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DigiMastered Works LLC
Office of Development
DMW107IB1017
Date 04/29/2023 6:00 PM
Welcome readers. Latest updates on development pertain to 4 major categories. AI systems, the quick action popup wheel, researching different technologies, and a game world mechanic that many of you are probably familiar with; fog of war.
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DigiMastered Works LLC
Office of Development
DMW107IB1016
Date 11/12/2022 05:00 PM
Short and simple, environment updates and storyboarding additions.
The weather system has been enhanced with more modes of operation. Moving forward, the system will allow for 8 different modes of operation.
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DigiMastered Works LLC
Office of Development
DMW107IB1015
Date 10/04/2022 02:00 PM
Bringing life into the game requires mimicking nature. That could mean adding grass, trees swaying, wind, storms, and even specific sunlight in different scenes. Over the last month small amounts of development has taken place. Mostly with storyboarding but a large accomplishment can be attributed to integrating shadows. Cue the showcase:
Shadow Timelapse
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DigiMastered Works LLC
Office of Development
DMW107IB1014
Date 09/04/2022 12:00 PM
In the quest for improvement and the need for additions, operations have had a few changes. As talked about in our previous article, actions are a large part of any stage within an operation. Actions, currently, are the only way to make strategic and tactical decisions on a grand scale. If you've been following this developer blog, you'll know that we've talked about how operations allow players to assign actions to agents within their agency. Through creating different stages within an operation a player can strategically segment different actions for different needs.
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DigiMastered Works LLC
Office of Development
DMW107IB1013
Date 08/03/2022 12:02 PM
For a while now I've been trying to tackle the issue of depth on the map. One area of concern was the map's terrain. Currently, the terrain is split into 9 regions. They are as follows: Water Deep, Water Shallow, Water Edge, Sand, Grass, Grass 2, Rock, Rock 2, and Snow. To give the terrain more depth the water edge now has a shadow below it. In the first image below you will see the depth visualized as red while the second image shows its true in-game color.
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DigiMastered Works LLC
Office of Development
DMW107IB1012
Date 07/03/2022 11:27 AM
Grab your coffee and take a seat because this update is lengthy. Over the month of June the Director's operation board has received quite a few changes and enhancements. While building out more functionality to the board, the underlying structure of an operation has increased in size. This was expected but the workload was not. Below we will talk about the overview of the operation system, what an operation contains, and how it is used.
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DigiMastered Works LLC
Office of Development
DMW107IB1011
Date 05/31/2022 11:02 PM
Fantastic developments have occurred regarding the Director's operation board with more to come next month! The purpose of the operation board is to allow you, the Director, to create operations for your agency. These operations will play a vital role in helping you keep track of what's going on and what you'd like to take action on.
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DigiMastered Works LLC
Office of Development
DMW107IB1010
Date 04/30/2022 11:22 PM
This month's edition of updates will include agency building construction, agency research, music, and additional sounds. We've previously talked about enhanced lighting, how details can be added to buildings through it, building selection and information, agent's entering and exiting buildings, and more. Today, we will be talking about utilizing buildings to enhance your agency.
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DigiMastered Works LLC
Office of Development
DMW107IB1009
Date 03/20/2022 11:29 AM
A Director's agents will be using A* pathfinding algorithm in order to move from their current location to a new location. Things to consider when implementing pathfinding into a game are the size of the game, the entities using the algorithm, and other objects as that can change how A* should be implemented. We implemented A* pathfinding with a small 16x16 grid that is placed around an agent. When an agent is told to move to a location within the agent's grid, a path is calculated from the current location to a new location.
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DigiMastered Works LLC
Office of Development
DMW107IB7008
Date 02/22/2022 08:48 PM
In our last article we talked about adding "Dynamic Shadows" for clouds. Today we will talk about dynamic lights and how the implementation works. With Unity, lighting and shading from lights can be introduced in many different ways but how we created it within a 2D space was through normal maps. Normal mapping is a texture mapping technique used for faking the lighting of bumps and dents and is an implementation of bump mapping. Many developers use normal mapping to add details without having to use more polygons for a given model. This increases detail without the performance hit from the extra polygons.