Blog for Geom at GarageGames.com

Old fonts, new fonts

Geom — 2008-01-02T21:56:56+00:00

Lately I've been giving a cosmetic makeover to Orcs vs. Martians' menus and guis, with particular emphasis on re-fonting things. Here's the old Game Setup screen:

It was functional, but looked too much like Microsoft Excel. I want this to look like a game, not a spreadsheet!

Here's the new version:

Ta-da!

My next mission is to get this gui to resize to different resolutions, in a way that looks halfway-decent...

BTW, thanks to everyone who gave feedback from the OVM Beta! The comments have really helped me get a clearer idea of what to focus on as well as giving me some new ideas! They've really helped me out.

In case anyone missed it, I resourced OVM's tab gui control, and it's over here. Ron Nelson was also nice enough to post a port of it for TGEA, and that's over here.

Tab Control WIP

Geom — 2007-11-29T05:50:39+00:00

Lately I've been sprucing up my tab control in order to turn it into a code resource.

The main thing I've been doing is adding support for custom bitmaps to it, something it didn't have before. So now, each tab can have an icon next to its label (w00t!) Here's how Orcs vs. Martians' Options dialog now looks, with icons:

Also, you can now specify bitmaps for the tabs themselves. This is in case you don't like the default look of the tabs. Here's a simple example with funky transparent, oval tabs:

The tab icons and bitmaps are independent features, so you can use both at the same time, or just one, or neither.

The TorqueScript for the tab control is really simple. Here's the complete script code for the 2nd example above with the tab bitmaps:

new GuiControlProfile(GuiTabTestProfile)
{
   bitmap         = "./mainMenu/tabs";
   opaque         = true;
   borderThickness = 2;
   borderColor    = "20 220 255";
   borderColorHL  = "20 220 255";
   fillColor      = "0 0 0 80";
   fontColor      = "0 0 0";
   justify        = "center";
};

new GuiTabCtrl() {
   profile = GuiTabTestProfile;
   position = "510 385";
   extent = "270 100";
   tabSize = "0 24";
   margins = "0 0";

   new GuiTextCtrl() {
      profile = "GuiTextProfile";
      position = "60 40";
      text = "This is tab pane #1.";
      tabLabel = "Tab #1";
   };
   new GuiTextCtrl() {
      profile = "GuiTextProfile";
      position = "90 50";
      text = "This is tab pane #2.";
      tabLabel = "Tab #2";
   };
   new GuiTextCtrl() {
      profile = "GuiTextProfile";
      position = "120 60";
      text = "This is tab pane #3.";
      tabLabel = "Tab #3";
   };
};

You just declare a GuiTabCtrl, and every child of it automatically shows up as a tab. The GuiTabCtrl looks for the special fields "tabIcon" and "tabLabel" in each child control in order to display its tab properly. The tab bitmap (if you use one) is declared in the Profile. No other programming is necessary to make the children appear and disappear, the GuiTabCtrl takes care of that.

Anyway, I should have this resourced pretty soon. I'm still working out a few design issues with how the tab bitmaps should work (like, should they overlap the top border of the ctrl, or not?) And then I need to factor out the code from Orcs vs. Martians' codebase. Then it'll be done. Hopefully, it'll be useful resource!

- - - - -

Changing subjects - many thanks to everyone who participated in on the Orcs vs. Martians beta test. The feedback has been really outstanding and helpful! Thanks guys!! If you haven't emailed me some feedback, please do so, I can definitely use more. The feedback has really helped me know what areas to focus on and given me some new ideas for the gameplay. The email address again is - ovm_test@redbrickgames.com

OVM Beta1 test!

Geom — 2007-11-11T04:09:01+00:00

I am pushing the Orcs vs. Martians Beta1 out the door today. w00t! Finally.

I'm not sure why I'm calling this the Beta1. Wait, I know - because it's my game, and I want to! LOL. Well, all the major features are in and are working fairly well. But the keyword there is "major" -- there are still lots of minor features to finish, and tons of work to do. Final art and particle effects in particular are lacking.

There are also still plenty of small bugs. Though none are too critical. The game plays quite stably. Although, there is an intermittant crash on exit.

I'm planning one more test release, a Beta2, and then the final release.

