Unit placeholders have arrived! And they look low-poly and dumb! Actually, I'm quite fond of the low poly look, used properly and with the right lighting it can create some really stunning visuals, but that's not what these guys are for. They're to stand in for the proper models, which will come later when I have the slightest idea what the hell a Halburger is. You may have noticed by now that the knight-looking dude in the centre has no legs, and you may be wondering why that is, and I answer with legs are a ballache, and since these are only placeholders I have no need to ache my balls where my balls are not required to ache.
I actually really like him, I gave him a chesspiece-like base so it didn't look too weird and i quite like the effect it gives off, sort of similar to the small wooden pieces a General would have on his warboard or Risk. I've never played Risk but I imagine that's what it's like. Anyway, on the right is our stand-in for siege engines, the subject of the previously mentioned lecture on trebuchets and catapults from John. The abomination on the left is, in fact, not an Anteater, and is supposed to represent a horse, though it looks more like one from a distance, roughly of about 1000 miles. Also, the knight guy has a variety of different weapons and is modular, so we can re-use his placeholder for a bunch of different units cause I'm lazy.
Unity had a slip up here, and rendered the lighting in the 'Butt-Ugly' preset. I would normally just re-render the lighting and take a screenshot of that as appose to showing this, but I wanted to show how important my job of global lighting and scene design is when it isn't done right to inflate my ego a little, what you end up with is something from the early 2000s. And gouged out eyeballs.
Here's the aforementioned knight, with some of his buddies in the background. he's lit properly this time, but doesn't have any camera effects on so he doesn't have the full visual package. That being said, I actually really like this guy now that eh's here and I kind of want to keep him, making other models in this style with a similar low-poly and basic texturing style would be both a nice visual distinction to other entries in the genre but would do wonders for computers running large battles, especially old ones. But alas, it isn't meant to be, as when first showing him to the other two the first point was "where's his legs?" That said, it does free him up to use in my personal projects so one day I might find a use for him, but for this project the prototyping stage is as far as he's going.
Anyway, I'll stop horsing around (get it?) about my cool little knights, because all you unbelievers in my anteater-horse hybrid are about to get a lesson in what proper lighting can do. Well, ok, it still looks bad, but it looks better, and the knight placeholders fit onto them perfectly, so they go together quite well. I want to name them Knight Riders, but I suspect that's going to cause legal issues down the line. The thinking is that these guys will be the fast attack type of guys, though currently they're in some form of squad of three to make testing multiple moving around each other easier, though i quite like having them grouped and would make for nicer, easier to control large battles, I can see why they would need to be split up.
Here's our little test battalion (were they called battalions back then? our resident medieval expert is in bed at the moment, so who knows) they're a tough bunch, mainly cause they don't have health scripts yet. up in front, we have three Knights, which are going to be a separate class of Elite units which will have their own population cap to normal infantry and such. Behind them are my Knight Riders (until I get enough blog views to make it a legal threat, I'm going to keep doing it) which have two groups of spear men either side. On the next row, we have archers sided by two groups of Knight Riders, which totally wouldn't trample the spear men in front of them at all. Behind those are our halburgers, sandwiching two groups of archers. On the final row are one last group of halburgers, flanked by two of our catapult siege teams (these are a catapult and two operating engineers).
Finally, for the models, we have a castle-type structure. It's built out of modular walls which will be able to be individually placed, giving people maximised customisation of their defences and stuff, but mainly people are going to use them to make penis shaped forts and we all know it. I just look forward to the day that I can topple King JustTheTip from the very thin end of his castle if this gets released. If the shape survives, I'll fire some catapults out of the head, in his honour. Units can stand on the walls while ramps are placed nearby, though this might have to go since it would involve generating a navmesh in real time over the network to sync it up correctly and that would extend into an aforementioned ballache.
But let's get real for a second people. I'm doing the graphic work on this test scene, even though it's a test scene and nobody will ever see it, and I want it to look fancy damn it. So, I've done some wonderful stuff with Wind Zones and made the trees and flag blow realistically in the wind. I can tell you're excited to see this more then anything else, so I'll go the extra effort and make a GIF for you. Did we ever establish how many words those were worth?
You know you love it, I know you love it, it looks great. Also, there's units on the walls in that GIF, so there's a bonus for you. Oh, and I understand that some people couldn't care less about my flags (cries) will want to see this thing called 'Gameplay', and while there isn't much to show, I can still show what's there. Basically only camera controls, unit selection and unit movement. But hey, we've been working on it for 2 days, what were you expecting, Starcraft? Currently Dan is working on the script which highlights the selected units, but that's what's giving him such a hard time, so let's not dwell on it, because if we do we'll realise that he's now been looking at the same 50 lines of text for 2 days. I'd like to point out that the game runs at frames that are well into the hundreds even on my 7 year old machine, but the GIFs don't seem to want to render at any consistent quality, so just know that frame rate issues are with the GIF, not the game. Oh, and the camera effects are applied in this GIF, so you'll see the current look of the world it's a little bright on the white, but it looks cool and I like it.
That's all for now, though I'm sure it won't be long before more developments happen. I'll go into the in-depth networking techincal mumbo jombo about how all this will work over multiplayer another time, as I've yet to even find a way to explain it properly to the other two. Basically, it'll do a thing, and it'll work, or not. Either way, I'm coming for you, King JustTheTip, and no amount of low-poly anteater-horses or legless knights you throw in my way can stop me. I'll siege you later.
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