Category Archives: Free Company

June 1, 2011

All hail the overgame.

The start of a shopping UI

Development on Free Company steadily continues here in the shed. I’ve had to venture out into the cruel, uncaring world a bit more than usual recently to earn enough money for those precious wheelbarrows full of coal that keep the code furnaces at full power. It slows the development rate for a few weeks on the one hand but on the other its good to eat food.

That aside, I’m currently focused on creating the primitive skeleton that will help join the 3D tactical battles together into a compelling campaign style narrative in your minds for the initial paid alpha version. A lot of the work here will be reused when I get to making the ‘proper’ map driven campaign later on so it’s not a total waste long term and hopefully it’ll make the alpha much more fun to play for a series of battles and thereby generate a whole raft more testing feedback if any lovely person does choose to take the plunge and give it a try for a small fee.

So what’s going in this overgame skeleton for the alpha? First up I’ve been working on a shop where you can restock your mercenaries consumables and outfit them with new weapons and other equipment. Secondly, there’s going to be a menu to recruit fresh-faced wannabe mercs to build up your fighting force and tackle more contracts/tactical battles. Thirdly there is going to be some basic facilities for equipping and editing those new recruits so you can roughly shape them into the kind of fighting force of your dreams. Then finally there is going to be the contracts board where you can pick contracts to accept, dispatch a squads of mercs to take care of accepted contracts and start the tactical battle when they arrive. The campaign screen will also have some other handy functionality, like the ability to save your game, which’ll also mean that the ‘load’ option on the main menu finally does something! Hooray! If you can think of any other essential ‘overgame’ screens/menus/options that I should absolutely cram in before the alpha version then do let me know, perhaps in the comments below even.

I’ve recently ‘rebranded’ my twitter feed to the more personable (and more related to this fledging gamedev shop) @danintheshed. Existing followers should have transferred over with no problem, but if you are new and interested in Free Company and whatever else I might put out then that’s as good a place as any to get updates.

Leave a comment | posted in Free Company, Game design, Programming

April 17, 2011

Rugs, doors and better options

By Dan Lawrence

A rug and a door in a Free Company Level

It’s the Easter holidays here at the Robotic Shed, a time for doing some gardening & pondering the chocolatey eggs to come. However amidst the shocking indolence some forward progress has been made, which, if you squint a bit you might be able to find some proof of in the screenshot above.

Mainly, I’ve had another pass over the game’s options menu and finally made sure that everything in there can be toggled on and off during the game as well as before it. I also added a couple of new options; 1) to change the texture quality 2) to toggle v-synch on or off and 3) to rebind the game’s control keys. Usually this kind of thing is fiddled about with at the last-minute in a game’s development but I decided to get it out of the way now as their broken-ness had eventually cracked the deep buried QA tester in me.

I’ve also added normal maps to most of the models since the last update and fixed up their shading code. They have to be quite pronounced to be actually visible at the game’s camera distance but I think it improves the look of things like the stone walls and tiled floor quite a lot from some angles. Normal maps were the last significant piece of the game’s graphics ‘tech’ that weren’t working so it’s nice to have them finished and therefore the last steps in the asset creation pipeline nailed down.

Finally, I’ve added a couple of new object types to the level furnishing mix; a new fancy rug at floor level and a door. The door is animated but is still awaiting a bit of man-door interaction code before it’s a finished thing. I suspect doors are probably going to be the main thing other than enemies that the player’s mercenaries will interact with as they complete a level’s objectives. I’m not sure I’ll match Deus Ex’s impressive number of ways to interact with a door but I’ll at least manage opening and closing.

Leave a comment | tags: graphics, options | posted in Free Company, Programming

April 1, 2011

Got myself a crying, talking, sleeping, walking, ragdoll

By Dan Lawrence

Thank Cliff for the title.

Since the last update on the game I’ve mostly been busy working on trying to furnish my algorithmically generated level layouts with, well furniture. I’ve bashed together one set of xml files that attempts to roughly outline what kind of rooms a type of location might have in it. Then I conjured up a second set that describes, for each type of room, what kind of furniture might be in it.

Of course to have any furniture to place in the levels meant I had to model and texture some up at last. So Free Company got a whole bunch of exciting new furniture assets recently; like plates and clay pots! The furniture models have to be all tagged up with meta data in a shiny new tool that I think I mentioned I was starting work on last time. It’s forked from the model viewer and is still evolving as I think of more useful ways to describe furniture to the game. Right now it looks like this:

That’s the ghostly Table O’ Doom asset you can see there.

The whole furnishing system is still pretty primitive, and still has some very obvious bugs but it’s coming along. Here is what it thinks a ‘dining room’ might look like right now:

Generated Dining Room

If you peer closely into the gloom you can probably make out the bug where chairs/stools are completely ignored by the placement system.

Other than that I also managed to fit in some time to fiddle about with Bullet Physics, which is something I’m now looking to to replace ODE with to better cater for Free Company’s physics needs. As you might have guessed from the title I was experimenting with ragdolls and after lots of brain teasing work I was able to get something that is just about acceptable or at least doesn’t feature the model warping all over the screen or shrinking into nightmarish ball. Of course it’s impossible to demonstrate physics in a screen shot so I’ve just wrestled with Fraps and Windows Movie Maker and you this delightful film: