< C++ and C# Games

'CastleWall'

Whilst working on my placement year at uni I worked on a project I've called 'CastleWall'.

The game revolves around two castles for each player which must be destroyed to damage an object in the middle. The game is turn based; a player can either build to repair their castle or fire their weapons. CastleWall is a prototype to test out the feasibility of a game idea and to learn more about game programming.

The primitive shapes don't do anything for a semblance of realism as you might imagine, I plan to try using a random selection of materials to add more variation and/or some offset mapping to see if that helps. The good part is that all the bricks are loaded from a .scene(xml) file from blender and a method just adds physical attributes to the mesh used.

Performance is low when certain parts of the castle's get struck and the collisions get complex, I'm going to have to work on this part. I decided to go for a multi-speculuar bump mapping shader, which I admit is from the Ogre sample, I really want to learn how to write shaders, but I'm concentrating on C++ and general game programming at the time if writing. The performance difference doesn't seem to be that bad either between that and a more basic material.

I've got terrain with a splatted texture. I've also added a skybox of rolling green hills and somewhat blended the terrain into in, which I'm quite proud of, I just have to alter the terrain to round at the edges in the correct way to look like it is completely another hill no different from the skybox ones. Another feature (its not a bug, honest!) I'm proud of so far is when the current players turn is up, an animation track, takes the camera to the other player, I bit like Battlefield I've noticed though without all the post-effects.

I've also managed to integrate/modify a class so that player names can be displayed above players heads, I've made it so they appear central out visible at a sensible height to be read at a distance, its a pity I'm still using the Ogre Head, which is the biggest sore thumb of the artwork at the moment. I'm hopefully going to take a bit of time out to model some reasonable looking wizards.

There is also a main menu. This has just a ocean, skybox and working menu items for New Game and Exit Game. I'd like to get some in-game options in there at some point too. The ocean needs a big island of rolling hills that I can fly to and around. I'd like a water shader in at some point, one that will work on my ancient temporary Nvidia Tnt2 (ATI 9600 finally melted).

Theres also a feature in their to build, that is create new blocks that can be moved and rotated on all axis via a menu and then made physical. I should mention that I've managed to implement these features thus far: a simple sound manager in via Audiere, physics, a working CEGUI interface, particles, scripting, OIS input, a process manager and a game state manager. So I guess I shouldn't be too hard on myself with my progress. As most things though its turning out to be more of an undertaking than I thought. Though I've been learning lots of OOP and C++ and things about game programming, so its been very useful. I think my brain would have rotted at work by now if i had not started this project.

Last updated 15/07/06