Suspended

I am currently occupied by other projects and do not foresee in the nearby future that I will develop further on Double Dragon Deluxe or Dragon Siege.

Resource Rate

I made good progress with Dragon Siege, although I could not resist implementing more gold plating features! It is so easy to spend an hour or so on a nice to have feature: I added clouds to the weather system. The clouds do contribute a lot to the atmosphere. I also added animated water areas.

The resources now work with rates. Resource changes occur at a rate per gaming second. For instance a wheat field of a farm produces 2 food units per second. Units also consume resources at a particular rate.

The target of the player will thus be to maintain a positive resource rate. Constructing units and buildings will still require a once off resource cost, therefore the importance of keeping a positive resource rate. There are also penalties associated with having zero resources and a negative resource rate. Currently your units will indicate a food shortage and attack at a slower rate.

I plan to make certain areas more "fertile" for farms. Thus a farm will produce much more food in that area. Of course these fertile areas will be close to invaders and vandals!

Mini Map no more

The last few months I had little creative energy to spare for Dragon Siege.

The recent development retake delivered a modern RTS feature introduced by Supreme Commander: there is no mini map.

Instead of using a mini map the player can zoom out and view the whole map from a bird's eye view. The player can also zoom to an area of interest by moving the mouse cursor over the place of interest and zooming in.

Note the small scale of the barracks in the attached screen shot. An added benefit of this modern mini map feature is that a player will truly be able to bask in the grandeur of colossal
creatures.

I plan to budget creative hours per week to ensure more continuous development. Meanderings off the development path forsakes my pursuit.

Double Dragon Deluxe and Dragon Siege

Someone asked me why there are no details about Dragon Siege development prior to the first post on this blog. It seemed that there was a lot of work done to get those first screen shots.

The initial development of Dragon Siege up to those screen shots happened quite rapidly.
The reason is that I leveraged the existing Double Dragon Deluxe engine. The most time consuming effort was the conversion of the graphics resources.

Double Dragon Deluxe download

Double Dragon Deluxe is ready for download.

Remember to install mdxredist.msi before running Double Dragon Deluxe.
A future version of Double Dragon Deluxe will make use of Direct3d, which will enable all sorts of effects.

Feel free to post feedback.

Download Page

Resource Conversion

I spent some time converting the graphic resources to the correct format for the graphics device. All the sprites are loaded as textures. For the graphic device the width and height of textures must be a power of 2.

The tasks were:

• Convert sprites to texture sizes
  
• Reduce size of sprite pages
• Add alpha channel to sprite pages
  
• Fix the GUI dependency on textures sizes
• Remove redundant Direct Draw specific sprites

The screen shot shows a soldier colorized according to faction.
My next tasks are:

1. Colorize all player units and buildings according to faction
   
2. Implement mini-map for Direct3D
3. Tie loose ends for play testing (Monster Dens, Units attack enemies on sight)
   

Direct3D

Yet another screen shot of Dragon Siege?

But wait!
I can see through the income - expense scroll!
Yes! indeed you can.
This is one of the free and quite common features available when using 3D hardware to render graphics.

Yesterday I've incorporated Direct3D support for Dragon Siege. The Direct3D details are abstracted behind the graphics subsystem interfaces, so Direct Draw can still be used by simply changing the implementation behind the graphics subsystem interfaces with the Direct Draw abstract factory. However I think the support for Direct Draw will be removed in future. There are no convincing advantages of using Direct Draw over Direct3D.

• Direct3D has a lot of extra features such as rotation, alpha blending and scaling.
  
• The Direct Draw .NET API is deprecated.
  
• Direct3D is a lot faster than Direct Draw since the hardware GPU reliefs the CPU of some processing

OpenGL support will definitely be added in the nearby future.

Using the 3D hardware unlocks a great number of possible features in Dragon Siege. Some of these features were imperative for the progress of the game play in Dragon Siege.
I name but a few:

• Large variety of monster colors and sizes
  
• Proper coloring and identification of player units and buildings
• Semi transparent effects and lighting effects
  
• Use of alpha anti-aliased sprites
  

I'm excited to take on these features!