Orcs vs. Martians alpha

I'm happy to say, Orcs vs. Martians has gone alpha. For the alpha release, all the main gameplay features are either working or mostly-working. All the building types are in, the unit types are in, the research system is in, constructing and repairing buildings is in, the resources types are in, roads are in and work with the pathfinding, the HUD is in, etc. Most of the HUD buttons even have tooltips. Hopefully, I'll get good feedback from my alpha testers on whether the gameplay is fun, which is my main goal for the alpha. Enough features are working that it should be possible to evaluate that. I've found free-for-alls on random maps, with AI players, to be pretty fun to play imo.

Work still left to do: too much to list! but it includes: multiplayer networking, art, animations, better effects, better AI, end-of-game stats, etc.

Screenshots:






Tooltips! Rather than float the tooltip next to the button it describes, I gave tooltips their own window. Empire Earth uses that approach and I've grown to like it. You can include more text, and more easily fit in info like hotkeys and resource costs.



Planning to build a new tower. Transparent green means it's ok to build at a spot. If you can't build, a little message appears above the shape telling you why.



Some screenshots at 1280x800. At higher resolutions the GUIs at the bottom of the screen separate to give the player extra real estate.




I recently discovered a feature of Torque where Torque can draw a DTS shape as a billboard, when the DTS is far away. Man, that is a really nice feature. I want to use it, as Orcs vs. Martians has a lot of trees, and billboards could really speed up the rendering of those trees.

So I've been trying to mod Torque, to let the programmer turn on DTS billboards programmatically. Normally, billboards have to be turned on when the DTS is exported, from Blender or from MAX or whatever. But my problem is that none of the DTSs I'm using have billboards turned on. And even if they did, I'd prefer to tweak the billboard parameters myself, and I'd like to do so without repeatedly re-exporting the DTS over and over (which is hard for me to do anyway, since I'm barely familiar with Blender and I don't own any other art tools).

So, I'm trying to come up with a mod, where you can turn on DTS billboards in Torquescript, via datablocks. Something like this:

datablock ShapeBaseData()
{
   // regular ShapeBaseData fields...
   shapeFile    = "~/data/shapes/trees/DesertAltTree01.dts";

   // new billboard fields...
   bbDetailSize = 32;      // switch to a billboard when DesertAltTree01's screen size is less than 32 pixels
   bbBitmapSize = 64;      // billboard bitmap dimensions are 64 x 64 pixels
   bbSteps      = "12 6";  // take billboard snapshots at 12 equator steps, and 6 polar steps.
};

So far, some success! Here's a tree from the RTS environment pack, switching to a billboard: