactly the design we were looking for: a card board game translated to a rts video game. In order to correct and take into account all those points, we decided to work on few points inside the game: 1) map display, 2) card interaction and 3) simplification of the rules.

HexaBoard map
In order to give a feeling more like a boardgame, and also simplify user interaction with the game, we decided to remove the usual 3D view of your landscape and replace it with a 3D view of a board game. We ended-up with a new object (CBoardMap) which replaces your usual terrain and will display an hexagonal board in 3D. Moreover this class can generate new terrain thanks to its high degree of parametrization.

You can see in the following screenshots some capture from different point of view and also inside the mission editor. The object is very light on the server and most of the work is done on the client. This allow some quick multiplay interaction and no overhead on the network communication between client / server. By the way, if you look carefully you will see some models from different packs available in GG and on the web. All others models (hexacell, hill...) have been done by our artist team under Wu supervision.



For those who already saw my message on the forums, you will notice that I reduce the artefact that was popping on the hexagon model. In fact, I just remove the sunlight / mllight interaction, but you can still notice some artefact in the middle of some models (see here, as I need help on this topic: www.garagegames.com/mg/forums/result.thread.php?qt=75668).

Future
We will now review the other parts of Pelorea that were too much complex and still work on our M4 release in order to put in it all updates of the code. In the meantime, our current alpha is closed and no longer updated as important changes are under process inside our code.