It’s been quite some time since the last update, but thing have still been in motion. If you visit the media section you can see some new screenshots from the in-game editor.

I haven’t said much about the editor at this stage, but this is where I’ll be designing all of the maps for War Worlds and it will also be available for end-users to create their own maps. It’s currently fairly basic but the mode you can see in the screenshots (one is shown to the left) is the “Pathing” mode.

Currently, this mode is little more than for testing. You can see it overlays the map with a red-and-green grid. The red bits are impassable and the green bits passable. In the future, the tool will allow to adjust the grid - perhaps extending the impassable bits a little or whatever you need to tweak things.

At the moment, though, you can just set a “start” and “end” location and it’ll show you the path it finds between them. There are two different “kinds” of path we can show: the “original” path and the “simplified” path. Our current implementation of A* uses the overlayed grid directly (future versions may use a navmesh for efficiency) and the paths that produces are a little… unnatural. So what we do is “simplify” it. Simplification basically removes nodes from the path that don’t actually affect the “passability.” If you click the image to the left, you’ll see what I mean: the top image shows the “original” path and the bottom on the same path, but “simplified.”

This is exciting! I’ve just uploaded the first gameplay video of War Worlds in action! I just purchases the full version of Fraps which I used to record this following video:

You can also check it out in the media section of the site.

The video shows the very basics of what works in the game so far. Basically, you can log in to the server (in the future, logging in will allow you to upload the replay of your game, record stats and join multiplayer games), add AI players to the game (you can see on the “Add AI Player” dialog, I’ve got a “Script” drop-down - that’s the initial version of what I’m working on at the moment: Lua scripts to control the AI players).

Once in the game, the AI player doesn’t do much (I can control his units, though, which is obviously not going in the “real thing"!). But we can build tanks via our factory, and then order those tanks to attack the enemy! The attack is a “missile” attack, which doesn’t make much sense for a tank, but it’s just for test

Anyway, I’m really excited about this… things are sloooowly coming together!

I’ve created an initial “media” section for the game where I’ll upload images, videos and other stuff. For now, it’s just got some prelimiary screen shots. These are from the latest build, so they’re slightly more up-to-date than some of the ones I’ve posted on my blog, but really there’s not much new (at this point!)

Check them out!

At some point, I’d like to display a “random” screenshot in the text above, but for now you’ll just have to click on the link there…

This is the website for War Worlds! I’ll be posting updates and so on here, while my personal blog will contain some more in-depth implementation details and so on (for those who are interesting in that kind of thing.

You’ll notice on the top of this page is my current “todo” list. The game is obviously a looong way from completion, and I feel like I need this list just to keep everything sorted out in my head. The list is sorted in the approximate order that I plan to work on things. As I finish each major feature, I’ll be doing a blog post about it (again, over on my personal blog) and linking to it from the todo-list.

As time goes on, I’ll also be including links to screen-shots, videos and other media. For now, there’s just the couple of screen shots that accompany the blog posts I’ve already written.

Please enjoy, and if you’ve got any comments or questions, feel free to leave a comment!