Work­ing some more on the Con­tent Browser mini-app this week­end, flesh­ing out what all I want to include in it and so on.

My ini­tial inten­tion was that it would be used purely to pre­view the weapons & other mod­els in the game as they become avail­able, how­ever I also wanted the app to be some­thing that was actu­ally use­ful for some­thing besides pre­view­ing con­tent in the engine.

There are essen­tially two sides to the game — the first is a strate­gic ‘high game’ com­po­nent, which allows you to mon­i­tor the state of the world, check out the sta­tus of your Unit and man­age things like trans­fers of equip­ment between the var­i­ous bases that you have setup around the world. The sec­ond com­po­nent of the game is the actual low-level tac­ti­cal ‘mis­sion pro­file’ com­po­nent, which cov­ers every­thing after the Unit deploys into the field and things get down and dirty.

(con­tinue reading…)

Another wave of stats are imple­mented — fin­ished the ‘nation info’ lookup sys­tem last night for the pri­mary Oper­a­tions Room screen.

(con­tinue reading…)

Got the main struc­ture for the high-level game frame­work imple­mented last night…well tech­ni­cally this morn­ing i guess. Went to bed waaaay too early and ended up awake and bored at 2 am so…anyways. Reworked the entire game startup pro­ce­dure, but pro­file cre­ation through launch­ing a new cam­paign and on down.

The sys­tem is designed to be very flex­i­ble and open-ended, each cam­paign has any num­ber of mis­sions attached to it, each with their own con­fig file, which deter­mines things like whether the mis­sion auto-launches (like the startup / intro cred­its machin­ima sequences) or whether they need to be acti­vated man­u­ally (either via a timed trig­ger event or through user input) on down to how the mis­sion and cin­e­mat­ics are executed.

All in all it’s pretty slick (imho) and gives me an excel­lent frame­work to begin build­ing and con­nect­ing all of the var­i­ous game­play ele­ments that I have been imple­ment­ing — every­thing from the high-level Oper­a­tions Room, through the unit & weapons cus­tomiza­tion pieces on down to the actual ‘in coun­try’ shooter game­play itself. So, lack of sleep aside, it was a pro­duc­tive night ;}
re

When I left off, I had the basics of the Oper­a­tions Room cre­ated, with both the base ‘earth’ and the seper­ate ‘nations’ geom­e­try in game and ready to go. Next up is to add the basic selec­tion sys­tem that I want so that the user can get infor­ma­tion about each dif­fer­ent coun­try in the game and other sim­i­lar info.

(con­tinue reading…)

The oper­a­tions room pro­vides not only a pretty view of the earth from space, it also is used for man­ag­ing your bases (For­ward Oper­at­ing Bases or FOB), mon­i­tor­ing Ter­ror Alerts & Unit deploy­ments around the world, and in gen­eral keep­ing track of the events around the neighborhood.

Along those lines, just got the polit­i­cal / national view of the OpRoom updated. I don’t have every sin­gle ‘legit’ coun­try in the world as a seper­ate mesh, but in total there are around 170 nations in the ‘C:SO’ world — and my goal is for the mis­sion gen­er­a­tion sys­tem to sup­port deploy­ing the Unit to every type of ter­rain / envi­ron­ment and ecosys­tem con­tained within. Sea, Air or Land, indeed ;}

As a side note, I’m work­ing on port­ing a small sub­set of the CIA Fact­book data­base into the sys­tem for gen­eral pop­u­la­tion info (among other things). When you select a coun­try in the grid, the game will actu­ally be polling fairly real­is­tic / recent data (at least as recent as is avail­able to us mere mor­tal / non-military types that is). More on this later ;}

And yes, every sin­gle coun­try (the pri­mary col­ored ver­sions) are indi­vid­u­ally mod­eled meshes that are over­laid over the main globe. If the user has selected a spe­cific nation, the over­lay meshes will be used as ‘high­light’ type meshes to indi­cate what the user has selected.

Next up is to do Cities (national cap­i­tals & oth­er­wise)… weee