This week’s (OK, I’m a day late… I’ve been working hard…) screen shot comes in the early stages of fight. I’m zoomed in and playing at 1080 vertical resolution. While this particular mission (thanks MadMag!) is very fun, the most interesting addition this week is something you can’t see… it’s what happened before I took this screen shot. Specifically, I started this mission yesterday, got up this morning, then Loaded the Save Game. So all of the wonderful little blinking, spinning, and exploding things were persisted to a save game file, then loaded today.
Now, save games were of course something Game 3 was always planned to support, but I thought it might be entertaining for the technical minded folks in the crowd (I.E. everyone) to share a few details.
As most know Game 3 is being written in Unity (3.5 currently but will likely ship with 4.0 and hopefully Linux support… more later.). All of the coding is being done in C#. Not that I don’t like Javascript, I just like the superior performance I get with C# in the Mono run time. So, to implement save games I have to persist information about every unit, every shell, every packet, etc. To do this I persist each object by creating XML. This is similar to what I did in CW2. Now I don’t use any auto-magic persistence, I do it myself. I want full control of the tag names and what data gets persisted, and more importantly over how it gets persisted. So I have ReadXML and WriteXML functions in my object hierarchy that use the .NET XmlDocument related classes. These .NET classes are pretty convenient and allow me to construct just the data I need. Some post processing of the XML, some compression, and poof! save games are born.
This is looking better every day, keep up the good work! 😀
The units are looking good! Is that…. A road?
Yep… MadMag designed this map and he used some custom tiles to make that road. The final mechanism for this kind of decal system is yet to be decided, though.
odd tentacley monster near the bottom right, might I ask what it is?
Emitter. They move and wiggle a little bit as they emit.
The units look different compared to the last screen, are they the upgraded versions?
Upgraded graphics… courtesy of MadMag.
it seems to me the “sheilds” are a little OP.
They take lots of energy and aren’t the cheapest things to build.
Why are some guns red and some are yellow?
Gun barrels heat up if they fire a whole bunch. Those barrels will start to glow red on the business end.
Ooh.. Fancy! Does this affect performance, or is it entirely aesthetic?
I’m curious about this as well – will guns slow down or lose performance somehow as they heat up, or is the heat purely cosmetic?
Do I see anti-creeper and larger ranges for shields as well? Awesome!
Keep up the great work!
I think the shields are the same range as before… but are still subject to balancing over time of course.
Oh, must be a smaller map
Loving the new graphics, though the emitters now look a little too much like urchins.
Also, huzzah for save games!
There seems to be a thin blanket of creeper covering all the area where the buildings are except where your shield emitters are. Could I ask why that is and why your buildings aren’t getting hurt?
That’s anticreeper that I dropped over the area and is left over. In this build the AC oscillates colors, but of course you can’t see that in this screen shot.
That color for Creeper-Anti-Creeper annihilation seems a little too grey to me. Perhaps it should be more blue?
It just seems like it would be more in line with the previous games.
Don’t worry…. all of these kind of things will get reviewed over and over and adjusted till they are just right.
What’s the laser shooting at the emitter? Is it a blaster or a nullifier?
That’s a nullifier.
Virgilw could you give a month when this may release?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oSs6DcA6dFI
Nice Video
Excellent reply. 🙂
C# with XML? Awesome! I have created a text based game before for a uni assignment using c# and XML to write save files. I have to say that it is really a neat way of doing it. You can have so much control over what you want to save, and it seems you are making the right choice imo. Maybe I will check out the XML files after the game is finished to see how you have structured it 😀
Yeah, I always find myself going back to XML for stuff like this. The disadvantage can be file size. But after complete, I shorten most tags (to 1 or 2 letter) and then do some compression. So even big maps come in in the 50l to 100k file size.
For me(or at least my game) I am using sqlite instead of xml.
It sounds like Virgil uses the same serialization structure for maps as he does save games (I could be wrong). If that’s the case, you certainly wouldn’t want every map to be its own sqlite database, as that’d be pointless. And using one for saving and the other for maps would be redundant.
I am curious, though, if I’m right and he does use the same structure for both. My impression is that the save game stores the map as well as the units, rather than accessing the map apart from the game status….?
Correct. Save games store the terrain data, units… everything pretty much. One reason for this is that the terrain changes at run time. This was also true in CW2 (since you dig).
I have noticed with CW2 that the save files and the map files are close to being the same format. You can actually edit the saves in the map editor (you lose some info when you do that though)
Sorry if this is inappropriate at this moment, but that brought me to an idea.
A Question to Virgil: What is, if i start a Story game, save it immediatly, edit in in editor so i can win in a few seconds, and reload that then. Is the score of the edited save file then counting as the Score of the Story map that has been started? This seems to be a reason for those impossible scores, those hacker scores, if this is possible.
