Going multi-platform, part 6 : Mac OSX
Posted on June 24, 2013
| Sascha
After hard weeks of work, february finally saw the release of a linux version for Projekt Weltherrscher - Phase. This marked the first step on my journey to go multi-platform, something to too easy for a game that was made on and for windows (with an IDE that actually only runs on windows).
But those that are into multi-platform development know how close Mac OSX and linux are in terms of coding (OSX is based on Darwin which is based on unix), so after getting the game to run on linux the next (natural) step would have been porting it to Mac OSX.
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Projekt "W" finally get's it's own theme song
Posted on May 28, 2013
| Sascha
After all the years that Projekt “W” has been in development the game finally has it’s very own theme song! While adding in new sounds (and replacing old ones) I found the music of the current build to be kinda unfitting and decided to dig through the depths of the internet to find some (free) tracks that would be a better fit for the game’s mood (especially with the new space backdrops).
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The challenges of a game's sound design
Posted on May 10, 2013
| Sascha
Usually I’d add some nice screenshots to show off progress on “Phase 2”, but this time it’s an area of game development that’s pretty hard to show off in screenshots : Sound design.
I find this is one of the hardest parts as far as game design goes, at least for me. I do all the parts of game development on my own (design, code, content, etc.) but when it comes down to sound design, the result is usually so bad or bland that (I guess) most people just turn it off.
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Introducing the AI builder
Posted on May 2, 2013
| Sascha
The next public release of “Phase 2” will include a new feature, the AI builder.
Managing your regions (constructing and upgrading buildings) becomes more and more tedious the longer a game has been going on, and once you own dozens of regions later on in the game that you’ll have to manage, this task gets very repetitive and takes up a lot of your time. And since monotony can do a lot of damage to the gameplay I decided to add the option to let the AI do the construction and or upgrades for your regions.
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Implementing the ingame tutorial
Posted on March 20, 2013
| Sascha
Now that the open beta of “Phase 2” has been downloaded a few times (with a 10:1 ratio between Windows and Linux) it seems that people like it. But one thing I’ve heard several times now was the lack of a tutorial. Since the game is pretty complex, especially compared to the current games, many people are finding it hard to get into the gameplay and actually win a game (I guess it’s the same thing I felt when I played my first matches of “Panzer General” almost 20 years ago).
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Redoing backdrops and tuning globe shaders
Posted on March 4, 2013
| Sascha
The backdrops of the different nations have always annoyed me since I started to work on a 16:9 (and currently 16:10) widescreen display. When I created them way back for “Phase 1”, I made them with Corel’s Bryce (a pretty old version) and rendered them for 4:3 and 5:4 displays. And I always wanted to redo them since starting to work on “Phase 2”, which has been some time now, but never actually got around this and never had a clue what to do.
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Projekt "W" - Phase 2 - First linux release!
Posted on February 15, 2013
| Sascha
Believe it or not, but after a month of hard work (and only very little sleep), the first open beta release of “Phase 2” for linux (i386) is finally here!
Only a few small issues had to be fixed since my last posting about going multi-platform. No big deal, only a few visual glitches, missing staff images and (very annoying) a missing flood fill algorithm. I use flood fill to generate the colored territorial maps on each turn, and lazarus doesn’t implement this for the linux widget sets, so I had to write one on my own that isn’t slow as hell.
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Going multi-platform, part 5 : Finishing touches
Posted on February 9, 2013
| Sascha
After weeks of hard work and learning a lot about the differences between coding on windows and linux, the current source revision of Phase 2 is completly functional on linux and playing the same as a windows version. So if you’d put them side-by-side in fullscreen mode you wouldn’t notice any differences!
Currently I’m putting the finishing toches on the linux release and only a very few minor things have to be fixed and adjusted before I’ll release the linux version into the wild, so you guys can play with it and provide me with feedback, the linux world is far more fractured than the windows world, so I’d love to know how the game runs on different distributions.
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Going multi-platform, part 4 : First run on a native linux
Posted on February 3, 2013
| Sascha
After another week of intense coding on “Phase 2”, trying to fix the mistake I made with nativeXML, I finally got all of the xml stuff switched over to my own xmlwrapper. As hinted at in my last posting, nativeXML wasn’t working on linux (and I haven’t been unlocked for their support forums, after over a week of wait!) so I decided to write my own wrapper unit that uses fpc’s or delphi’s xml implementation, depending on the compiler target.
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Going multi-platform, part 3 : First throwback
Posted on January 28, 2013
| Sascha
Last weekend I worked on getting the lazarus / free pascal build of “Phase 2” to look and play exactly the same as the delphi build. I had to change some small things here and there, but after a few hours you can now no longer distinguish between the two builds, maybe except for performance. It looks that some stuff that’s pretty fast with delphi is kinda slow with fpc, for example accessing stringlists and stuff.
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