Age of Wonders: Planetfall - Dev Diary #4: Creator Engine 4.0

[Thrake]

Nah, it's water scavenging, so he doesn't have to leave the armor.

Oh yes, of course... What else? The precious water of life

 

[BloodyBattleBrain]

But for Planetfall we picked DirectX11 and the main reason for this is that DirectX12 only runs on Windows 10 and for us its important that our games support older hardware.

And one more reason to love you guys!

Well, the idea was to write a post about the mechanics of combat and how they differ from AoW3, you're list is quite a bit more extensive than that! I'll see what I can do though

mega journal...or several journals!

It appears that culling the quote messes with the number order, but to throw in my own 2c on these topics:

For the first, there could be ways to make the system more granular without simply giving an advantage to units with more movement points. For instance, certain actions might cost a certain % of movement points. Or units might have a varied number of action points - a Dvar assault troop, for instance, might be slow but have many action points to represent that laying down a barrage of fire doesn't slow them down much, while a hovorbike-mounted sniper might have fewer to represent that while it can move fast, it has to stop and set up in order to snipe.

On the second: I think it's fine in an open field battle: if the defender can run rings around the attacker, it makes sense that the attacker just isn't going to be able to take them out. If there's an objective being defended, though, I think there needs to be some mechanic to represent that the objective has been abandoned by the defender and forfeited to the attacker. If you're just flying in circles around the attacker, after all, you're not defending the objective, and there's a military adage about how an aircraft can't hold ground.

Oh many ways to approach this .


That DVR looks shiny. more screenies please....

 

[Destrada]

Not a fan of Win10, for someone who grew up with a command line such as myself, it feels half-assed.

 

[Damkac]

That dvar looks great.

 

[Alex646]

Question: can I launch AoWP at least on lowest settings, if I can play AoW3 on high/ultra now? Owner of shitty PC is asking.

 

[frags]

Question: can I launch AoWP at least on lowest settings, if I can play AoW3 on high/ultra now? Owner of shitty PC is asking.

I'm curious as well. How scalable will AoW: Planetfall be. Perhaps it's too early to tell though.

 

[Tavior]

Below is a screen shot that demonstrates how the surrounding environment, in this case just the terrain, influences the lighting of the object.

Somehow the structure in middle look "slightly" greener reflecting grasses than the left structure which look more yellow which is suitable for arid terrain. I am talking about the base pyramid part not the "rotating thingy on the top".

I think there was a mixed up somewhere?

 

[HousePet]

I realise that this is probably a long shot, but is there any chance that someone will look into whether some of the new editor improvements can be added to the AoW3 editor?
The Snapshot Renderer comes to mind as something that doesn't sound overly integrated into the new engine and would be of use to AoW3 modders.

 

[sikbok]

I have another question about doing things in parallel. What exactly does the engine do in parallel? Are AI moves for the different players on separate threads? Or would that cause to many synchronization problems?
Do you have a more traditional split in threads like one for thread for UI and graphics and one for the rest?

We have separate threads for:

• Application
• Renderer (command processing)
  
• AI
• Particle effects.
• Content loading
• Auto-combat
• Audio
• Etc.

We'll likely go in and split some more stuff up for console, which will also benefit performance on PCs.

Question: can I launch AoWP at least on lowest settings, if I can play AoW3 on high/ultra now? Owner of shitty PC is asking.

I'm curious as well. How scalable will AoW: Planetfall be. Perhaps it's too early to tell though.

@Alex646, yeah, unlikely you'd have trouble running Planetfall.

We'll do final optimization for PC when almost all the other stuff is done, so we're not 100% sure yet. However, there won't be a dramatic increase in system requirements. The main thing is memory, memory usage will increase given we're a 64bit application now. There are some changes due to dx11. Also some graphic cards no longer being supported by recent drivers updates, which is something we are looking into. But - as noted - if you can run AoW3 nice and fast, Planetfall on lower specs will likely work fine too.

I realise that this is probably a long shot, but is there any chance that someone will look into whether some of the new editor improvements can be added to the AoW3 editor?
The Snapshot Renderer comes to mind as something that doesn't sound overly integrated into the new engine and would be of use to AoW3 modders.

Our mod tools are basically the tools we work with, splashed with some - make multiple mods work together, don't have patches break all the things - sauce. So most features we use will make it to modders.

 

[Destrada]

The machine-god hears the offering of words, and is pleased, but has one question that has not yet been answered:

Soo... when can we give you money for this?

 

[Nerdfish]

Brilliant ! Good job. That's all.

 

[jpinard]

One horrible person downvoted this thread.

This all looks and sounds amazing. Thanks Arndt!

 

[Tanksy]

How different is the UI of the Editor and Tool set compared to AoW 3? AoW 3 had a really clunky editor, with no guidance. How easy to use is the new modding tool going to be?

How is mod loading going to work? Are you going to use the same priority system from AoW 3 and rely on Mod Authors to manually specify their mod's prioirty (Bad idea IMO) or are you going to let us organise our own Load Order? (Good idea IMO)

In Age of Wonders 3, modding was a complete pain, but at least we had more freedoms than modding Age of Wonders 2 -- Where we had to make our own tools for the most part, in order to modify more than just unit stats and effects. In Age of Wonders 3, there were still some limitations (Level cap on heroes, unit groups capped at 6, can't make Combat maps) for modders that were frustrating. In Planetfall, how much of the game is going to be "in our hands" so to speak, when it comes to modding?

The graphics look nice, and the snapshot feature is also nice. Is that UI what we can expect the new editor kit to look like?

Offtopic: Still no dice on getting my Age of Wonders 2 and SM badges.. I've even tried reinstalling the games and playing them to see if Paradox somehow needed more proof I own them despite being linked to my Steam. I've even re-linked, and re-synced, and nothing.