Technology tree

I created a technology tree diagram for the game's different entities and how they interact with each other.

Green: Building
Purple: Unit
Yellow: Technology

Oriental style building

This is an oriental style building I threw together in 3ds max one evening. It has the general shape and just needs texturing and and a bit of tweaking before I put it in the game.

There has been progress on the game logic and I've put together an A-Star pathfinder which balances searches across frames. However at the moment it seems that it grinds to a halt when searching for an impossible path so it may require a bit of tweaking.

Animation is now in game and uses vertex programs to linearly interpolate vertices between frames. This type of animation isn't as effective as skeletal animation but its cheap and quick and when the characters are quite small you won't notice the difference between implementations.

I'm now working on collision detection and updating the collision grid. Currently units will not update the collision grid and will only plot paths around static obstacles. Next I'll be adding buildings into the game.

Interesting youtube video

I stumbled across this youtube video which has some really interesting background about the weapons used during the warring states period in china. It will be a very good reference to make when designing the units in the game:

First preview of assets

Here are some of the model designs that I have been working on for the game. The models will all be pre-rendered and used as sprites in the game. As can be seen I haven't added textures or materials yet but the structures are taking shape.

Blog started!

I've started this blog to record the development of my final year university project. It will be an online multiplayer real time strategy (RTS) game which will be played through a web browser. The game will be written in Java and aims to feature multiplayer as well as a challenging computer AI as a single player option.

The name 'Warring States' refers to the period of time that the game will be set. This was a time in China's history where the country was split into seven seperate states, each at war for the control of the known world. In multiplayer games, each players will choose which faction they want to play as, and the single player game will feature a campaign mode which will follow the state of Qin who aim to unite the country.

I hope to update this blog whenever I implement anything particularly interesting. I plan to release a public beta for testing when the game reaches a stable state.