Dammit, you guys! Stop it with the cool ideas that are gonna make this take forever to implement
10ebbor10, a few of those ideas are actually in the book! They're also the kinds of interesting and tough tactical decisions that I'd like to have. I'm always afraid of putting the player in a position where he can't possibly recover, but hey, it's his fault he his entire arsenal in the first minutes of the battle!
Flamers: might just do it for the cool effects... but only if a proper graphics artist makes good sprites, otherwise it just looks lame
Also, will probably totally degrade research. All AoE weapons should.
Tanker bugs: Oh god! If it does get in, he'll probably be smaller than in the movies, but it'd be a pretty cool thing to go against. And by cool I mean deadly. Deadly as in, everything melts under the lava puke of the deadly beast! Starship Troopers, now 50% more dwarven!
Terran Federation News Service AnnouncementWould you like to know more?Bad news: didn't get a lot of time this weekend.
Good news: got enough that I managed to implement all things unit selection!
You can now click, double-click and drag for unit selection, all units of same kind selection and box selection, along with all variations given by SHIFT and ALT being pressed. I think that's mostly all the selection tools anyone will want. Might implement control groups at some point - should be fairly trivial.
This means we're getting a whole lot closer to this becoming an actual game. I'm wondering where to go next. Perhaps I can flesh out the Bugs a little bit and make some very basic cheating AI for this to have some actual gameplay.
The problem is I can't really develop the Terrans much further until I know more about them. I'm still not clear exactly how Terran reinforcements/resources are going to work. What resources are used to build more bases/buildings? How do you get them? I'm not a fan of the RTS fare of drones harvesting deposits; I much prefer capture points like WH40k, Company of Heroes, Cossacks 2, etc. Not sure if that would work very well in 1 dimension though. So I don't know what to do about that.
And with that, we move on to our new regular segment, which details what needs doing the most!
Service Guarantees Citizenship!The needs of the Terran Federation:
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Game design: flesh out Terran resources and Terran resource gathering. Control points that give resources, reinforcements over time as more Terran Fleet ships arrive, or just plain regular constant reinforcements over time?
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Playtesting: It'd be real nice if somebody would playtest this on their computer. It should work on both Linux and Windows, you just need to install Python and PySFML (I'll post instructions in OP). Just let me know what is working for you, what isn't, and how many FPS you are getting under what specs. There's a ton of really significant optimisations I can do, but I'm trying to leave those for later.
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Graphics design: as usual, this really needs someone to take over the visual direction of the project. If someone is interested, I can definitely work on making it easier for you to make new units/unit graphics. Please let me know if you are interested!