I've been putting time into the most complex gameplay mode (and map) in the game, the "Beach Assault". One team is sent in on landing crafts (LCVPs) with a goal of destroying the enemy artillery batteries and securing a beach head. Once all four artillery batteries/bunkers are captured then the attacking team wins. If they can't make it before the timer runs out then the defending team wins. There are 1000s of CPU soldiers, and 64 human players per-online server. Players control their 'warbots', but they can get out of their vehicle at anytime and play on foot in a first person shooting mode.
I'll detail the specifics of the spawning system and other details on the next part - I expect this should be a 2-3 part series of journal updates over the next couple of days, given the amount of work still required until the map/gameplay mode is finished.
Here are some screenshots of the work I've done in the last few days...if you want to see screens of the first person shooting mode, or read about the other stuff I've recently done just scroll down to the previous entry. The biggest thing I've done was to add an extra layer to the map, so now instead of it being only brown, there is grass away from the beach, that combined with some new tree artwork really improved the quality of the map IMO.
There are lot of layers - obscacles [ hedgehogs, barbed wire ], grass, trees, bushes. Rocks still need to be added into this map. Still I'm very happy with the results.
Here is a view from one of the artillery installations that have to be captured by the attacking team.
This screenshot shows an arial view of the map...you can see there are 32 landing crafts each holding 1 player's vehicle, and 16 CPU controlled soldiers.
A view from closer down right near the seawall where the grass/sand meet.
Behind the artillery looking towards the beach.
A small infantry / soldier battle taking place on the beach, I've got two obstacle types in the game, the headhogs [ the X cross tank trap things ], and also some barbed wire setup.
This screenshot also shows how well the dynamic imposter system works on the humans in the game. I've probably coded 3-4 dynamic imposter sysetms over the years, none have been this stable. I based my last system, and this current one off this article on gamasutra [Dynamic 2D Imposters ].
In the screenshot there are only actually 4-5 humans who are 3D geometry, the rest are faked with dynamic screenspace quads. This is a truely dynamic imposter system. It's setting the viewport for each soldier in the world and rendering a dynamic version of each soldier every n frames or whenever the view angle to that soldier changes past some delta.
To increase the realism of some aspects of the scenes [ in particlar interiors of buildings / capture points ] I've been playing around with some SSAO:
LOL, just kidding this isn't ssao, just regular offline ambient occlusion on the artillery model xD It works to great effect on the sandbags...
And finally here is a side-by-side before 'n' after of a tree model. [ The texture used is the same ] ...
Lots more work to be done...heres a small list of the things I'll be adding to this map in the next few days ...
Quote:
- 3D layer of dynamic sea-foam to merge water/terrain better
- Finish splashes / wake on the water from the landing crafts
- Model interior of the capture point / artillery bunker
- Model the interior of the pillboxes so people can shoot out of them
- Search lights by the artillery installments
- Work on the static beach artillery firing system
- Add rocks to the terrain
'til next time [ part deux :-o ]...
- Dan
