Hello everyone,
We've spent the past month mostly working on additional logistics updates. One of the big ones was the addition of what we're terming "Slave Miner logic" (for any Yuri's Revenge fans out there). Essentially this is just an alternative method for resource construction and resource units to operate, and will mostly be applied to the Warband faction, although the test unit seen here (which most likely won't make it to the final game) is an Empire unit.
We've also worked on logic pertaining to logistics unit automation. A lot of logistics units won't be directly controlled, but rather will be automatically be deployed to work from the building they are stationed at, and you can indirectly control them by adjusting the settings of the building they are bound to.
We also plan on adding some other options to better control worker units, such as marking structures as disabled or empty so that delivery units won't deliver to them or extract from them.
We've also added preliminary work on the Recruit reinforcements system, where fresh troops are brought from off-map and delivered to the HQ building. These "raw" infantry are essentially a type of resource, with each one being "spent" to turn into a dedicated infantry unit, vehicle crewman or structure staff. Essentially is a more in depth version of how many RTS games like Starcraft and AOE2 have population mechanics. There will be other mechanics related to this system, like upgrading the reinforcements frequency by building rail lines or airstrips, and even press-ganging civilians into your population.
We've also done some work replacing the terrible, hacked together fire system that I made with an actual hardcoded one. Not only does this looks a lot better and allow for more interesting gameplay potential - with things like spreading forest fires, and units that can take damage over time from catching fire - but is also much more performant and bug-free.
Essentially, every tile can have a heat value applied to it, which determines the severity of the fire. Fires slowly decay, but will deal damage to surrounding objects, with bigger fires causing more damage of course.
Flammable objects like vegetation can also sustain more heat per-tile, and of course can spread to other flammable objects in the vicinity. We'll also (at some point) add a bit of terraforming logic for fires, so that tiles that have been substantially burned are turned into their own type of scorched terrain, better selling the effect for forest fires and areas that have seen lots of fiery destruction.
We also finally implemented proper "rampfix" tiles (to use the Tiberian Sun term, if you've ever used that game's map editor), so now we no longer have those weird origami slopes. The actual sprites for these were made last year, but were left unimplemented in the game itself until this month.
Also, while a small update, we added a small feature to certain objects that causes them to be instantly destroyed by certain weapons while letting the projectile pass through. This was done to make it so tank shells and other powerful weapons will just pass through thin walls harmlessly, while bullets and smaller weapons don't penetrate through them.
Finally, we started work on adding dirt road tiles, though this work was temporarily halted since there are some other terrain related features we need to add (specifically, a blending/transparency feature to better facilitate different terrain types having adjacency and looking natural). There are quite a few of them:
That's all for this month. Next month we hope to flesh out the logistics system even further and apply polish to a lot of the new systems like reinforcements and recruits.