EDIT: I have put my “Planitia Tasks” document online and it can now be viewed by anyone at this link. So you guys can actually check on my progress yourselves now!

First off, I’ve done a comparison of the god powers of various games which you can look at here.

Now I’m going to subject you to a bit of stream-of-consciousness about god powers.

God powers fall into two broad groups: those that help your followers and those that hurt the enemy followers.

Another reason I don’t like Black & White – the god powers are anemic. This is because your goal isn’t to destroy the enemy god’s followers, but to convert them to your side. You must convert, because doing so increases the range in which you can use your god powers. I’m not going this route with Planitia…on levels when you are opposed by another god, your job will be to wipe out his followers, not convert them.

Making it so that you can only operate in your own sphere of influence is terrible. It makes the game almost completely defensive. Another thing I hate about Black & White. On the other hand, by default you could only raise/lower land in Populous 1 and 2 near your own settlements, but you could use any other god power anywhere. This is good, I like it.

One thing a lot of people don’t know is that some of the god powers in Populous 2 that “grew” effects across the land did so according to the rules of Conway’s Game of Life, so if you understood how the Game of Life worked (and you should), you could actually set up glider guns that would “shoot” carnivorous fungus into your enemy’s base. That is just too freakin’ awesome.

So here’s what I’m thinking. These are effects, not spells. They will be combined to create spells.

Help:
Land flattener/raiser/lowerer
Land restorer
Temporary unit growth
Create Hero
Don’t want walls; makes games too defensive (walls don’t protect against god powers anyway)
Roads?
Shield?
Inspiration (advances village tech level)

Harm:
Direct damage
AOE direct damage,
Damage over time
Land ruiner
Walker flinger

I’m thinking that I want a fairly low mana cap, but a healthy civilization will give you a fairly fast recharge rate. The big effects will take practically all your mana, thus you won’t be able to cast them more than once every few minutes or so, no matter how much mana you have.

I’m also sort of leaning towards the idea of different types or schools of magic, kind of like Populous 2 with its six different types. I think six is too many, though. Five would be interesting but it would feel too much like Magic: The Gathering. Three, maybe?

Okay. For your edification, I am going to post my current “Things To Do On Planitia” list. I’ve been maintaining this list since I started the project. According to SVN, I created this file on Monday, December 11, 2006, so I guess I can say that’s when I started working on Planitia.

Everything starred is done. Everything not starred is not done.

Tasks to be done on Planitia

*  Create a heightfield.  Texture it with our grass texture.

*  Create a camera object and implement our moving, rotating, zooming camera. Do
*  nothing else until this works.

*  We'll start with billboarded sprites as our objects.  Rip graphics from
*  another game.

*  Make it so units move smoothly across the landscape at any angle.

*  Create the walker unit.

*  Create the archer unit.

*  Create the fighter unit.

*  Create the barbarian (for now) unit.

*  Add combat stats to all units.

*  Fix the weird mipmapping on the units.

*  Add code to ensure that two units can never stop in the same grid square.

*  Fix problems with the picking input and box drawing.

*  Create the arrow unit.

*  Change the unit selection and orders to match a more traditional UI style.  In
*  other words, make it so that right-click gives orders.  Also change it so that
*  left clicking on a new unit dumps the current unit selection.

*  When you don't have a selection, left-clicking on the ground does nothing.
*  Left-clicking on a unit selects it.  Drawing a box with the left mouse button
*  selects all units in that box.

*  When you have a selection, left-clicking on the ground removes your selection.
*  Left-clicking on a unit removes your current selection and selects the unit.
*  Drawing a box with the left mouse button removes your current selection and selects
*  all units in that box.

*  When you don't have a selection, right-clicking on the ground does nothing.
*  Right-clicking on a unit does nothing.  Drawing a box with the right mouse
*  button does nothing.  (Boy, that was easy.)

*  When you have a selection, right-clicking on the ground moves all selected units
*  to that spot on the ground.

*  Right-clicking units not on the current team tells all selected units to attack
*  that unit.

*  Make sure that every time you delete a unit off the stack, you check the entire
*  list to see if anyone has a target to that unit and set them all to NULL.

*  Drawing a box with the right mouse button does nothing.

*  Jigger the numbers on unit creation so that attacks are staggered.

*  Add simple "find Quinn's ass and beat it" AI.

*  Create three teams of units and see what happens when the AI has them fight each other.

*  Moving the mouse to an edge of the screen should scroll the screen in that direction.

*  Get the hit point bars off the arrows.

*  Moving the mousewheel should zoom in/out.

