Pantropy Update October 2020
We have been quite busy during the past Month; we got our first implementation of the androids done, have launched the staging branch to our discord community and fixed some long time bugs like the shadow flickering.
Lets talk androids first. Our androids are still quite simple: They are flown into a territory that they claim and then build a little outpost in the landing area.
This is currently all that is active on our staging branch but we do already have the systems finished that are needed for more features like the mech transports, base defense or raiding.
I will be working on implementing these features this week.
As mentioned above the „claim territory & build oupost“ feature is currently the only active option.
For that feature to work i had to develop an algorithm that analyses the terrain and finds a spot where the GSS could place a base.
You can see here a quater of the map and a lot of squares which are the ouput of the algorithm. Every square represents a space whre a small 2x2 oupost base can be placed. This algorithm is fundamentally importent because it is always used when the GSS wants to place a new base on the map and it has already proven to be very reliable because i could not find any base that was part way inside a rock or a mountain.
Now that i had a reliable way of finding a spot for a base, all that was left to do is to fly the androids to that spot and let them build their base.
Then i moved on to implement a feature where the androids would raid bases in a foreign territory but i had to disable it before publishing our first patch to the staging branch because it caused the game to lag and i had no time to fix that.
Shortly before opening up the staging branch i had to create the UI for a main menu where you can choose between singleplayer and multiplayer.
At first I ran into a lot of issues with the singleplayer but fixed these one by one and now we have a working singleplayer solution.
On the 27th of september we opened up the staging branch and we quickly ran into a lot of old bugs.
Since then i have been on a bug-fixing-spree and i already got a ton of bugs fixed including:
- Mech armor would uninstall itself when the mech got hit – FIXED
- Android shops not working at all – FIXED
- Shadows flickering badly – FIXED
- Creatures sliding or teleporting when getting hit – FIXED
Now that some major issues are out of the way i can focus on finishing the implementation of our androids so look out for that in the next devlog or check it out for yourself on our staging branch:
https://discord.gg/6Dx9rwf
- Julian
Lets talk androids first. Our androids are still quite simple: They are flown into a territory that they claim and then build a little outpost in the landing area.
This is currently all that is active on our staging branch but we do already have the systems finished that are needed for more features like the mech transports, base defense or raiding.
I will be working on implementing these features this week.
As mentioned above the „claim territory & build oupost“ feature is currently the only active option.
For that feature to work i had to develop an algorithm that analyses the terrain and finds a spot where the GSS could place a base.
You can see here a quater of the map and a lot of squares which are the ouput of the algorithm. Every square represents a space whre a small 2x2 oupost base can be placed. This algorithm is fundamentally importent because it is always used when the GSS wants to place a new base on the map and it has already proven to be very reliable because i could not find any base that was part way inside a rock or a mountain.
Now that i had a reliable way of finding a spot for a base, all that was left to do is to fly the androids to that spot and let them build their base.
Then i moved on to implement a feature where the androids would raid bases in a foreign territory but i had to disable it before publishing our first patch to the staging branch because it caused the game to lag and i had no time to fix that.
Shortly before opening up the staging branch i had to create the UI for a main menu where you can choose between singleplayer and multiplayer.
At first I ran into a lot of issues with the singleplayer but fixed these one by one and now we have a working singleplayer solution.
On the 27th of september we opened up the staging branch and we quickly ran into a lot of old bugs.
Since then i have been on a bug-fixing-spree and i already got a ton of bugs fixed including:
- Mech armor would uninstall itself when the mech got hit – FIXED
- Android shops not working at all – FIXED
- Shadows flickering badly – FIXED
- Creatures sliding or teleporting when getting hit – FIXED
Now that some major issues are out of the way i can focus on finishing the implementation of our androids so look out for that in the next devlog or check it out for yourself on our staging branch:
https://discord.gg/6Dx9rwf
- Julian