Skip to main content

Spotted!

After some testing, I decided to rework the radio contact rules described in the previous post. I've been playing a lot of RPG and Strategy games lately and one thing I don't really enjoy is the micromanaging aspect of buffing and de-buffing.

Rather than force the player to make hard decisions on where to allocate their buffs, it just ends up with them having to devote too many resources to support. You end up having at least one team member out of four doing nothing but support.
It also wastes a lot of time clicking and selecting and so on.

So, I want support actions to offer a significant bonus when active, but most should be passive. They should have specific utility too, not a general buff which you simply apply to your best unit. If your tanks are getting swarmed with infantry, then rapid fire will help you clear them out. If there's an enemy who is well dug in behind cover, you can use steady aim or mark target to get a bead on them.

In the end I just made special actions and ability to receive buffs reliant on having a radio. While the support role requires the command radio. Infantry can't carry a radio (yet) but they don't need to as none of their special abilities are reliant on it.

I'm also working on air support.

It's nice to be able to abstract this element. Not having to have actual planes flying around the map makes coding it a whole lot easier. Later I may add some graphics to represent it, such as a shadow cast on the ground, or an inset box with a picture of the type of plane doing the action.

Three types are currently planned; Spotter Planes, Fighter Planes and Air Strike.
In both cases they start their first turn inactive. The icon is placed on the map, but nothing happens.

On its way.
On the very next turn, the effect becomes active. Either dropping some bombs or revealing some of the map.

Circling and looking for targets.
At this time, the enemy (or the player) has a chance to use anti-aircraft weapons (or Fighter Planes) to try and cancel the effect before it is active. The chance will depend on a number of factors, such as the weapon being used, distance from target and so on.
About to head home.
The big advantage of air support is they can be targeted on tiles which are covered by fog of war. You can use them to scout out objectives or soften up the enemy before an attack. The disadvantage is that they can be nullified by opposition air support or anti air defenses.

This is quite a significant development, as none of my previous versions of Vinland got as far as adding air support rules. I hope I can train the AI to use them effectively, along with anti-aircraft weapons.

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