And I’ve included the text of the readme.txt file here for your convenience.
This is a work-in-progress demo of my game Planitia.
Current version is .60.
NOTE: IF YOU GET A MESSAGE SAYING THAT D3D9_**.DLL IS MISSING THEN YOU NEED TO UPDATE YOUR DIRECTX.
Planitia is a real-time strategy game that will (eventually) allow you to both build an army and use god powers to crush your enemies.
In this demo you play Green. In the main window you will see the game world, your general (the large guy with the green cape) and your village.
BASIC CAMERA CONTROLS
Planitia is meant to be played with one hand on the mouse and one hand on the WASD cluster on your keyboard. (Sorry left-handers – I’ll get controls in for you soon!) You use the mouse to interact with the interface. You can also move the camera by pushing the mouse to an edge of the screen, but it’s much easier to move the camera with the WASD cluster. You can rotate the camera using the Q and E keys. You can left-click on your general to select him and move him by right-clicking on the terrain. You cannot select your villagers. They do their thing all on their own.
GOD POWERS
On the right side you will see a GUI display with a minimap. The blue bar below the minimap is your mana. Below that are buttons for the god powers. Only some of the god powers work now, inactive god powers have their buttons greyed out. The working god powers are:
Flatten Land (up/down arrows): Costs 3 mana per second.
Allows you to raise or lower land to village height. Click and hold in the world window on any terrain to affect it. Flattening the land around your village will allow it to grow, and the more villagers you have the faster your mana will regenerate. Villages only grow at certain populations, so your village may not grow immediately even if you’ve flattened the land properly. Just be patient.
Earthquake (concentric circles): Costs 10 mana.
Drops an earthquake wherever you click in the world window. Be careful not to cast it on your own village. The earthquake prevents enemy villages from growing and forces their gods to use more mana fixing what you’ve done.
Stone Rain (looks like falling rocks): No current mana cost.
Changes the terrain you click on to “ruined” terrain. The terrain must be high enough to be affected (you can’t change beach or land that is underwater into ruined terrain). This will eventually slow down village production, but right now it has no effect so it has no mana cost. You can get rid of it by flattening the terrain with the flatten button.
Volcano: No current mana cost.
Clicking on the terrain will cause it to push up into a volcano shape and the ground to be covered with lava. Has no current effect (other than the terrain morph) so it has no current mana cost. Using multiple volcanoes next to each other causes them to “fight” over the terrain as each one tries to pull the terrain into a different shape.
Lightning Bolt: Costs 5 mana.
Casts a lightning bolt wherever you click. The lightning bolt damages units and throws them into the air. You can even knock them off the game world this way.
Bless: No current mana cost.
Paints “blessed” terrain over the current terrain. The terrain must be high enough to be affected (just like Stone Rain). It currently has no effect so it has no mana cost.
MILITARY UNITS
If you click on the second tab on the GUI (looks like a red general) you will see the military buttons. You will see buttons for archers, barbarians and warriors, along with a display of how many you currently have of each.
Clicking the archer, barbarian or warrior buttons converts a villager into a military unit of that type and adds it to your army. Your army will always follow your general so you don’t have to worry about controlling units individually. Unfortunately, combat is not in this demo – should be soon.
One thing to keep in mind is that once you convert a villager to a military unit it no longer gives you mana.
OPTIONS
If you click on the third tab on the GUI (which is currently blank) you’ll see the exit button. You can also exit the demo by pressing ESC.
If you wish to give me feedback on this demo, you can do so at anthony.salter@gmail.com, or comment on my blog at www.viridiangames.com.
THINGS TO TRY
You can change what color you play as by going into DataOptions.cfg and changing the value for “playernumber”. 0 is green, 1 is red, 2 is blue and 3 is yellow.
You can also change the terrain of the level by going into DataMapsIntro.txt and changing the value for “seed”. It’s currently set to 7777, valid values are from 0 to 65535.
Copyright 2006, 2007 Anthony Salter. All rights reserved.
first! wheee fun! lightning bolt unit launching never gets old ^_^
* levelling terrain is a bit of a pain – if you lift/lower the terrain enough, the mouse hotspot isn’t lining up with where your levelling anymore, so it shifts back. also, is the levelling moving to where your village is started? i haven’t figured out how the game is figuring out what the flaten plane height is.
* you gotta put a todo for quick-jump with the minimap in your list, i can’t imagine that being too difficult. i want to move to another part of the map without scrolling the whole way there.
* the map rotation button is a little touchy. i wanted to get a screenshot Just Right, but i just couldn’t get it.
obligatory wierd screenshot! this is how i would guess Mister Salter might show his feelings for Bullfrog:
keep up the great work!
hey! double yew tee eff! it totally ignored my image tag!
http://members.gamedev.net/steelgolem/pics/planitia-screencap-200709100807.png
Yes, I need to change it so that once you start leveling a certain cell, it no longer moves off that cell until you let go of the button. And yes, I need to put a camera indicator on the minimap and let you click the minimap to jump around. And yes, the camera rotation is a bit touchy, I think I’ve got the max rotation speed set too high. I’ll be releasing another version next Saturday, hopefully I’ll get all that fixed this week.
Thanks for trying it out!
This looks like it could be something really good when it’s done. I’ve got a suggestion on the terrain thing – as well as a levelling mode (which is really cool – being able to just sweep around the village is so much less fiddly than adjusting each bit), how about a mode that locks to a cell while the button’s held down, then dragging up and down raise and lower the height?
Thanks! Yeah, I need to do something about the terrain morphing…I really like being able to sweep around with the morph tool like you said, but that means the tool can be inaccurate like you and SG pointed out.
I think I may make it so that it can only change cells if you move the mouse cursor, not because the terrain has changed under the cursor. That might be a happy medium.
B-( I still get the same error I got with the previous demos:
“This application has failed to start because the application configuration is incorrect. Reinstalling the application may fix this problem.”
If it helps, I have a Dell Precision M90 running WinXP Professional (SP2), 2GB RAM, Centrino Duo @ 2GHz, at a resolution of 1440x900x32. I don’t have Visual Studio installed. In fact, I don’t have any development tools installed.
I imagine it is likely a missing library. I know we’ve talked about it, but I don’t see why the fact that this is a laptop versus a desktop should make a difference.
In fact…I just borrowed my girlfriend’s desktop and tried it there. I got the same result. It is likely a missing DLL, but which one?
Hello,
Vista users (with directX 10) need to download the d3d9_29.dll and put it in the game folder to make it work, or else they’ll get the dll missing message.
Stupid, stupid Vista, talk about backward compatibility.
You may want to add this in your readme.
Thanks very much for that tip. I don’t have a way to test on Vista yet myself.