*  Double-left-clicking a unit should dump any current selection and select all units
*  of that type.

*  Unit movement is time-dependent, which is correct, but camera movement is frame
*  dependent, which is wrong.  Fix it.

*  Have the zoom and the pan move faster the farther out you are.

*  Fix the box so that it works in any direction.

*  Add line to the help screen that tells people to exit the game by pressing ESC.

*  Make it so that you can pan, zoom and rotate all at the same time.

*  Add braking to all camera movement so that it doesn't feel so "hard".

Need pop states

NEED STORY STUFF NOW or we run the risk of Planitia having no story elements.

Need a dirt-simple text-based scripting system for story scenes.

*  MOVECAMERATO (location)  (time the move should take in MS)
*  ROTATECAMERATO (angle) (time the rotate should take in MS)
WAIT (time to wait in MS)
*  BARK (location) (text) (time to display in MS)
DROPUNIT (type) (unit) (position)
MOVEUNIT (unit) (position) (time the move should take in MS)
*  BOUNCEUNIT (unit) - Causes unit to "bounce" as if it jumped
TURNUNIT (unit) - Causes the unit to rotate 180 degrees

*  Need parts of a talk bubble that can be put together to form any size talk
*  bubble so that we can print text on it.  Based on script input.

NEED LEVEL INI FILE FORMAT NOW

It should include:

Targa file to use as heightfield data
Location of trees
Location of rocks
Initial location of buildings
Initial location of units
Initial location/rotation of camera
Level goal requirements
Script to run for intro
Script to run for outro

Need god powers.  Start with lightning/meteor as a test.
Need to flesh out design so we can figure out which ones we
want.  Reference Populous 1/2, Powermonger, Age of Mythology,
Black & White.

Need ten playable levels, plus intro outro scripts for each level.

Need skirmish against computer.

Need multiplayer, up to four people (can come after initial release).

Need 3D buildings, trees and rocks.

Want 3D units (may not be necessary but it would be very nice).

Fix terrain picking to use a real ray-plane test (sphere doesn't work that well).

Sort units back to front before rendering.

Do a cleanup pass; the code is getting kind of murky.

At this point it’s really feeling like every single thing I finish adds two more things to the list. But I’m hoping to have the game feature-complete by the end of March so that I can spend all of April creating content for it.

The armies are arrayed – and even have hit point bars!

And the warriors and barbarians can even fight each other!

So why no demo? Well, technically I could release one but you guys probably wouldn’t be that happy with it. First off, the archers don’t work. None of the units control the way you would expect them to control if you’ve played an RTS before. I need to do some more work on how they move and attack and what they do when they don’t have any direct orders. Hopefully I will get that done this week.

I swore to myself that I would work on Planitia for at least an hour a night every night this week, and so far I have kept that promise. A lot of stuff has been added, but I still feel the game needs more work before I can update again. It is possible that I’ll get that work done tonight and have the update up tomorrow, but if not it certainly should get done this weekend.

And the reason I’m holding off is because once I get in everything I want to get in, I’m actually going to let you play it! So be patient!

Okay, it’s Two For Thursday so that means two – count them, two – new Planitia screenshots!

First off, multiple unit types:

And secondly, the highly coveted band selection! With bonus white box!

Which means that the first battle in the War of the Pixelated but Iconic Sprites can now begin!

Seriously, I’m hoping to have some decent-looking combat footage by the end of this weekend. Things are finally shaping up!

The box still will not draw. I have now spent more time drawing a variable-sized box on the screen than I did implementing and debugging the band selection itself.

I hate 3D. I really do. And I don’t hate it because it’s hard or math-intensive. I hate it because it’s undebuggable. Nothing shows up on the screen. Why? You’ve no idea. All you can do is fiddle, fiddle, fiddle with your numbers until something shows up, which hopefully will allow you to figure out what you were doing wrong and where to go from there. But if nothing ever decides to show up? You’re screwed, and that’s where I am right now.

I should have epic armies clashing right now. Instead I’m hung up on drawing a box on the screen. Gah!

Well, I got band-selection working in Planitia last night. For the record, that’s where you select multiple units by dragging the mouse to form a box around them. So I really should be posting an update.

But I’m not.

Because I have yet to figure out how to actually draw the box using D3D. I figured out how to do billboarded, “fake 2D with 3D” stuff in OpenGL, but haven’t figured out how to do it in D3D yet. I spent as much time trying and failing to draw the box as I did debugging my band selection code. It’s quite frustrating.

Hopefully I’ll fix it and be able to upload an example video tonight.

Next: Now that all the controls are in, I can finally implement some combat!