I guess this will be the last post on my blog in 2006, and I don’t want to let you switch into 2007 without a last update on the status of Projekt “W”.
Again I worked a lot on the code itself, made several changes to make my life as a coder easier (e.g. a global window update, so I don’t have to care about what windows to update on what action) and most important I decided to get rid of the pixelbuffers for offscreen-rendering. I used them to render 3D overlays on the windows, like the 3D preview of the region or the rotating preview of buildings, but pixelbuffers need a change of the rendering context during rendering the frame and I also used automatic mip-map generation to get rid of heavy aliasing. Those two together though sucked on the performance and even switching to the brand-new FBOs didn’t make it much better. So I came up with a simple way of rendering the 3D previews in the windows without off-screen rendering and it’s a lot faster and also works like a charm.
Other than that I started to work on the battlefield-feature, which is the 3D view you get when you attack an enemy region (it’s optional, you can also let the computer calculate the outcome of the battle). I mentioned something about this feature months ago, but after (almost) finishing the espionage feature I decided to finally put my hands on this as the next feature to implement into the game. And as this is a bigger thing I did (as with other bigger changes/features) write a separate prototype where I’ll try out some things and implement the most important things of this feature before I’ll put it into the final game. Basically this is a very simple round-based strategy mini-game (like Panzer General, but with a lot less features) where the attack tries to crush all defending armies to take over the region. The prototype isn’t too advanced, but it can load different regional presets (lush, desert, etc.) and you can move your units around. And to finish this, here are two screenshots of that “new” feature :
So much for my last post of 2006, and good wishes to all you reading my blog for 2007! Stay tuned for more Projekt “W” in 2007…