Development progress images

[blejdaq]

some insight on what is being cooked

[blejdaq]

[11/03/25] very first scenario look


[11/04/04] basic terrain overlay for later experiments


[11/04/07] first terrain blending looks messy


[11/04/07] terrain blending odyssey:
if submissive terrain A meets dominant terrain B, then first A is drawn and then B is drawn (using B's blending mode) on top of the A terrain - i call this strong blending. but sometimes when two terrains meet, the B is drawn using A's blending mode (ice terrain for example) - this is the weak blending
- example of strong blending: you can see Farm and Snow are blended correctly but the Ice isn't
- example of weak blending: Ice is blended correctly, Farm and Snow aren't
i solved this by hardcoding additional blending strength (strong or weak) into each type of terrain
there still was a minor problem with some corners but was also fixed and the final result is great:


[11/05/25] 4 different dominant terrains blending into each other over a submissive terrain


[11/04/17] was about time to add some objects


[11/04/26] complete sets of trees - the beauty of AoK graphics


[11/04/29] lot of players will require lot of colours, so bad there's no palette in true color


[11/05/09] although at first i didn't want to add elevations (wanted to stay completely in 2D) i tried and saw it was good, the first attempt with real 3D elevation (tiles are moved in 3D space and lighten by direct3D)










[11/05/14] it looks good but smells too much 3D so i made new elevation system using only 2D and shadow map to simulate slopes


[11/05/15] driven by elevation madness i decided that one type of elevation isn't enough, there are now different slopes


[11/05/15] elevations with objects


[11/05/25] what elevations can do


[11/05/25] and there's a lot more


[11/05/02] first units - 1600 female villagers!


[11/05/04] how many units fits on a screen?


[11/06/09] server based game requires a login dialog and later all kinds of windows for economy/tactics...so i drew and coded my window management system

[Alexandra]

hey hi, finally you made a interesting site from ur project (I'm Taichi San from, AoKH)
Can I beta test your work? this is the most interesting thing ive ever seen.

By the way, do you already have somesort of system in mind on what attributes your game objects should hold?
I'm very specialized in aoe2 data, so I can help you on making an example of your own unit system Plus the fact that u culd add even more functions

Please add my msn its alexandra_r (@] hellokitty (d0t] com

[blejdaq]

Hey Taichi, welcome and thanks.

Sure you can test, i hope there will be something to test in 2 maybe 3 weeks from now (although very pre-alpha stage), i will let you know.

Right now i have only the graphics engine (almost done), storage system, networking and GUI system and a simple terrain editor server.
So nothing game (or attributes) related is implemented or even designed yet. I want to stick to the original AoK system as much as possible, so the genie knowledge is quite important, but i have many changes on my mind. The original system must be adjusted to the global aspects of the new game.
I will gradually add my ideas to the Concepts thread, they will be open to discussion and they must be taken into account when designing the new system.
If you think you can handle that, i will be more than happy to let someone else co-design, manage and balance these things. Any help will be very appreciated.

[Alexandra]

I have read your new topics with the ideas on how you think about making this game, this will make it a little bit different but im very glad that I got experience with a online game similar to aoe2: Social Empires, on facebook.
Maybe you know this game, maybe you don't so I'll explain:
It's a cartoonish version of aoe2 but its played online by thousands of people in real-time.
You can build, collect resources, train armies etc, it's less complicated than you have in mind tho, but this will resemble your idea pretty much and it will be a source for many ideas on your own game like this one: how to deal with being attacked while offline.

When you attack a player, attack symbols appear above all military buildings that you can destroy for gold an experience points, and soldiers are marked by red selection shapes.
You will loose 10% of all units/buildings youve lost and 90% will recover if your attacked while being online so if your enemy kills:
100 archers, 150 pikemen, 10 villages, 20 houses:
You loose, 10 archers, 15 pikemen, 1 villager and 2 houses, the rest will recover.
After you attacked a player you cannot attack them again in 3 days (other players can ofc) to prevent players from being totally destroyed while being offline.
Unless the other player attacks you back, you can make a so called revenge attack that you can make any time after being attacked.