Just came through my mind when reading “edit the saves”.
No, edited games become “new” missions and their scores don’t get counted as story mission scores. Hacked scores come from people hacking memory, etc. when running the game.
can we ask what those different planes/ships/drones in the right are? (I mean, can you give us just a name, or a brief description, anything, and I mean the different colors of them.
According to previous comments, strafers lay down a lot of light pulse cannon fire and bombers drop mortar-shell bombs.
It also looks like AC bombers will make it into the final game.
I should add that I don’t have insider knowledge about the status of AC bombers, but he’s demod the possibility on the blog, and discussed in comments the various ways they might operate.
I lold at the video and keep up the great work! looking awesome
I have a question that has nothing to do with creeper world but I’m going to ask it any way.
since I am not as young and update with internet abbreviations, is the past tense of lol lold or lolld or LedOL?
I love the video to by the way
There is no official version of such slang. Some would even say lol doesn’t Have a past tense!
No offence Virgilw….but emitters look….ugly. Its like a blue creature ith red dot in center.
What red dot?
the end of the nulifer beam appears as as a red dot because of the mist blocking part of it in this pic
Nothing red in the Emitters.
Yeah….In some point you are wright….previos emitter models were way better. And that ” red dot ” may be blaster shooting at emitter.
I think what I don’t like about these models are the bevel.
A bevel tends to make things look like they’re raised up – which isn’t really suitable for something that pours out fluid. Maybe if you used an inverse bevel on the emitters, so they looked sunken instead of raised, like a dimensional hole in the sassafrass of whosiwhatsit, it might work better?
Hmm. You implied shields were mobile, but there are two in the lower left that could plug the gap in defenses near the lower right, where only AC is holding creeper back.
Were they forgotten in the heat of battle, or made stationary, or are you saving energy by keeping them back? (If you implemented energy consumption based on the force that shields exert to hold back creeper)
Shields will be an interesting tool for herding AC around, if they’re mobile. No more wasted pools of AC in remote corners of the map. 🙂
Yeah, this map and game were actually used for testing some things…. So I wasn’t paying close attention to the game. In fact the only reason there is AC all over my base is because I just send out a Bomber run every so often to keep the Creeper at bay while I test. While testing I looked at the screen and thought, “that would make a nice screen shot for a blog post about something you can’t see” 🙂
I see a Ore mine and AC refinery in the building slots. I’m guessing thats how we are going to make AC? And i’m guessing we are going to use bombers to deliver the payload?
I’m play testing a system based on mines and refineries currently. Bombers, and other weapons, will be able to deliver AC.
Will anything be able to vacuum AC?
Yes, that’s the plan. Exactly which unit is still up in the air. But collecting AC via inward pointing fields, then making and AC packet to send back to storage is the idea.
Shields. If you (as much as I hate to say it…) “reverse the polarity” then it gathers creeper at the center and converts it into ore.
Last night I was playing CW2, trying to move Anti-Creeper into one square to block it off, when I thought that pulling the Anti-Creeper would help a lot. Then I wondered if the sheilds in game three could have an option of pulling in Anti-Creeper, or the Creeper, or both, and not just push them away. Doing so could make it possible for interesting strategies, such as pulling the Creeper back after it passes the sheilds. Just an idea.
We were discussing the possibility of directional ‘push-pull shields’ to help channel AC in the last thread, and it’s still awesome.
Those new squirmy emitters look so gross, so creepy, so…so…perfect!
Kudos to MadMag, I am loving the updated graphics.
Thanks! They look way more evil now.
In my opinon i liked the landing pad yellow, grey is a dull color
I really hope you get this to run under Linux whichever way it works (wine,mono or native). I hate having to switch to my windows drive to play some games.
I really like CW2 and I still play Evermore every now and then. This new one looks like it will be awesome. Good luck. 🙂
Yeah, Unity 4 is supposed to support Linux. I hope it works well, since I really want to support Linux.
i wanna play D’:
will there be a beta or demo release at any point
Yes…. there will be a free demo of the game once released.
NO ENERGY BAR!?!?!?!?!
Since each CN has a separate energy storage, which may be at different levels if they’re on different networks, the game so far has had energy bars on the individual command nodes.
If they’re all on the same network, they’re all equally shared, however if the two are not connected by nodes then an energy bar might be meaningless.
If you are talking about health bars…. those auto hide when the unit is at 100% (in recent builds). So you only see green health bars when necessary. As for ammo/energy bars (the red bars), what Lurkily said.
this part of the blog is about something you cant see.
well i SEA an emmiter at the top. (cheesy joke 😀 )
is that it or something we actually cant see.
also,will nullifiers be able to attack alittle bit?
and finally,will nullifiers be one of the things that insta-die when thhey touch creeper
He’s talking about the save game structure in the post – I think that’s what we can’t see that he’s talking about.
