Category Archives: Free Company

Cracking open the door a little

Apologies things have been a little quiet here on the blog. Holidays, illness and a new kitten in the house had conspired to slow my rate of progress a little, but things are now back on track. I wanted to wait until I had gathered up some things things that were at least vaguely interesting to look at after a months absence so here we go:

First up the promised video of a door opening. Sadly, it is a bit of a failure as an exciting door related promo as the video shows the doors in their least beautiful light, opening right through a mercenary. Ah well,  here it is anyway:

Next up is a new monster model, the fearsome skeleton model with spear and boshed together shield:

Scary.

And what would a skelton be without his life long pal the zombie? Nothing much probably. So here he is too:

Clutching an improvised club.

There has also been some other, much less exciting to probe with ones eyes, progress on boosting AI performance, removing normal map bugs and clearing up a variety of fun bugs caused by the introduction of doors. The general plan short term plan right now is to boost the visual variety of enemies and then to work on making them all feel different tactically with different AI, skills and weapon setups. Hopefully, I should be back in the swing of the weekly-ish updates now so check back next time for some more monsters!


Convex Hull – 1, Physics United – 0

Physics Boxes

Look at that lovely pair of convex hulls!

Work on Free Company continues through the Summer Holidays down here in the shed. I’ve been learning about exciting topics like convex decomposition as I bring the game’s physics implementation up to scratch. It’s been tough going, mostly as I haven’t had any real experience fiddling about with physics in this kind of depth before. It seems that the moment you want to go beyond knocking over piles of boxes things get a little more complicated. Bah.

I’ve managed to wrap pretty much every object in the game in some kind of physics representation now, using a mix of hand crafted and auto-generated convex hulls. This means for a start that the ragdoll dead bodies now no longer clip embarrassingly through walls, it also means that I can click directly on the arch shaped doors in the game to interact with them. I wanted to have a some kind of video of me finally cracking open doors with wild abandon as the mercenaries wander freely about the levels. Unfortunately, I’ve run out of time this week to get the easier non-physicsy parts of it working properly yet so it’d probably just look a bit daft to the casual observer. Expect it next time instead.

It’s also been ludicrously hot here in London, so I’m amazed my brain even managed to do anything other than melt. Good work brain.

Upcoming (if it cools down a bit):

  • Finally working useable doors!
  • Super clever cover calculations using raytests!
  • Stripping out old crappy physics code!
  • Finally not having to think about physics for a while!

Superstructure supplement extension!

Wood & plaster tileset

Click to enlarge

So this week, I’ve created some new walls, floors and their related structural tiles to form a second architectural tileset for Free Company’s mission generator to make use of. This one, as you can see above, looks less of a dungeon and more like a moderately well appointed house. I was getting a little tired of staring at those stone walls all of the time. The ’tile’ based structure of the game makes it pretty easy to drop new sets of walls into the existing mission generator and have them ‘just work’. Hopefully, once the game is out, the relative ease of adding new tiles might inspire some enterprising modders to do just that. I started out making games through modding and love how modders can take a game and extend it’s lifespan for years. As a result I have been trying to make the game’s systems as open to modification as I have time for and I plan to make some of my dev tools available at around the same time as the game as well.

Other than tiles, I’ve been working to replace my old physics library with a new one and improve the game’s use of physics along the way. The plan is this will eventually;

  • Stop ragdoll enemies falling through walls and other objects.
  • Make for much better ray-casted cover calculations.
  • Allow more natural interaction with doors and any other interactive objects.
  • Improve performance & reduce bloaty code
  • Make physics objects fit much better to their objects & make it much easier to debug them

I’ve also;

  • Added a really simple blood splat almost decal-like effect. Doing these properly looks like a lot of work for little return, at least when viewed from an isometric perspective.
  • Fixed a bunch of bugs & performance problems interfering with playtesting.
  • Created a fireplace object.
  • Read A Dance with Dragons. 
That last one was definitely important research. Definitely. There were mercenaries in it.