[Help-liquidwar6] Liquid War 6 eye candy

[Christian Mauduit]

Hi,

On Sat, September 26, 2009 1:32 am, Timothy Anderson wrote:
> I've been wondering if you were planning on tinkering any more with
> the way the "liquid" looks in LW 6. I liked the way it looked in 5
> better. It had more of a granular look to it. Understandably you
> wouldn't want it to look too "granular", but the way it is at the
> moment makes everything look like it's meant for a smaller resolution.
> I'm guessing you'll probably focus more on that type of thing later,
> but I felt like asking.
Good question. The current implementation, indeed, suggests the game is
meant for smaller res. It happens that with a "reasonnable" CPU it's
plainly impossible to play 1600x1200 with adequate speed. There's probably
still some room left for optimization, but I don't expect it to be more
than a factor of 2, which is anyway not enough to have smooth display &
play on high resolutions.

So well, I have two ideas in stock.

First idea : use triangles instead of squares. Modern hardware renders
triangles very fast. Those triangles could even rotate, gigger, and I
expect it to give the impression of a swarm of bees, or autumn leaves
flying on the ground. See what I mean? The advantage is that triangles can
have sharp edges in this context, thus fixing the "but this is for a lower
res!" problem.

Second idea : go the RTS (real-time stragegy) way and make the game look
like classics of the genre. One would have to draw little fighters in 3D
with eyes, legs, arms and all. Maybe I'm exagerating, the game could
probably be best served with simplistic, symbolic fighters. I was thinking
of some pacman-like buddies. But the general idea is this : while the
algorithm behind remains rather simple, one can decide to display
complete, complex fighters, animated, really fighting. Think of those
chess games where one sees towers attacking queens, and such. I
acknowledge it's plain CPU waste for mere eye candy but it happens LW6 has
a free thread to handle this. That's what I've been working on the late 6
months : hacking the display engine so that it runs in a independent
thread and is able to use 100% of a CPU on a multiprocessor system (resp
100% of a core on a multicore system). Of course I did not implemenet the
fancy display yet, but the idea is that it can be done with barely any
impact on the overall performance, and it could even, to some extent, be
coded by some OpenGL expert (not me!) once the internal API has stabilized
a bit. The most difficult about this is probably to modelize the
characters, a domain in which I must admit I'm not really an expert.
Artists wanted ;)

> I was also wondering what you were planning with the cylinders/menu.
> Are you set on that idea? I see you're implementing it more and I'm
> wondering if you want to stick with it or if maybe more flat-looking
> buttons might look nicer. Again this is something that you probably
> want to focus on later. I'm only trying to get a feel for what you're
> thinking is on this.
Cylinders will remain as is. But the implementation is ready to accept
another menu engine. There's a very simple, basic interface betweenthe
menus and the game. A menu engine should just stack menu items on top of
the other, be able to select them, and that's it.

> As for the score screen: what about a 3d pie chart?
Yep. Pie chart is not good for the in-game meter IMHO but for the score
screen at the end it might just fit. So it would be : pie chart + history.

Have a nice day,

Christian.

-- 
Christian Mauduit <address@hidden> - http://www.ufoot.org/ ___ __/\__
Liquid War 6 - http://www.gnu.org/software/liquidwar6/     / _")\~ \~/
"Les amis de la vérité sont ceux qui la cherchent et non _/ /   /_ o_\
ceux qui se vantent de l'avoir trouvée" - Condorcet     (__/      \/