What's new in Beta1? compared to the Alpha2 back in April,

* LAN and internet games now work! (although the connection UI is clunky)
* Game replays now work! (and can be saved!)
* Improved & new animations & sound effects!
* Improved graphics
* Improved random map generation (more control over the outcome, and a higher % of accessible terrain)
* Multiple tile sets!
* Improved HUD
* An on-screen popup alterting the player to attacks
* Improved game results screen
* Improved AI
* Lots more

=====

So here's something else new. I limited the previous Alpha tests to people I knew personally, and those tests went ok, but I didn't get as much feedback as I wanted. It was good feedback, just not enough. So this time around, I am opening the Beta1 test to all Torque'rs. Yep, that's right. You can now play OVM, and help me make the game better. I hope this will be a fun way for others to see what I've been up to, and for myself, I hope to get lots of critiques and suggestions to improve my game.

The only things I ask -- you must be a Torque licensee, and you must agree to give feedback within a couple of weeks.

What kind of feedback am I looking for? Most helpful is feedback about the overall fun factor of the game, gameplay elements, usability, what you liked and didn't like, suggestions for changes/additions, etc. If you can only think of a couple of comments that's cool, just send something that'll help me. Also, negative feedback is every bit as helpful as positive -- if it stinks and it's going to be a flop, I want to know!

To get in on the Beta1 test, send email to:

ovm_test@redbrickgames.com

and I'll reply with a download link.

Please note, this is NOT a purely open beta test! Don't repost the download link anywhere, or share the game with others. Let me control that, as I don't want the Beta1 to get too widely distributed.

Thanks in advance. I promise it'll be a fun test! Here's a short blurb on the soul of the game. (I need to get this up on my GreatGamesExperiment page)

=====

Orcs vs. Martians aims to combine the best of casual gaming and hardcore RTS gaming. OVM is easy to learn, and incorporates many usability features meant to minimize RTS micromanagement. However, its core fun is designed around my personal favorite hardcore RTS features.

Casual / ease-of-use features:

- only 1 resource type (but multiple ways to get it)
- only 3 units types (but they're customizable thru upgrades)
- no building or tech dependencies to memorize
- beautiful scenery
- new worker units automatically start working, w/o user direction
- when you're attacked, on-screen alerts summarize where & by whom

Hardcore features:

- different terrain has different tactical value
- different terrain has different resource-producing value
- random map generation is powerful and flexible
- full fog-of-war implementation
- unlimited upgrades, leading to interesting battles late in the game

Games typically play in well under an hour. Perfect for a lunch break at work. Also good for older gamers, who may have less free time than they used to (family, etc.), but still want to get in a good RTS experience with their buddies. You might say I've tailored the game to my own demographic group, so to speak.

Orcs vs. Martians

Geom — 2007-07-11T03:11:02+00:00

It's been a while since I've posted about Orcs vs. Martians, and I've got something exciting nearly working, so I figure it's time for an update.

The past six months I've worked on a little of almost everything in this game - useability, gameplay, replays, the hud, graphics, sound effects, animations, networking, out-of-game guis and dialogs, you name it. Probably, the areas I've put the most effort into are the hud and the guis / menus. Although, sometimes it all seems like a blur :) so I'm not really sure.

In contrast to the other stuff, I've only spent a little time on the AI. I'm really looking forward to getting to that in a bigger way, one of the main reasons I wanted to write an RTS was to try some crazy ideas with the AI.

Some current screenshots.

The thing I'm excited about is, I'm close to allowing selection of different tile sets in the game. I think it's cool to see how different the game looks with different terrain textures; it's a pretty dramatic visual effect. And, I've already tried a few different ones -

here's a tile set consisting mostly of textures that came with the Torque 1.3 SDK. I'm not too crazy about this particular set - it's a bit dark, making it hard to see the units, but still it makes for an interesting variant.

Here's a 3rd tile set, consisting mostly of textures from the RTS environment pack. I thought this one came out looking really good. I need to do a little tweaking though like maybe smoothing out the transition from sand to grass.

So much for tile sets. Another new feature is, you can now order a worker to build multiple buildings. Just hold down SHIFT while placing a building, and you can queue up several of them. Very convenient for building a line of towers, since it lets you divert your attention elsewhere while the things are getthing built.