This all is based on that social empires game and could give you ideas with the part of making it online.

Another game I play has more the gameplay things you think about.
Battle of the red cliffs is also an aoe2ísh game, but its more manual like you talk about.
For example that you can mount soldiers if you catch or breed a horse.
And you can sent peasants into a military building to train them to foot soldiers.

The game also has a experience system, soldiers can gain experience with defeating other units or destroying objects in combat and if they reach a certain amount of exp theyle increase in rank.
Rank increases could make your soldiers stronger, faster etc. ofc set a max rank to prevent players from making super soldiers and make each rank harder to reach but I guess u already wuld have thought about it anyways.
Peasants could increase in rank if they keep doing the same work, over time they increase in rank because they got work experience, this system could also be a solution to the day/night problem because if peasants are trained far enough they can work at night but with increased costs.

And another game I played in the past, Anno 1503 is also a aoe'ish game but this game focusses more on the resources and materials you need to build up your empire.
Like you need fields, farms, mines, refineries, logging camps etc to get all resources and materials you need, and one class of buildings are for basic resources, like food, wood, stone, ore, etc etc and other buildings are to refine the basic resources like ore to iron, and you can can create weapons from wood, iron, etc.

I hope that I helped you on the way with all these examples with idea's on gameplay.

Anyways making a engine for your type of game would be harder to make an example for but its doable, but if you want to implement all ideas like day and night it will take alot of data.
My best idea of day and night is to keep it server time > real world time based to make it just the period where you will have less morale when attacking other players at night time and increased costs for peasants working at night because you should manually assign them todo their work for increased costs if your online at night so the fanatics among us can play whole day.

I don't think its a great idea to make day and night go by in 30 minutes especially not since the game is played on such a large map because many strategies that take some movement time would be interrupted but that's only just my oppinion

[blejdaq]

So i tried the Social Empire and it's too cartoonish for me and also strongly oriented on $ profit like all facebook games. Also the idea of recovering killed units seems weird and i don't want to restrict player in any way, if he wants to attack i let him attack (if the opponent isn't online isn't actually his problem). I want to give the player total freedom - killing own units, pushing own units off the cliffs, whatever. But also i wanna make it as real as it gets. Destroying building with DEL key seems wrong 'cause it takes a lot of time to disassemble them. If you don't want to destroy enemy's building, bring your villagers and let them disasssamble it.

You're right about the day/night change interrupting player's plans. Do you mean something like moving an army and suddenly there's night and your units have to build celts and go to sleep for 10 minutes? On the other side i think using this time scale is fayn because doing simple math, if a villager is moving 1 tile per second then he can move across the map in 512 second and let's say migrating across whole Europe (like 30 super G maps) will take 256 minutes of real time. Doing Eurotrip in 4 hours isn't possible but if a game day would be 20 minutes that trip would take 12 game days straight line. If thinking about avoiding rivers and hills, it can rise up to, hmm, 24 game days. And if you say your army crossed the Europe in 24 days - that doesn't seem so unreal anymore. What do you think?

[Jon321]

Looks good, I can help test. saw your concepts, you dont like rushing? haha do you guys use voobly

I have also done programming in directDraw (the 2d one), with delphi6. I made only basic terrains but had unit movements, working villagers, ranged attacks

hippo1081 [at] hotmail [dot] com

[Alexandra]

Oh, so you mean all maps will be connected to each other and can be viewed like one huge solid map?
And I didn't knew you wanted to use *real time* movement speeds like in aoe2, so in this case your night/day idea is correct afterall.

Because the map is so huge u will probably make a page with overview map of europe. From there you can goto the map you want to view.
The most exciting feature of all could be fog of war. Besides making it more realistic that you just can't see entire europe it's also a very handy feature to make things more exciting and it uses less resources to load things because from a player's view, things will be hidden til the player explored that part of the map.

Anyways making the map totally black isn't a good option but doing it in the aoe2 style of a "Explored Map" with fog of war makes it easier to navigate thru the game. Then you can see the landscape but you can't see hostile unit movements if you don't have spies, buildings or whatever any other method to reveal the map.

