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| Welcome | The City Skirmish V Project | | Welcome to www.city-skirmish.net, the website for the City Skirmish V Project. Here you will see the latest developments made in this project. Also this place will be used to show technical options and possibilities, which could appear in the game later, to see what we are maybe able to reach. Have fun to browse! |
| 24.02.2008 | Artificial Intelligence | The last weeks I've been working on a very exciting part of the game - the Artificial Intelligence. Does not mean the pathfinding for soldiers, which has been threatened in the last news, but the CPU players. A proper CPU enemy is very hard to code, since a computer has no intuition, no feeling what's a dangerous situation and what isn't, he just has the pure values (crossing 1: 2 soldiers, crossing 2: 3 soldiers, crossing 3: empty, building 1: powerplant, building 2: farm, building 3: empty field), and does not know the rules of the game. So how to make the CPU play? Without going too much in detail, the concept was very hard to create, since the computer has no goals or needs, and especially it has no overview (example: Why should the AI move a soldier at the start of the game? After copying the human patterns, the AI might think: "There is nothing under attack, there is no need for money, since I still have my start money, there is no need for energy, since I have no energy consuming buildings, and my opponent does not own more of the map than me". So you obviously need to give the AI reasons to expand-)
I splitted my AI think procedure into several blocks, which are destined for several interpretation phases on the field. This allows the AI to flexibly react on what happens on the field. No energy? Build a new powerplant or upgrade an existing one. No field to build on? Expand. Soldier limit reached? Try to conquer a fertile field or conquer enemies farms... etc. And if there's nothing to react, I gave the AI a natural pressure to expand. The defense part of the AI makes sure, that there are enough soldiers in the possessed areas, which can be used for that by the offence AI. But that's just the "thinking", how to solve that technically? The AI creates priority lists of crossroads and fields, which are the best ones to do what. To give you a rough estimation, how complex it is (especially in realtime), I appended a little diagram, which roughly presents the structure of the AI which I made for this game. Just to compare the AI to the one from CS4 (which was roundbased): The CS4 AI was based on two priority lists, one thread, and one heuristic. The CS5 AI is based on 14 lists, 10 threads, and 5-6 heuristics based on the difficulty level of the AI (like performing a rush, etc).
Another new thing we integrated, is the build time. When you create a building, it's a construction site for a while, before turning into the real building, which seems quite natural. On the 2nd screenshot appended you see the construction site. The black buildings are buildings, which lack energy. If you're out of energy and have not enough powerplants to compensate, the energy consuming buildings turn black and lose all their functionality. You can see that better on the 3rd appended building. On the 2nd picture you can also see the AI acting in the background. It expanded very fast and built the needed buildings to survive.
Other new things are just minor and not worth showing here, like bugfixes, overworked build menus, etc.  
| | 17.01.2008 | Network Lobby coming along | Wohow, I have to tell you, there are not many new different things, but the ones we have, are even bigger. The project proceeded a lot during the last three weeks. First of all, we finally got the Airport textured by our modeller Silvestro, the only 2x1 sized building in the game, and it looks really really cool! The creation of an airport turns two fields into one on the map, and makes the former separating road unusable, what caused me to finally implement the pathfinding algorithm for soldiers. It's a modified version of the BreadthFirstSearch algorithm, with saved preprocessor nodes and backwards reconstruction. For those of you who are interested, I append the source code of that algorithm as I implemented it into the game. Soldiers now find holes in the street web, if they're by map, an airport, or a roadblock, and use another (shortest) way. I append our concept for the map list, so you can see there are maps with holes, and see the different map sizes. The dark squares indicate the HQ start positions.
Unit movement and production is also finished, solved by a quad menu over the HQ/barracks, to produce the soldier right at the correct corner of the building. So, except there's no opponent yet, you can fully play the basic game mechanisms now: Buy soldiers, move them around, conquer fields and opponent buildings, build own buildings. To get an impression, how the game looks when full-in-progress, that means with many buildings built and four players participating, I append a big gameplay screenshot for you. I also tried myself in 3d modelling, and created a war factory myself, which you find appended aswell. I plan to leave the texturing to Silvestro or Fuub though, since that needs to be more professional. Something also finished, which is not on the gameplay screenshot yet, is the minimap, I append an extra screenshot just for you to see it. It indicates conquered such as filled fields in the player colors.
And last but not least I proceeded on the networking. Getting the games list from the CS5 server works fine for Internet games, also IP broadcasting fulfills the job for LAN games. It's now now problem to find any Internet/LAN game in the menu. Next step will be the connection procedure after you selected a game from the list.     
| | 24.12.2007 | Christmas Break | Now, where it's Christmas, everyone is starting his holiday and taking his break. But we're confident to present you fresh new progress in the New Year. For today, I decided to show you a little collection of screenshots of Work-In-Progress things. After the Christmas break you'll also find a new CS5 website here, which contains all the features which are needed for running CS5, including an account system, comment functions and so on, stay tuned.
First, I'm showing you a few 3D Max screenshots of buildings, Fuub and GD are working on. You've already seen the Headquarters, Barracks and Powerplant finished on previous screenshots, current work in progress models are (the first three screenshots from the left): The anti-air facility, the airport, and the university.
Second, you see a little feature I integrated to the game. The player name you define in the game lobby, will be written on your headquarter, as a 3D statue on the front wall. So everyone will know that it's your personal headquarter, which you will defend by heart (besides it's in your player color aswell of course).
Third, as known from our last project, all server-related CS5 data will be transfered in XML-compatible format, for external game browsers or websites. On the 5th Screenshot you see the message format, first one deals the list of currently opened games on the Internet, second is your player stats.
A hard thing to show is the work of the coder, since he works mostly invisible. But to show that I'm not lazy either, I decided to show you the code of a function. This function has the task to separate the HUD from the rest of the game, so there are no pink overlays or parts of the HUD missing, everything needs to be cut out precisely.
And last but not least, I uploaded a piece of our soundtrack to listen to, while our new team member Sascha is producing new tracks in the style of this music. Also, Teemu announced to have a new Seasons greetings track ready.
We wish all of you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!     
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Latest Updates
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City Skirmish Test File #3
(13.01.2008) Download - 0.1 MBCity Skirmish Test File #2
(12.01.2008) Download - 0.1 MBCity Skirmish Test File #1
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