The queued buildings plans show up in the 3-D view as white, translucent buildings. (the green one is the building "cursor")

Another area I've been putting a lot of effort and thought into is the end-of-game gui. I feel it's important that the player have a satisfying end-of-game experience in an RTS, more so than other types of games. OVM's end-game gui now has quite a few stats and graphs (possibly, too many at this point):

The player can even watch a replay of the game right in this gui, while he's still connected to the server. Since players are still connected, they can watch the replay together and use the chat window while watching it. The replay is is sort of a poor-man's version; it's not a full-blown Torque replay, it just shows an enlarged version of the minimap and dots moving around on it.

Back to Torque-ing around. Charge!!

work on programmatic DTS billboards

Geom — 2007-05-31T02:23:56+00:00

A while back I mentioned I had been experimenting with adding billboards to DTS shapes, programmatically. This is the idea where your game code can add billboards to any DTS shape, without involving an art tool (Blender, Max, etc.) exporter. You'd simply write Torquescript calls (or something) to add the billboards at run-time. This seems like something that would make a useful resource.

So finally, I've gotten around to working on this idea in earnest.

The good news is, I've got it working - in certain cases. It works when the DTS shape is used by Player / AIPlayer objects, or by RTSUnit objects (from the RTS-Starter Kit).

The bad news is, this resource doesn't work for all cases. The biggest problem is that it doesn't work when the DTS is used by a TSStatic. That's a pretty big drawback, if I understand the purpose of TSStatics correctly. TSStatics are for when you've got lots of a certain kind of object in a game, like trees. Unfortunately, that's exactly the situation where billboards are most likely to be wanted.

The resource can also crash if the billboard is for a Player object, and the Player object has shadows turned on.

I think I know what the problem is (or at least one of them) with TSStatics, so I'm going to keep trying to get this resource working with TSStatics.

Despite its current limitations, I thought I'd go ahead and post the code I have, so that anyone who wants to can play with it or comment on it can do that. I should note that the code *sometimes* works with TSStatics. In fact the example below uses TSStatics from the Stronghold mission; by luck those don't seem to crash it. But it's definitely not guaranteed to be stable.

For more info about DTS billboards in general, check out e.g. the docs on the Blender .dts exporter.

Here's what I've got so far for the resource. Again, this is only a prototype, hopefully in the future there'll be a more bulletproof version.

--------

Programmatic DTS billboards

Summary:
This resource allows you to programmatically add billboards to a DTS shape. The DTS shape does not need to have been exported with billboards.

Article:
Torque DTS shapes support a nifty feature called "billboards". A billboard is a 2-D representation of what the DTS shape looks like when viewed from a long way away. If a DTS shape has billboards turned on, then Torque will render the DTS as a 2-D bitmap (billboard) when the DTS reaches it's lowest detail level. This can can result in huge speed-ups, since rendering a 2-D bitmap is much faster than rendering a 3-D shape.

Until now, billboards had to be turned on or off at the time the DTS was exported from the art tool (Blender, Max, etc) that created the DTS. With this resource, you can now turn on billboards in your game rather than in the art tool. This can be done for any DTS shape that doesn't already have billboards. The programmatic API supports all the same parameters that the art tool exporters support (and, arguably, slightly more).

API:
This resource adds a single Torquescript function (brackets denote optional params):

setupBillboards(shapeName, numEquatorSteps, numPolarSteps, bitmapSize, detailSize [, polarAngle [, includePoles [, bitmapDetailLevel ]]] )

For more info on the parameters, see the Blender DTS exporter docs.

Code
snipped - see comments below

Example
You can test this resource using the starter.fps example in Torque 1.5. Run Starter.FPS.bat, and start the mission "A Stronghold". Once in the mission, bring down the console window (~) and type

setupBillboards("starter.fps/data/shapes/Winter/TreeNoSnow03.dts",8,4,32,64);
setupBillboards("starter.fps/data/shapes/Winter/TreeNoSnow04.dts",8,4,32,64);
setupBillboards("starter.fps/data/shapes/Winter/TreeNoSnow05.dts",8,4,32,64);

That'll create billboards for three of the tree models. As you run around the mission area you should notice some of the trees transition between 3-D shapes and billboards. The billboards will be pretty ugly, but that's intentional to make them more noticable. (normally, of course, you'd select the billboard parameters to make the transition as invisible as possible).

up-close: 3-D shapes.

step back a bit: they become billboards.