Game looks just AWESOME!!!!! And Virgilw,could you please make a video? I realy want to see creeper in action!!
Soon…. I’m getting closer to releasing a public video. Just a few more things….
In Creeper world 2 mission 17-Trickery,invisible creeper was exactly very good idea. You Virgilw should implent it in cw3. Imagine you rift on planet,no creeper,no emitters,but as soon as you turn ” thermal ” vision on ( creeper is organic so…) and you can see creeper flowing around.
That mission had no invisible Creeper….unless you mean the Creeper entombed in the terrain. That might be a good thing to see again in game three, yes.
Virgil has mentioned the possibility of buried emitters.
will the nullifier still build really quick( makes packets release faster than other stuff)
and wil it still cost 50 packets?
Nullifiers have to be built, then they have to charge. It is neither really quick or protracted. It’s somewhere in the middle.
Those red guns ( must be pulse cannons) need more work-diffrent design,they dont look cool enought.
Wait till you seem them in action. They have moving parts.
I can sort of see how they move. They look like artillery where the recoil forces the barrel backwards and opens the bolt/chamber (or whatever it’s called; it’s where shells go). The two leftmost cannons in the picture are the best reference.
What f there could be a Time device that player could use only once in a mission,and ( using this time device would be very expensive thought ) player could ” roll the time back, ” for example-you engaged creeper to early and it has flooded most of the map already,not a problem!If you have enought energy use the the time device and roll time back!!!!
The Omega 13 device? Who told you what that did!
Hahahah! Nice reference.
Not only should it go back to a point in time, but do a visual rollback with the music in reverse… That’s easy to code, right? 😉
Isn’t that what saving your game is for?
So, I noticed that Ore Mine was in the build slot. How will ore deposits work in this game? Will the Ore Mines just slowly produce ore, to some maximum before they have to be moved? Or will there be certain locations on each map rich in the ore that the player may or may not have to fight to get?
The next blog post will be about the AC economy.
Virgil has said in a blog post that he favors an AC economy that was rate-based rather than having a hard limit to production — this should provide you some hope.
Willing to pay €20 for alpha or beta access 🙂
Im soory? What do you mean?
My attempt at humor… Google “Omega 13” then watch the movie sometime…
If i will have enought free time i will watch it,but how about my time device? Any chances of it beeing added?
The coding involved in that is non-trivial . . . I think we’re probably better off with an auto-save feature that keeps two or three savegames from five-minute intervals.
Hey,Virgilw….have you been thinking about airships ( zeppelins ).
Not really zeppelins, but something like them yes….
gj so far, how about a ground unit can move on its on, it can be on defensive and offensive which can make friendly creeper, has a blaster and maybe a AA turret 😀
hmm that seems a bit OP but maybe something like the widow mine from Starcraft 2 Heart of the Swarm where you build it and then move it to the front line where it will latch onto nearby enemies and explode doing massive damage or maybe it could slow or reduce the amount of creeper coming out of an emmitter for a short period of time would be cool.
* by slow i mean make the time between ticks where the emmitter creates creeper longer
The idea of AC mines has been posited. (By me, no less.) I think, though, that mines can be powerful because they are not mobile – once you grant them mobility, the tradeoff that allowed them to be powerful without being overpowered is broken.
I like the idea of using AC or mines as a cheap bulwark against creeper that permits you to hold a battlefront while you construct more permanent defenses.
I should add that I realize nobody was talking landmines up to this point – it was only a generalized example of the relative power permitted to mobile units vs immobile units.
I realize how they could become overpowered but you probobly dont know why i refenced the mine from sc2. The mines have to burrow before they can be used and are basically 1 shotted by alot of stuff so maybe when you move them they have to go through a readying period before they can blow up creeper and if creeper touches them before they are readied they blow up instantly damaging any of your structures nearby but not damagaing the creeper.
I just though of another way to balance the mines. Perhaps they could be one of the buildings you can drop and you have a limited number of them throughout the campaign.
There could be missions in space where you cant build blasters,you would have to build spaceships 9 in size of blaster ) and fight other spaceships. That would be nice
soory,i spelled wrong-(in size of blasters) ignore the ‘ 9 ‘
Maybe you could not only roll the time back,but travel in time?!?! OMG thats wright Virgilw thi is what you need -traveling in time!!!!! Imagine-travel to 1968 new york,and fight creeper there,travel to dinosaur age and fight creeper in there!!! that would be AWESOME!
Virgilw,what about tesla coils,they could convert creep into anti-creep,or they could be used to fight new enemies? Anyways i think tesla coils would be very good.