Command And Conquer DS Clone Project News
News from the Command And Conquer DS Clone Project :
Just thought I'd post what part of the game I'm working on right now... and it's the game! That's right I'm now starting to make headway into the actual game core, even though it's early days. The concepts of players (whether AI or human), armies, units, buildings, tech trees and more have been coded in. While I'm working on the game code I'm adding a VERY simplified rendering routine for it which basically involves coloured blocks. This will gradually be replaced by nice graphics as the game progresses. I still think the hardest part of this project will be to squeeze in all those nice graphics on the poor little DS, but it'll be a fun challenge.
I'm now starting work on the path finding, which is a very important part of an RTS. So far I think I'll go for the tried and tested A* technique with a heuristic friendly to a low memory/cpu environment. I'm looking at ways of sharing A* work between groups of units given the same destination to save CPU time and also ways of breaking up the task over consecutive frames.
This is the part of the project I've been really looking forward to, until now putting the framework in has largely been a pain, but actually writing the game is the fun part :) Oh and don't worry, I'm writing the code with network support in mind from day one. Though it won't be WiFi enabled for a good while yet I'm taking the first steps in that direction now.
