Development Status #3

[h2]Dear Tankers,[/h2]

Welcome to our 3rd Development Status,

[h3]Infantry AI[/h3]

We are very proud to inform that our team was enhanced by Marco, the maker of Easy Red 2 and will be working on helping us create a competent infantry AI.



The AI will try to follow our commands to move, attack, select target etc. Below we present the testing of move command execution, as well as formation movement commands. Bear in mind, everything is work in progress, the camera angle also is only to help the developer, the game won’t be an RTS type of game, nor it will have such cameras:

[h3]Visual metrics[/h3]

The optimalization process will be a hard one, as we will have to decide what is very important and needs to be synchronised between players, and what is only a visual effect, that is not essential to the server, and can be optionally shown to the player if required (so the server won’t blow up when it will be forced to synchronise hundreds of unimportant animations/particles).



What you see is a field of view from tank driver’s perspective. We measure how much detail can we have close to player’s view without overloading our performance limits and how many objects can we have far away. We are setting standards for optimization in the process of creating levels to make sure that the game won’t run smoothly only on latest PCs.

[h3]Programming[/h3]

We continue to search and find for the best programming practices.

Recently we adopt MVC (Model - Viewer - Controller) pattern for use with Unity Components.



So now we use it to split big and avoid big scripts by divide script in to 3 parts:

• Model - Data
  Viewer - Editor stuff
  Controller - Proper game logic

[h3]Characters and Animation[/h3]

Besides testing Inventory / Interaction system we also test Ragdoll on characters and detaching limbs from character (in explosion). We want to add variant that infantry close to explosion can lose their limbs.



[h3]Design[/h3]

We are organising a set of tests on following topics, feel free to ask us questions or answer ours, that we are asking below:

• Tank movement - bulky and realistic (thus slow and prone for malfunctions) or more arcade and dynamic?
  
• Enemy tanks behavior - AI spotting and decision making, range finding etc.
  
• Aim helper - should we allow for this at all?
  
• Giving feedback from hitting an enemy tank (how player will know that enemy tank is destroyed?)
  
• Gameplay balance between large open maps and small condensed ones
  
• Checkpoints on level - this is a coop game, should be this possible to save and load during battle?
  
• Tank camouflage - if player covers his tank with correct camo patternt/colors and add some bushes on top, how to make the enemy not see us?
  

Thanks and have a great weekend!

DeGenerals