In the last devlog I came up with a decent system for finding paths to a destination, producing a series of nodes for units to follow with path smoothing and spreading. An example of such a path, using the debug visualization of yellow squares for nodes joined by blue lines, is shown below.
A path f…It's been a few weeks since the last devlog. However I've spent a fair bit of time working on pathfinding and path following - and improving Construct along the way! This is a complex part of the project and will take multiple blog posts, so here I'm going to focus on just pathfinding. It gets tric…
It's time to deal with the bane of online multiplayer games: lag. Previously Command & Construct just displayed raw network updates - as soon as a message arrived it would update units accordingly. However with my low-bandwidth design on a (simulated) really terrible network, that ends up looki…
I started this part-time RTS game development project back in September. This post is a round-up of the development so far, and also covers some of the improvements made to Construct along the way.
GoalsThis project aims to highlight the impressive JavaScript coding capabilities of Construct, as the…
In the previous devlog I focused on getting intense multiplayer combat with 1000 units to use just 50kb/s bandwidth. Now it's time to turn to the CPU performance! You can see the results now on the freshly updated CommandAndConstruct.com.
Extraordinary JavaScript performanceIn my previous post I not…
After the last devlog I had the basic controls for scrolling and zooming a larger level. Mostly for a laugh, I threw in 1000 units and set up a huge battle. That's where things start to get interesting.
PerformanceFirst of all I assumed performance would pretty much grind to a halt at this point, as…
In the week or so since the last devlog I've mostly been working on mouse and touch input, as you can see from the commit history. The player can now drag a selection box to select multiple units, as well as scroll around a small level with both mouse and touch input.
Dragging a selection box to mas…Since the last devlog I've been working to get to a minimally playable game. Units now have turrets, they can fire at each other, and get blown up when they take too much damage. If one player wins, it's game over! And it all works multiplayer online at CommandAndConstruct.com.
Unit combat, with mul…You can now play a minimally multiplayer version of the RTS live online at CommandAndConstruct.com! It's an unoptimized export running on a cheap web host so it might take a moment to load. (I can improve that later - I'm just doing whatever is quickest to set up at this point.) However the multipl…
Since the last blog I've added some very basic interactivity. You can click to select units, and click somewhere else to move the selected units there. They just move directly there in a straight line at the moment, but everything like pathfinding, crowd control and so on can come later down the li…
Since my first blog I've been putting together the overall architecture of the game. You can see some of the initial work in the commit log on GitHub. This can be slow going at the start: these initial decisions are very important and can end up very difficult to change later on. In this post I'll …
I'm going to make a game in Construct! This is going to be a bit of an experimental part-time project with the aims of showing how far Construct can go, providing a big example of JavaScript coding, "dogfooding" Construct (as I am also the lead Construct developer), and hopefully even ending up wit…