Projekt "W" battles and some newton tidbits

Projekt W new battles

Recently I’ve started working on the new turn-based battles that’ll come with “Phase 2” of Projekt “W”. If you have played the game, you already saw the automatic battles with no possibility for the player to intervene. This will be changed, and you’ll have full control over attacking and defending regions. If a battle starts, the game will switch into the turn-based battle-mode where you firt place your units and then move them turn-by-turn (player after player) until one of the parties has been terminated. If you have played some of the more known turn-based military sims like “Panzer General” you’ll know how this new battle-mode will work. The shot on the left shows an early implementation, so mostly the graphics will change in the future and I also need to add an interface to show the most important information. If you don’t like to fight the battles by your own, the game will still offer you the possibility to automatically calculate the battle (though this may come at a higher risk than fighting yourself). There will also be differend maps with different graphics sets, depending on where the region is located, and I also plan to have different skins for the units depending on their owning nation, so that they’re easier to distinguish in this battle-mode.

Besides this I also recently had the chance to try out a new beta version of the Newton Game Dynamics Engine (2.00), that now finally supports multiple cores. This brings much more performance, and getting my NewtonPlayGround to work with this new version was only a matter of minutes as there aren’t much API-changes for the new version of the SDK. Right now the new version is still in development, so it’s only available for SDK-developers, others will still have to wait for a final release. But I uploaded two videos to show off how much faster this new version is on a system with multiple cores (in my case it’s ans AMD Athlon 64 X2 4200) so you can see for yourself : Video showing 36 trebuchets going off simultaneous (wmv) Note that these are real trebuchets working like the ones in real-life by using a very heavy weight at one end. They are constructed using convex hulls and are connected with different joints. Video showing 500 convex hulls rolling down a hill (wmv) This one shows 500 rocks (represented by convex hulls) rolling down a hill at a decent framerate. And though this is from an early version of the SDK it’s already running much faster than with the old version of Newton.