Warbots is currently being pitched, I just sent out a new build last night..hopefully I can find an interested publisher soon and move on with that project.
One of the coolest (IMO) things I've added into the game recently is 1000s of autonomous humans/droids to the battlefield. They will basically add ambience to the world, but they will also effect the gameplay, the players can only control the vehicles though. I can scale the humanoid system up into the 10,000s easily, but it's really pointless beyond 2,500 given all the other stuff that has to occur in the scene [ 64 fully animated potentially unique vehicles, 2 bases, 5 command points, terrain, water 1000s of trees/rocks/shrubs/etc...]
I did some little tricks to get the humans working in this volume, it actually doesn't use an impostor system [ yet ], I do use instancing and some "odd" ways of packing transforms/positions/rotations into the instancing shader to reduce state changing and really make this even possible. The model used is still a place holder as well. The system still needs a lot of testing on other machines :-D This project is juuust about ready for a BETA, if I can't get a publisher soon, I might just do the self publish route for this project...at least I need to get it into testing soon.
Anyways, here is a preview image of a video I've uploaded to youtube showing a "freeze frame" of a battle...
Download link
">Click to view Warbots Online - Battle Freeze Frame video
*NOTE: If the video looks blurry, make sure flash 10 is installed on your machine
Preview
More Stuff...
I've been working on countless other parts of the project, including an update to the Warbots Homepage...
You can now create accounts, login to the game using the account. I've got stat tracking working, all the database/web/stat frontend is in testing, I've been evolving this stuff over the last 2-3 years so it's pretty stable. Just X amount of work.
I've been working on the options menu, making everything in the game scaleable. I'd already coded the rendering fallbacks I just had to hook things together...the player can modify -
Quote:
Screen Resolution
Texture Quality
Post Processing
Water Quality
Terrain Quality
FSAA
Fullscreen/Windowed
FPS Display
View Distance
God Ray Quality
Human/Droid toggle/qualty
Other Stuff...
I've been running the app through the D3D debug runtimes for the first time in a while, wow, I'm sort of embarrassed some of the things I let slide ;-) But they are all fixed up now :-D
My workspace is a pile of keyboards, to-do lists, and other programming paraphernalia stacked under an array of monitors lol... I need a vacation lol. First I have to get this latest project signed and out the door...
I'll keep you guys updated on the process as best I can :-D
- Dan
I think the grass could still look better but the bots hide it nicely
However, are you sure that these bots are a good decision?
- Do they have a good AI?
- How do they behave to collisions with vehicles? (Ragdolls would be awesome!)
- Wouldn't it feel weird to mow-down so many bots with such a small vehicle?
- Wouldn't it suck to get blocked by any bot?
- Are you sure you can get them to look good even if animated? (I could imagine that bots need a lot work on their animations alone, but you possibly use urban empires stuff here)
- How do you plan to sync so many bots over the network?