Fog of war in this style also adds aload of new features of adding spies, outposts and technologies to improve view on a area.
Also about being able to be entirely destroyed you could add some aid for players like making towers that warn you of approaching enemy troops. You get a warning signal like a bell if the enemy approaches the view of your guard tower. Of course you need to put a villager in the tower that will alert you, else it won't help.

When your defeated:
You could say when you defeat a player:
> They lost all units.
> They lost all buildings, etc. that are able to produce new units, siege weapons, etc.

If your defeated the game should ask you where to set up your new village again so you can make a fresh start.
When you make a fresh start, all other remaining objects previously belonging to you that weren't destroyed will be abandoned. This could also be a feature for other players (or you) to capture these deserted buildings.
Deserted buildings should only excist on the map for a limited time, after they will collapse and disappear. (also to save up server data)

Another thing is europe also got islands, so you must lock down certain parts of the giga map players can start on because that's not realistic because the players will need transport ships first if they want to reach the islands. Allthough the unaccessable parts of europe could be covered in complete darkness when it comes to fog of war afterall making it extra exciting/hard to explore the outerseas for new lands like england, iceland, but also smaller islands like the ones at the coast of netherlands/germany

what do you people think

[blejdaq]

Looks good, I can help test. saw your concepts, you dont like rushing? haha do you guys use voobly

I have also done programming in directDraw (the 2d one), with delphi6. I made only basic terrains but had unit movements, working villagers, ranged attacks

hippo1081 [at] hotmail [dot] com

Rushing is good if you don't care about the game and fun and only want to win, isn't it? I tried voobly and it's good medieval tool for medieval game We still use hamachi for multiplayer, if you're interested in playing a round or two of AoK, leave me a message.

[blejdaq]

Oh, so you mean all maps will be connected to each other and can be viewed like one huge solid map?
And I didn't knew you wanted to use *real time* movement speeds like in aoe2, so in this case your night/day idea is correct afterall.

Because the map is so huge u will probably make a page with overview map of europe. From there you can goto the map you want to view.
The most exciting feature of all could be fog of war. Besides making it more realistic that you just can't see entire europe it's also a very handy feature to make things more exciting and it uses less resources to load things because from a player's view, things will be hidden til the player explored that part of the map.

Anyways making the map totally black isn't a good option but doing it in the aoe2 style of a "Explored Map" with fog of war makes it easier to navigate thru the game. Then you can see the landscape but you can't see hostile unit movements if you don't have spies, buildings or whatever any other method to reveal the map.

Fog of war in this style also adds aload of new features of adding spies, outposts and technologies to improve view on a area.
Also about being able to be entirely destroyed you could add some aid for players like making towers that warn you of approaching enemy troops. You get a warning signal like a bell if the enemy approaches the view of your guard tower. Of course you need to put a villager in the tower that will alert you, else it won't help.

When your defeated:
You could say when you defeat a player:
> They lost all units.
> They lost all buildings, etc. that are able to produce new units, siege weapons, etc.

If your defeated the game should ask you where to set up your new village again so you can make a fresh start.
When you make a fresh start, all other remaining objects previously belonging to you that weren't destroyed will be abandoned. This could also be a feature for other players (or you) to capture these deserted buildings.
Deserted buildings should only excist on the map for a limited time, after they will collapse and disappear. (also to save up server data)

Another thing is europe also got islands, so you must lock down certain parts of the giga map players can start on because that's not realistic because the players will need transport ships first if they want to reach the islands. Allthough the unaccessable parts of europe could be covered in complete darkness when it comes to fog of war afterall making it extra exciting/hard to explore the outerseas for new lands like england, iceland, but also smaller islands like the ones at the coast of netherlands/germany

what do you people think

Once again some interesting points, i especially like the "watch tower being functional only if occupied" - adds the realistic feel i want so much (but also increases gameplay complexity). I want fog of war to completely mimic the AoK's behaviour with some little changes (explained in the Spy concept), i think the guys at ES designed it pretty well.