Recoloring DTS shapes

Geom — 2007-02-14T01:09:06+00:00

I've run into an interesting problem while developing Orcs vs. Martians. I need to recolor my RTS units and buildings, so that they show the color of the player that owns them. But, Torque doesn't have any native ability to recolor DTS shapes at run-time. At first, I thought about manually recoloring the DTSs' material files in a paint program. But since OVM supports up to 9 players, that'd mean recoloring every DTS shape with nine different colors. That seems like too much work, and besides I might want to tweak the player colors later and then I'd have to do that work all over again. So, I've come up with a programmatic way to recolor DTSs at run-time. If there's interest, I can post the code for this feature as a resource.

The basic idea is that you tell Torque the rectangular region in the DTS's material file (.png, .jpg, whatever) that you want to recolor. E.g. to recolor the Torque Orc's "shoulder pad", the region would be this rectangle:

You can also say to recolor only certain colors in on the color wheel. This is somewhat hard to describe (and not quite implemented yet), but you basically specify the range of colors you want to recolor as an arc on the color wheel. It would be delimited by a "low" color and a "high" color. Only colors inside the arc get recolored.

Then you specify your new color. All the recolor specs go into a datablock, like this:

datablock RTSUnitData(OrcAxeman)
{
   shapeFile       = "~/data/shapes/units/orc/orc.dts";
   // ...etc...
   recolorRect     = "256 280 92 100";
   recolorLow      = "98 46 255";
   recolorHigh     = "157 199 255";
   recolorNew      = "255 0 0";  // new color is red!
};

In order to preserve bright-and-dark variations in the original material, the algorithm modulates the brightness of your new color pixel-by-pixel.

Here's the current effect in Orcs vs. Martians:

Viola! Team colors in an RTS. Now players can tell who's on whose team. The game definitely looks and plays better for it.

Orcs vs. Martians alpha

Geom — 2007-01-24T21:12:38+00:00

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:

It's starting to look like a game

Geom — 2006-09-14T03:02:44+00:00

Orcs vs. Martians is finally starting to feel like a real game. Not yet a game that anyone would want to buy :) But hey, at least it feels like a game.

OvM now recognizes when somebody has won. It shows scores and statistics at the end of the game. The AI is starting to get feisty and less stupid...and more irritating, when it comes and harasses me while I'm trying to test something. lol. Fog of war is also mostly-working now.

Some screenshots:

Fog of war turned out to be pretty hard to do, and my implementation still has some issues. In the 3D view, all I do for FOW is to turn the terrain black when you're not supposed to see it. However, that doesn't hide water. It also still allows you to kind of see hills and ridgelines you're not supposed to see, if they're silhouetted against water or against the sky.

Also, for Orcs vs. Martians, FOW causes an aesthetic problem in my opinion. OvM is supposed to be a light-hearted game, and all that black terrain looks way too ominous. Slightly sinister. It'd be interesting to try fixing that by coloring the terrain something other than black. Like maybe paint it with a green terrain texture, that has embedded question mark icons or something. Just something more friendly looking. I've never seen another game do that, so this sounds like a job for... (drumroll please...) an indie game.

I've also added "melee" units to the game, in addition to the ranged units that were already there. Orcs get axemen, Martians get battle-bots, and humans get swordsmen.

Here's the end-of-game results screen. It's not too pretty yet, but I figure it's good enough for an alpha release (which is hopefully not too far off). The screen shows results both by player and by team, which I think is pretty cool. I plan to colorize it to make it easier to see each individual player's contributions to his team's score.

I also have a working Windows installer/uninstaller! OvM shows up in Windows Add Remove Programs and everything.

I used NSIS to create the installer, but I'm not too enamored with it; I might end up going with some other installer creation tool.

I've also started thinking more about the races and game balancing. Right now the three races are Orcs, Martians, and Humans. I've been trying to think of a way to balance such different races in a semi-realistic way (this being such a realistic game and all :P). What I've come up with of so far is:

Martians are the most powerful race. They're the only high-tech race, so their weapons far exceed anything the others have. To keep them from being too powerful, the storyline could be that they've crash-landed in Middle-Earth. So although they have hand guns and robots, they don't have flying saucers or artillery or anything like that. Also it would make sense to give them the fewest hit points, since they're little dudes. And maybe the slowest on foot, too.

The Martians' main strategy will be to defeat their enemies from a distance, with superior weapon range and firepower. They'll do best in wide-open areas, where they can use ranged weapons to maximum advantage.

