Swarm - Generic Battle System a few screenshots

The core game functions work..it can be played multiplayer, there is no single player functionality yet. It is a turn based game in which the two or more players assign orders to their units (fairly basic orders at the moment) and the game then proceeds to play out the orders in real time. I initially planned to have it as a real time multiplayer game but was having too many problems with out of sync errors..and there are less tactical decisions that can be made in a real time game. The game is written so that the basic units can be either animated billboard/sprite models (64 frames with 8 frames in each of 8 directions) or static meshes or animated meshes with 4 different animation modes, idle, moving, attacking and dying. The vegetation will be billboard/sprites also. The minimum spec machine for this will be my machine - an AMD 500 Mhz, with Geforce 2 MX although I do not know how much system RAM it uses.

Most of the code is my own, although the networking code is using blitzplay lite and the code for the motion of tracked/wheeled vehicles over the terrain is from the Code Archives and the skybox is from terragen. Also the code for generating the terrain texture is from some source I saw on flipcode for generating a kind of procedural texture.

There is still a long way to go it seems yet I am pleased with my progress so far.
Here are some screen shots:

Looking good.

Might wanna chuck in faked shadows(blobs or whatever), to give the scene a little more 'depth'.

Yes, I guess some kind of shadows would look better...even if they are simply little blobs underneath the base of the units.

Looks like fun. How fast (FPS) is it running at and how many models\polys are visible on screen at once?

Jason.

I like it mucho. Very Total War'esque. A bit more variety in the foilage maybe !

@QuickSilva: On my machine it generally runs at about 30-40 FPS (which is as fast as anything runs on my machine). Basically it is quite smooth. Each team is designed to have no more than 256 units at any one time although this limit is often not reached due to the fact that I limit the number of squads that can be deployed and that those squads have differing sizes. Of those 256 units though a large majority of them are sprite/billboard models. Using only sprite/billboard models on a map I can have about 1000 units on screen...I have not fully tested it with the animated meshes yet...although my slow machine can easily handle at least 16 of those large robots. My aim is for the game to run well on any PC which is equal or higher in performance than my own PC - and my PC is pretty old.

However it is very easy to simply change the media and text data files so that different units, meshes, sprites, sound, particles, foliage can be used.

matty you could have an option for sprites or meshes

@Slenkar - yes that would be a good idea. And it would not be too hard to implement as I already am able to do that simply by changing some values in a data file I then would just have to have the sprites pre rendered for each of the meshes.

Finally, a wargame! :)

Looking great. I originally had developed my game to accept either sprites or meshes but found meshes looked and performed better so stuck with them.

I can get 60+ FPS on 2.8Ghz with alot of tricks but generally 30 when everythings moving close to camera. Can we see a closeup of the swarm character?

Also like the formations and the terrain is excellent.

I'm feeling even more depressed about my poor 'ol game now :( LOL

(Zip demo file removed...)