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WARSTORY – Alpha Release Notes – From a code point of view

Veröffentlicht Andreas Drewke

Hi,

Yaaaaaa, this is the very first blog post here. Nice!

So I am Andreas Drewke from Mindty, so to say the code warrior working on “WARSTORY”.
Let me summerize our current situation regarding the upcoming alpha release from a code point of view.

1. What do we have archived so far in code area

  • We have formed a good multi platform foundation for WS providing 3d realtime rendering, physics, network communication, UI, … including tools like a installer application based on TDME2
  • We have a good stable multi-threaded architecture separating and organizing our game logics into small compilation units or classes in C++ which in particular handle physics, rendering, state delegation via network, sound management, … in backend and frontend
    • and this all was designed by me to be implementable by a small number of people
  • We have lots of game logics already as base like buildings, actors(villagers, players) including behaviours, resource logics, items(tools, weapons), …
  • Furthermore I made sure
    • UI is designable and implementable by our game designer Dominik Hepp
    • Villager behaviours can be defined by our game designer from now on too as I provided a script language for that purpose as last minute change
    • We have a working art pipe supporting our game designer Dominik and artist Kolja Gumpert as best as possible in future also using PBR(WIP) soon

2. Content that we already have

  • Game design(we are not at 100%, apart of the fact that Kolja and Dominik have lots of future ideas)
  • Art(is in place but will receive some major updates in future)
  • Gameplay(see 1.)
  • Sound(is there but still WIP)
  • Music(starts to be there, but is still WIP)

3. What is not optimal with the current situation

  • While the engine can handle foliage, terrain and multiple single objects of the same type very well, as well as lots of bots(by combining e.g. skinning computation and rendering) our assets are not yet baked down so to say
    • We are currently looking into ways to bake down multiple model mesh nodes and materials into very less like 1-3 per model to give the maximum of performance we can reach, so expect a update on this topic soon

4. What is the plan regarding the alpha release

As there were many last minute updates like GLTF reader, PBR, Flow Maps, A scripting language for villager behaviour and e.g. light scattering we also introduced some last minute bugs.
The plan is that on 2020-07-01 there will be a feature freeze and bug fix sessions until the alpha is ready to be released which I expect to be in mid July.

Also be aware that FreeBSD, Linux and MacOSX version will arrive a bit later as there are a few issues left with MacOSX mainly and we need to create a build infrastructure for that operating systems.