Ancient Warfare 2 Devblog 20

Posted on 4th February 2017 by Jannik

Ocean battles, update, lords level bundle, bugfixes and more...

Ocean battles


There were too many requests for this feature, that I had to create it. There will be ocean battles in Ancient Warfare 2.

Last week I started to work on the basics, like the shader and the physics and I really made some good progress.

There will be an extra large ocean setting, which will be eight times larger than the default terrain size. But this feature will only be available on direct x11+ gpus.

At the moment the ocean is only available on direct x11+ gpus, but I will try to support dx9 and open gl before I add the mode to the experimental branch.

And I will have to model some ships, too. I'm very open for suggestions for ancient ship models.

Lords level bundle


I finished the first level bundle. It will tell the story of the beginning of Ancient Warfare and I will expand it over time. The first level bundle's name is: "The story of lords".

And this is the description:

Once there were 9 lords, which reigned the world of the blues and reds...
On one day, the lord of darkness decided to create it's own kingdom, the red kingdom.
Thereupon the other lords established there own kingdoms, too, and a big war started.
This war brought a lot of harm into the world and even the blue guys were in danger.
They had no leader and were unprotected against the heavy attacks, but one day a glorious warrior of good blood was born.
He learned to fight and started to lead the army of the blue kingdom.
The new blue king gave him the task to kill all lords, which were weakened from the last 25 years full of war.

Campaign removed


I know this is a heavy change, but I removed the campaign. To be hornest, it was a bit boring to play the campaign.

I added the campaign to the wrong time with less content. Of course I could update the campaign, but I decided to continue with the new level bundle system, which is more dynamic.

This gives me the option to tell a new story from scratch and step by step and it's much easier and faster for me to add levels.

Bug fixes


I took some time to fix countless bugs. Here is a list of the most relevant ones:

  • The player would stuck in place if a siege weapon got destroyed
  • The player couldn't start with an animal
  • Distance horse units moved without rider
  • Killed cammel rider's weapons continued to shoot
  • Equipment for level bundles wouldn't be saved
  • Not flying ballista arrows killed units
  • There were an sorting error which caused randomly heavy lags/game crashes

Update


Due to all the bugs and problems, I will update the game today to fix all the bugs.

This is an important update, because it is impossible to play the upcoming first level bundle without it.

The experimental branch on itch.io will be updated, too, but it will be the same version as the default branch.

Performance progress


It took much time, but I really analysed the performance in order to finally improve it to allow larger battles.

I tested a new movement system, but I have some problems to implement it in the game, but I will implement it.

I also found out, that beside the movement system, the rotation of the AI is really bad.

This means that I will have do some math next week to improve the performance.

 

I know there is still a problem with the rotation of ranged units, which are placed on walls/towers, but I won't fix that right now, because of the performance problems.

Translations


I started to work on a translation system. There is a form to apply to translate Ancient Warfare 2 into your language.