There is now a marker on the minimap showing the location and heading of the camera. You can also click on the minimap to jump the camera to that position.

Next I’m going to overhaul how the terrain morphing tool works.

And here it is.

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.

The minimap is now drawing correctly.

Units now show up on the minimap.

Mana bar now charges based on how many villagers you have.

God powers now cost mana to cast.

The “Add Archer To Army” button works.

I inch ever closer.

After a whole lot of work last weekend (and a lot of help from Ryan) I finally managed to get Planitia’s frame rate up and keep it up even when terrain morphing.

As much as I would have liked to put terrain.cpp to bed, I wanted to do two more things – make the terrain look less tiled, and make the water look more interesting.

So I did.

And I updated the demo so that anyone who wants to try it out can. Performance should be greatly improved, but there’s no new functionality (yet).

Now I need A* on the General. After that, no added features should really impact the frame rate. In theory.

I still feel I’m on track to have the first playable alpha version out by the end of August.

Okay…why exactly am I killing myself working on Planitia again?

(You can download a much better version of that movie here.)

Yeah. You know what? I give up. You guys can just play Multiwinia when it comes out. It’ll probably be released around the same time Planitia would have been and will be loads better.

Okay, I’m kidding. (Mostly.) But I am knee-deep into the second 90% on this project. I would pay good money to never have to look at terrain.cpp again. I am starting to understand why game developers don’t make games with deformable terrain any more.

Um…yeah. Demo.

See, I’ve got a bug in the terrain morphing. It looks great, but it kills the frame rate and if you move and morph at the same time the camera goes out of control. I know I can fix it with just a little work.

Plus, if I get some sounds in, the whole game will be SO much better.

So here’s the thing. I’m going to keep my promise.

You can click here to download the current version of Planitia.

But! I will be releasing another version of the demo this weekend that will be greatly improved, so please don’t judge this one too harshly.

Controls

W, A, S, D – Move Camera. You can also move the camera by moving to the mouse to the edge of the play window.

Q, E – Orbit Camera

ESC – Quit

On the first GUI Panel, the following buttons work:

Flatten – Flattens out the terrain and raises or lowers it to city-building height.

Stone Rain – Paints “ruined” terrain onto the map.

Lightning Bolt – Click this, then click units to throw them around. Does not do damage and has no associated effect yet.

Bless – Paints “blessed” terrain onto the map.

Volcano – Pulls the terrain into a volcano shape…doesn’t do anything else yet.

Clicking any of these buttons puts you into an associated “mode”. Right-click to go back to selection mode.

None of the other buttons on this panel work yet.

On the second GUI Panel, you can left-click the general button to select your general (no matter where he is). Right-click the general button to zoom to your general. You are the green player and your general has a green cape.

None of the army buttons work yet.

On the third GUI panel…the Quit button works 🙂 It’s probably the best button in the game currently.

So what can I do?

Flatten out the terrain around the villages and watch them grow. The villages won’t grow unless they have enough flat terrain to do so.

Deform the land to your heart’s content with Flatten and Volcano (although as you do so you will see your frame rate drop to crap temporarily).

Move your general around.

Throw units around with Lightning Bolt. I find myself unconsciously trying to keep one in the air as long as possible.

I’m not going to ask for feedback on this demo…though if you have trouble running it I would certainly like to know that.

NOTE: If the game complains that you are missing d3d9_**.dll then you need to update your DirectX.

No new screenshots, sorry. But I got a lot of help over the weekend from Sol, which I am very grateful for. He pointed out a couple stupid things I was doing that was keeping my frame rate down and making the camera movement jittery. I’m quite happy to get those problems solved.

Now if I could just fix the fact that the frame rate drops to 1/3 of normal when terrain morphing…

ANYway…I promised you guys a demo at the end of July and I intend to make good on that promise. This demo is mostly going to be god powers; the army stuff isn’t fully implemented yet. And not all the god powers will be implemented either. Hey, it’s a demo.

Now, in return, I’m going to request that you guys give me feedback on how the game looks and plays…you know the drill.

At this point I’m thinking that I’ll probably end up doing three releases.

The first will be skirmish against the computer only.

The second will add the storyline missions.

And the third will add multiplayer. God, just saying that word makes me shudder. It’s going to be such hell and I’ve already gone through so much hell with the 3D stuff…

Frankly, I could see myself working on this game for the rest of the year, easy. I may limit myself to one year of development time, which would mean I’d have to be done with everything by late October.

And to think I originally thought I’d get this out by the end of April…

ANYhoo. Demo later today or early tomorrow. I promise I’ll have at least one Ultimate power implemented for you guys to try out.