As some people over at a forum I’m active in noted that they wouldn’t be able to play Projekt “W” cause their graphics cards don’t support shaders, I decided to spent some time on implementing a renderpath that works without shaders. Especially the globe uses a more complex shader and recreating something at least similar with the fixed function pipeline wasn’t that easy but in the end I got something that works on old cards and still looks good enough.
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Manual and soundsystem
As the project is already close to finish I started to write the manual several days ago and just finished the english one (the game will include german and english languages, so a german manual will also be included) and it’s roughly 15 pages long. And as this game is a bit more complex than most of my other games it’s really recommended to read this cause otherwise out would be hard to play.
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More playtesting, balancing, bughunting and AI
The title exactly sums up what I’ve been doing on Projekt “W” the last couple of days. After an extensive round of playtesting I squashed the last few remaining bugs and problems I encountered and was finally able to play a whole game without any troubles, crashes or other things that disturbed a smooth gameplay experience. It took me around 90 turns to finish a whole game, playing the oceanic front.
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Transfer market, new cursors, texture compression and more
Since the last update on Project “W” I worked on a lot of smaller things and also did a lot of work on the “background” of the game (the stuff most players won’t notice but which is still important to work on), so this news posting will be a collection of all the things I did over the last days.
Transfer market : This was actually the last thing that was really bugging me as up until recently each staff member would have the same image with only name and values being different, so I started to take care of this and in the final version there will be around a dozen of different faces for each of the professions (scienists, spies and generals) so the staff you hire is much more personalized and can easily be recognized.
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First playtesting sessions and hardware requirements
Although there are still some minor things to do before I can call it a version that’s ready to getting released, Projekt “W” is now in a shape where you can actually play a whole game without it throwing an exception (so far all show-stoppers have been fixed). So today I made the first two playtesting session with the first one being interrupted with a bug that I quicly fixed followed by a second playtesting session.
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On the state of Project "W"
I just crossed the last remaining things off from my todo-list for the demo (except for one point which is finishing one of the remaining nation backgrounds) and so far I have been very pleased with it’s progress since I started on the new version back in august 2006 (I still have a backup from that date on my disk in order to quickly check progress). Recently a friend of mine came by and after showing him the current in-developement version he was stunned by the professional looks of it so I guess it’s going in the right direction and all the work I’ve put into it in the end will pay out.
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Hotseat mode is in
As already hinted at in my last posting on the subject of Project “W” I implemented the hotseat-multiplayer-mode, which will be the only multiplayer-mode present in the demo. For those that don’t know about it, hotseat is a multiplayer-mode that only uses one PC and therefore only can be used in a turn-based game (like Project “W”). So before starting such a game (see first screenshot) you choose what nation is controlled by a human player (other nations are played by the computer, disabling a whole nation is not possible but maybe later on with different game modes) and you can also set the number of ressources each nation has at the start of the game.
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Endgame screens and top-five
Although I haven’t had that much time to work on Project “W” since my last entry here I actually did get some more points on my todo-list done. As you can see on the screenshot to your left there is now a nice looking game-ending screen which will show some statistics as well as a top-five of the best players. For the screen itself I needed half-a-dozen attempts until I had gotten something finished that looked the way I imagined and had enough space to present all needed information, and as some kind of gift I also decided to add this small highscore-list so that there now is another additional value in replaying the game.
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Cast of buildings
High on 1the heels of my last posting about the cast of the military units for the Project"W" demo, I now also have finished all buildings that will be present in the demo. The number is 39 and even though I didn’t stop the time while creating them I can safely say that it took me far over one hundred hours to design, model and texture them so this was actually the toughest part of the content creation sector for Project “W”.
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Cast of military units
I just finished modelling and texturing the last military unit left to have the list of units for the demo finished. If you click on the image to your left you’ll get a picture of all the different units that will be in the demo. You can see 10 military units that can be build by the player (2 infantry units, 5 different tanks, a mechanoid walker, two airplanes) and one special purpose unit, the mobile environment changer.
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