Infantry combat and entering buildings.

I've been working a lot on the game recently and I've nearly rebuilt it to the level it was before. Past that maybe, since now I have the beginning of a working combat system and the ability to save and load the game.

Infantry can now occupy a building. It's quite an abstract representation, since they stay at the door and turn invisible. But they can then fire from one of the windows and take damage from shots at the windows too. I think I've set it up well so that when building damage and destruction is working then the system should continue to work.

For combat I tried some new ideas, but they didn't work out that well. It seems that it's important that viewing range should be further than shooting range. Now shooting range is pegged at 18 units of distance, while viewing range can extend out past that.

In the above image one unit has an officer, so has further viewing range. The other can only see as far as they can shoot, a dangerous situation since the enemy will be able to shoot them as soon as they see him.

One way to get around that is to put your units in to sentry stance. While in this stance they move slowly and are not good at combat, but they can see much further. I decided on this instead of the binocular mode that blitzkrieg uses because it's simpler, predictable and requires less micromanaging.

Combat is quite brutal at the moment because I haven't implemented the "shock" game mechanic. That will reduce rates of fire and accuracy for units under fire. Making combat last longer and giving an advantage to infantry supported by tanks.

I've been having some problems with the game crashing on exit, I think it's to do with some textures I've been loading for models which are also loaded. If I don't delete the textures before exiting the game, then it crashes. I think I've solved it, but I'm still thinking of putting all the models and textures in a single file and loading that instead of piece by piece.

You can see the video diary, showing my early ideas for infantry combat here.

Comments

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