End of October Update - A Whole Lot of Junk

Hello everyone.

This month was mostly spent on trying to fill out a lot of the game's resource assets; while there will be conventional mines/resource caches that can be plundered, a lot of the game's resources will take the form of wrecked vehicles and equipment that can be salvaged.

 
A lot had to be tweaked from how this stuff worked in OpenRA; OpenRA originally only allowed for individual resource patches that units can cross over (like Tiberium or Ore), however seeing as this is fairly limiting for what DORF needs, we are making some adjustments to resource transfer logic so that actors can essentially become resource piles that resource-collecting units can "dock" with to extract from, with the actor's storage amount corresponding to its HP so that it disappears when fully collected (or obliterated by weapons fire, of course). In short, this means we can have giant resource objects that can be harvested, rather than being limited to objects that are only a single tile in size. There was also work that need to be done so that resource patches would have the correct sprites when placed on slopes, as well as getting them to be compatible with the light and shadow system.

Also, for those wondering, we may further desaturate some of these junk piles, since as can be seen above, units tend to get visually lost when standing in them (though it should be noted that the above screenshot was taken in the map editor, where player units aren't given their bright remap colors, and so stand out even less than they would in normal gameplay).

Note that resource piles will spawn when most vehicles or structures are destroyed, and these can be collected for resources. There are different salvage piles too, as it would make more sense for a concrete structure to be reduced to concrete rubble when destroyed, rather than there being a single type of rubble that is used for everything.

 

While not every map will be totally focused around these junk fields as the main source of income, many maps will have a post-apocalyptic feel, with lots of large wrecks dotting the map.

 
Some will even be massive, larger than most base buildings.



These assets are also designed to be visually stripped away as resource harvesters consume them, or they are destroyed by weapons fire.

 

 

 

There's also been some work on optimizing the game further, as shadows are currently implemented somewhat inefficiently. This involves altering the game's method of 3D camera projection and finding a smarter way to cull off-screen objects, as right now the game brute forces everything and will render shadows even when they are off-screen, resulting in especially bad lag on maps with lots of objects that possess shadow meshes.

Here are some trippy screenshots of the 3D camera projection Gustas sent. It may look like gibberish, but is essentially the game displaying 3D shadowmeshes, as well as the terrain mesh, with darker objects closer to the camera, while lighter are further away:



 
That's all for this month. Next month will feature fleshing out the resource system further, and continuing to update old graphics to the new lighting system.