Defence of Odysseus Cloud - Dev Blog

Well, I managed to do some very important work and... fixed the loading screen:

The text is no longer talking about the "other game" and the bar is always in the middle instead of sometimes being annoyingly off to one side...

Much more important than these other things:

• Lots of moving shared code around so that I don't have to keep syncing things (as much)
• General improvements to the UI (progress bars can now have different styles for the filled/non-filled parts, sliders actually work on touch screens, etc.)
• Turrets shoot at enemies now
• Buildings can be rotated
• Builds can be cancelled

Yes, they're still all placeholders... and the ground isn't flat... and I'm still building on a beach for some reason.

... did I mention that I keep getting distracted?

Anyway, turns out that stuff gets a bit broken/outdated when you leave it alone for... several months? Over a year? 🤷

Since I've just spent a few days getting everything building everywhere* again, here's it running on an iPhone (uh, 6s plus? so a little old...) (Several seconds of failing to end the recording removed.)

Over on macOS, we have some "interesting" water:

... and if you prefer raspberries to apples: (Required a small detour to fix a performance issue in the driver...)

Android still works, but nothing interesting there as that gets more testing... (Though I do need to handle screens with holes or bits missing/rounded off, ugh. Can we go back to rectangles please?)

* Okay, I missed Windows... My Windows laptop is a little dead (well, it doesn't work as a laptop due to a mostly dead NON-REPLACABLE battery sigh)

Hmm, next update would be in ~two months, maybe I'll have some new features by then...

Missed two updates, came back for a bit and got distracted again... So not too much in this one.

The visible change: (A lot of cleanup was needed to get there)

Also, buildings can now have weapons and the "AI" is actually used for the other players.

...or unit, as I only added the one.

Other changes include:

• Improving performance on Android by pre-rotating the screen.
• Rewriting the animation support (it's now not based on the ten year old original)
• Adding a placeholder enemy "AI" that just builds endless units and moves them around.
• Fixing the endless bugs revealed by doing that.

After leaving the "infinite unit builder" running for a while:

(Yes, the textures are still bad.) (Ignore the super-high FPS, this was on a desktop with an RTX 2070, it can get > 1k sometimes.)

At this point, the pathfinding thread was slightly dead. But it hadn't crashed, ended up with three units in the same position, or turned into a pile of distorted triangles.

Main new feature:

Buildings can now produce/consume resources and creating units has a cost. Also, more placeholder-y placeholders!

Other changes:

• Buildings can be shapes that aren't rectangular
• Timing fixes (there was a bug where it would time everything as taking 0ms)
• Actually builds on Windows
• A few optimisations (mostly graphics related)
• Some cleanup (mostly deleting code that hasn't done anything useful in years)
• The UI now does less pointless work
• The options now get saved on Android
• Also, the app doesn't crash when suspended on Android now
• Worked around a bug on one device where the driver would crash if the Y axis of a vector was used...

Oh, and resolution scaling... ... is almost done. (Maybe this should be "The Y axis update"?)

(The new units are still coming, really!)

20-second video of main new features:

New stuff:

• Model updates
• Can now build and place buildings
• Minimap (can be hidden until a specific building is placed)
• Improvements to text rendering (can do non-English text now, also fixes some wonky alignment)
• Units are now less likely to randomly decide to point the wrong way, then turn back around

Here's the minimap after a little exploration:

Wait, I said I was adding more units last time... Maybe next time?

No video this time (not much to see), but still a lot of changes:

• Rewritten audio code (can actually play sounds)
• Rewritten network code (and a server that gets multiple players on the same map, mostly in sync)
• The new renderer now doesn't frequently crash (And is the default)
• Unit variants
• Weapon damage is no longer hardcoded as 1
• Less giant memory usage spikes while loading

Oh, and an actually useful options menu:

Now it's time to add some more units/buildings...

This took slightly longer than expected...

(Ignore the loading messages)

Two builds (and a year) later and we actually have some UI! Other additions:

• "Boats" (Haven't finished a boat model yet)
• Unit construction
• Multiple unit selection
• An entirely new renderer

Next update will hopefully take less time.

Unsurprisingly, the latest Daft Games project is yet another game! It's a strategy game in space with aliens. That's all you need to know, right?

No? Okay, fine. I'll actually talk about it. After this video.

This video basically shows the entirety of the game right now.

• There's terrain covered by fog (with placeholder textures)
• With some units on it (with placeholder textures)
• You can drive ones you own around
• You can shoot your enemies with invisible bullets

So, this is a pretty early preview. Most of the work so far has been untangling reusable code from another game and rewriting some of the older and slightly broken code(image loading would create multiple copies of the data and scaling was extremely slow, path finding was using the completely wrong data structures).

There's a lot of stuff half-implemented right now (buildings, other units) that you can't see in that video (because it doesn't work yet). The next thing I'm working on is the UI so that you can actually interact with the units without clicking random buttons and hoping the right thing happens. (It usually doesn't)

I'll probably write some more abut the game here later. Probably.