So far Alpha 7 works out quite well. Collected only half a dozen of crashreports, mostly related to GPU drivers. There are couple of recurring bugreports that I would like to address: Continue reading
Alpha 7 is finally ready!
It took a long time, but the list of improvements is also long:
This is still Alpha, there are likely a lot of bugs, flaws, incomplete things, broken mechanics and such.
Build has been updated to r4320 (crashreporting was missing)
Download links:
[Download not found]
or
Knights Province Alpha 7 (7z package)
Today was a productive day for small fixups:
Now the game is at revision 4260
Knights Province needs a lot of animations. They are essential to making the games’ world feel alive. Here’s how they work and how they just got better.
Animations start with a skeleton rig. Rig is a description of how character skeleton bones are located and which of the characters parts they affect. Typical character rig in Knights Province consists of ~20 bones. 20 is a good compromise between animation visual quality (more is better), animation cost (less is cheaper) and game’s performance (less is faster). Typical rig looks like this:
Smoothed house and unit animations. Where they were sampled at 30fps and nearest frame was picked to render, now the render shows interpolation result between two frames (article will follow later).
Did a lot of work on refactoring old code, simplifying and cleaning out. Moved code bits around for better and more logical layout.
AI parts responsible for choosing a house to build got structured better.
Added soft shadows around game panels. Also made panels to come to front and overlap other panels when clicked:
This weekend was devoted to getting back to the game
What has been done towards Alpha 7:
All in all that resulted in 73 commits, and now the game is at r4093.
I’m going through some busy times which put Knights Province development on a lower priority for now. Haven’t touched the game in 5 weeks and looks like won’t be touching for another few. On one side it’s a bad thing, because I’m loosing momentum and development schedule slips (Alpha 7 gets delayed). On the other hand there’s a good side – I will have a fresh look on the game when I get back to it.
Stay tuned for updates!
Did 4000th commit into Knights Province repository yesterday – another milestone! 🙂
Took me some 2,5 years.
This week I was working on new fighting mechanics for Knights Province. I want fights to be a little less random. Hence units will have a lot of hitpoints and proper damage range.
Should these numbers show to a player? We’ll see about that later )
