Skip to main content

More rockets and tech timeline.

I greatly reduced the rate of fire of the rockets and made them smaller. A single 60mm rocket now takes up the same space as a machine gun. A single vehicle should mount a large number of rockets to take advantage of their power.

I also added a delay after a weapon is successfully fired. This means the rockets will fire in a staggered volley instead of all at once. I tried both styles and this looks better and creates less logic spikes.

I think it needs more smoke and I'll be adding some rocket trails too.

I'm still unsure of where to put the rockets in the tech ladder. In real life the Russians developed their rockets before the German invasion. They were first deployed in 1941.

These early rockets were quite small though larger ones were developed later.
The Germans designed and tested their first rockets as early as 1940 but they were not deployed until 1941. Larger rockets were introduced later.

The rockets weren't mounted on vehicles until 1943, by which time the Americans had started producing their own rocket carrier.
I'm going to make the smaller rockets level 3, which puts them around 1941 levels of technology, while the larger ones will be level 4 which would put them around 1943.

Actually, now is a good time to talk about tech levels. I've set up the vehicle components so they follow a simple schedule based on tech levels from real life:
The current scope of the game is from 1936-1940, the first stage of the Vinland Crusade and the Northern Revolts. This makes equipment from level 0 to level 2 available, with level 3 and 4 equipment available as "prototypes" which can be bought at a much higher price and limited availability.

Each level allows the creation of a vehicle which is superior to those from the previous level. In theory if you had a vehicle which is all level 3, you could easily defeat a level 2 vehicle.

However, levels are split for each kind of technology and differ depending on faction.
For example, Vinland gets access to level 5 engine technology by 1943, but their weapons don't reach that pinnacle until spring 1948. The Europeans start out with level 2 technology almost across the board, but are much slower to adapt because of their long supply lines and entrenched military customs. Later in the war they are suffering a complete breakdown, with war weariness and revolts crippling their wartime economy. They lose their early lead and by 1945 they are only ahead on weapons and infantry.

This should give more interesting design philosophies, where some vehicles are far ahead in one area, but lagging in another.  


Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Automating Level imports from Blender to Godot

  Recently I've been making some levels in Blender an importing them into Godot. There are only about 7 or 8 shaders for each level, not counting dynamic objects which will be added later. But to improve rendering performance, it can be a good idea to split the meshes up into sections. At that point you might be faced with a list like this: Or it might be even more chaotic, if you didn't use simple names for the objects in your level. So it can take a long time to sort out all the meshes, make them unique and add textures and so on. Blender imports with simple Blender textures, or with placeholder materials. This is sometimes OK, but if your Godot shaders are very different to those used by Blender, it means applying new materials to every mesh object in the level when you import the scene. I found that during the design process, I was importing and readying a level several times before I was happy with the final layout. So at first I was wasting a lot of time. In Blender, I us

Dynamic terrain in GODOT

Long time no posts. I haven't been keeping up with the projects I started. At first it seems fun and exciting, but I always run in to limitations in the setup, plus the grind of just making stuff without any real challenges... It ends up being something that I don't want to commit to. So right now I'm just messing around with some ideas and see what comes out. No commitment to a bigger project, just some time to try new things. This week I've been working on procedurally generated terrain.  In the past, there were some big limitations on how I approached this, because the game world had to have the whole map, from the micro to the macro. I had to choose a scale somewhere between, which meant I couldn't have really large maps, or really small details. I think I've found a way around that. Below you can see two types of map data coexisting on top of each other. The wireframe is the collision data, used for physics and for clicking on the map, to move characters ar

Make your game models POP with fake rim lighting.

I was watching one of my son's cartoons today and I noticed they models were using serious amounts of simulated rim lighting . Even though it wasn't a dark scene where you'd usually see such an effect, the result was actually quite effective. The white edge highlighting and ambient occluded creases give a kind of high contrast that is similar to, but different from traditional comic book ink work. I'll be honest, I don't know if there's a specific term for this effect in 3d design, since my major at university was in traditional art. I learned it as part of photography. You can find plenty of tutorials on "what is rim lighting" for photography. It basically means putting your main sources of light behind your subject so that they are lit around the edges. It can produce very arresting photographs, either with an obvious effect when used on a dark subject ... ..,or as part of a fully lit scene to add some subtle highlights. See ho