Making a Good RTS Game

As we're adding the final touches to the engine and fixing the last bugs our focus is beginning to shift when it comes to engine features.

It's cool when you can make an RTS Game with no coding or 3d modeling knowledge. But can you make an interesting game that people will actually want to play? What things about your game are captivating?

That great thing about the existing AI engine and editor is its more then just a Player AI engine but a Game AI engine. We're beginning to focus more on the Game AI aspect now, and what aspects of the game can be manipulated  so you can add slick level briefings and debriefings, have a video screen display in the players HUD, and add more methods player interaction that make your game interesting.

 As a teaser shot, here's a picture utilizing the newest features -

• Level Size 
• Level Texture

Saving and Loading

The player can now save and load from within the game.

We have a few more changes that need to be made to the engine before we continue working on the editor.

Things have been progressing fantastically and as soon as we find a bug we resolve it.

As a teaser, here's a pic of the main editor in its current state!

Map Editor Beta!

RTS Creator MapEditor and Engine beta now available for download!

Go to the Downloads section of the website! http://www.rtscreator.net

SSAO

We've implemented SSAO into our graphics pipeline!

This subtle effect makes a big difference in the quality of the graphics. See for yourself!

Shader Implementation and Obstacles

In the last 2 weeks we've been attempting to implement shader's into the engine and the process has been both challenging and rewarding.

If you don't know what shader's are, they allow you to write code directly to the graphics card to achieve certain effects such as anti-aliasing, and motion blur.

We've implemented per pixel lighting, alpha blending(for team colors), and fast approximate anti-aliasing and the graphics are looking much better!

Our next implementation is for Screen Space Ambient Occlusion(SSAO). SSAO estimates the lighting of objects based on the position of objects on the screen and is used to achieve a certain degree of realism.

The challenge has been that RTS Creator has been developed on a laptop with onboard Intel graphics. Intel doesn't support OpenGL code in a lot ways and we haven't been able to get any implementation of SSAO to work properly.

Because of this though, we're able to draw the line of compatibility and produce a fall back plan. If a persons computer doesn't support a specific shader, we'll have multiple fall back shaders to ensure they can play the game.

Game GUI

We've added a new GUI system to the engine. It can easily be skinned and customized.

The GUI combined with scripting gives creators the ability to create in game menus that can do just about anything.

Path Finding Optimized

We're working the last of the bugs and implementing our final critiques when it comes to gameplay.

The path finding has been optimized and resembles that of the original Command and Conquer path finding verbatim. Now, a hundred ground unit objects can path find and navigate the map with a barely noticeable performance hit.

Prior to our enhancements, each unit would re-path every time it had to make a move. When you're path finding on a 300 x 300 grid with a number of obstacles this can take lots of time.

Now, the path finding occurs when the player gives the units the command to attack or move. If the unit can't move it waits, and will try to move along this path for 2 seconds before it re-paths.

This improves the gameplay and gives a much better player experience.