Orcs are the 2nd-most powerful race, owing to lots of hit points and pretty good speed. Their melee units (axemen) will have powerful attacks, but their ranged (crossbow) units will be comparitively lame.

Orcs' main strategy will be to close in on their enemies quickly so they can use their melee units. They'll do best fighting in hilly terrain, since it minimizes the advantage of long-range weapons. Maybe they can also use their speed to spread over the map quickly, claiming the best map spots.

Then there's the humans. They've got neither good hit points nor good weapons. Poor blighters :)

I'm thinking of giving humans the best technology tree, which will eventually allow them to upgrade their weapons. That is, if they survive long enough. To help them survive, I could give them the strongest buildings. That kind of makes sense...Orcs aren't exactly known for building well, and the Martians have crash-landed, so they don't have much in the way of construction tools.

I'm not sure how far I'll let humans upgrade. I was thinking it would really be funny to see Middle-Earth humans attacking the Orc Horde with gatling guns :) Or with a thermonuclear device :). Got an Orc problem? No worries... BOOOOOM! lol. Not sure how far I want to go down that path, but for this game I think the more humorous, the better. Assuming, the humor doesn't horribly wreck game balancing, or drive up development time too much.

Another crazy idea I had was, instead of making the 3rd race be the Humans, make them be the Amish. That would be way funny. I can just see guys with little Menonite-style beards running around the game, beating Martians over the head with ploughs or something. Unfortunately, I don't think it's such a good idea, I can too easily see it coming across as offensive to some people. I don't mean it that way of course, I've got nothing against the Amish, I'm just looking for humorous angles. Anyway, how would Amish fight effectively against Orcs and Martians?? That'd be a problem. Maybe it'd make a good Easter egg though...

That's about where the game is now. On with the development. I can hardly wait to get to where I'm ready to try out some of the content packs that are available.

On a totally different subject, AT&T is bunch of price gouging thugs. There, I feel better.

Random maps and menu screens

Geom — 2006-04-17T23:33:42+00:00

Lately I've been working on generating random maps for Orcs vs. Martians. It's been pretty fun since it's all very visual work.

I owe Derek Adams a beer for this.

Screenshots:

One of the interesting challenges I haven't tackled yet is, how to ensure that a generated map is playable !!! LOL That's the problem with randomness, you're not sure what you're going to get. For this game, the main problem is that player locations must be reachable from each other. Namely, they should not be isolated by bodies of water, cliff ledges, etc. I am not planning on having any air or water units in the game, so player locations must be mutually reachable by land.

I've also been working on the out-of-game screens and menus for the game. I got tired of looking at the placeholder art for the RTS-SK. That orangey-pink background color gets to you after a while.

Menu screens:

More ramblings at

Progress on my RTS

Geom — 2006-03-21T01:19:05+00:00

Here's some progress on the RTS I've been working on. All models and textures are just stand-ins at the moment. I'm focusing more on functional behavior before I worry about the art too much.

Each base has its own local supply of resources. This is shown when you hover over or select a base building. The tree icon shows the number of resources, and the worker icon shows the number of workers harvesting for the base.

I'm using the "building planning marker" (is that its name?) that came with the RTS SK. I constrain the marker's position to always be aligned to world tiles, so you always know exactly where a building will get built. I'm currently using a world tile size of 8 meters (the default), but eventually I'd like to go finer to something like 4 meters. Though I understand there are still issues with that and water blocks.

The game is smart enough to not let you build on top of existing buildings and other illegal places (prev image). A green marker indicates an ok spot to build. For the red and green markers, I'm just using a flat green/flat red texture with no details in them whatsoever. I thought it came out looking ok.

For the animating the building process, currently I just scale up the Z scale. So the building rises out of the ground. This is an older screenshot where the worker is standing in the middle of the building to build it (so you can't see him). I've changed it so that he now walks to the perimeter before building it.

Viola! Two bases. I allow multiple buildings to be multi-selected if they're the same type, as shown here. That way the player can queue production orders or set rally points faster. Yeah! Take that, RTS micro-management.

Got some walls and towers going on...

More walls and towers. The walls are kind of rediculously thick at the moment.

You can now tell soldiers to attack specific targets. Here's a soldier attacking a tower.

Options on the start-server GUI. ("HFW" is just the internal project name if you were wondering)

More details about this project are on our website, Red Brick Games