Ancient Warfare 2 Devblog 3

Posted on 1 October 2016 by Jannik

Custom Battle Editor, Beta content and more...

Custom Battle Editor

Last week, I've mainly worked on the custom battle editor.

There are now a buch of features for you like different terrain types:

Another new feature is the way of placing troops.

You will have different formations like triangles and circles to place a selected amount of troops.

Other stuff I have added:

  • Change formation distance
  • Rotate troops
  • Delete Troops
  • Undo last few actions
  • Different gamemodes
  • Spectate only mode
  • Choose player start equipment

Added Ambient Music

Background music is now in!

The game feels much better now, however you can disable music if you want.

Thanks to Ross Bugden for creating this awesome music for free!

Ross Bugden on youtube

Settings

I've added 3 settings for the beta:

  • Music on/off
  • Sound effects on/off
  • Blood on/off

More settings (about graphics and performance) will be added for release.

Fixed a bunch of bugs

I fixed a bunch of bugs. Most of them were causing worng hit detection and other stuff.

There is a bug with the custom terrain and I have to deactivate the option of uneven terrains in the beta build.

But it's just a beta, so there will be more bugs.

Anyway, it's playable.

Beta content

In the beta will be the custom battle editor and all troops I added so far.

I think the custom battle editor is enough to test and play the game until the full release.

So I will focus on the custom battle editor and fixing bugs next weeks to give you you a good beta experience!

Unsuck the AI

I will have to investigate the AI behaviour.

They are just idiots walking around and kill more teammates than enemies :D

One the one hand this behaviour is funny, but on the other hand I want them to look after their team.

This will be really important for other gamemodes like siege.

Another bad thing is that the AI won't walk towards other targets, if they are out off the follow range.

I want archers and other units to walk slowly near the battle area to finish the game.

Right now they are just useless when there are two teams out of range...

I hope I can fix this stuff until beta release. I will try.

Performance

On the one hand the game is really minimalistic, but on the other hand the mechanics are really complex and expensive on cpu and gpu.

Ancient Warfare wasn't really optimized, but in was ok. Now, I've added dismemberment and blood.

This two things will need much performance because there are a lot off skinned meshes and animators, which are really hard to the cpu and the particle effects will force the gpu above it's limits.

I have some ideas to improve this for larger battles with playable performance.

At the moment you can reach 30 fps with 100 archers on good hardware. The goal is to reach 200 with 50-60 fps, let's see if I can achieve that!

 

Performance improvements I have made today:

  • Removed unused Animation Layers for all enemies(+1-3 fps)
  • Combined Skinned Meshs and split on dismember(+ up to30 fps)
  • Reduced draw calls by 90%!
  • Reduced batches by 75 %!

I've tested it and I could place 120 archers with 60 fps! Thats 50% more than before the few optimizations!

What's to do until beta

Last few days I'll use for optimizations, AI improvements and Sound Effects to give you a good beta experience.

And later, there will be a large game test, *Screenshots incomming*