Friday, March 20, 2009

Some news about SoundRTS

I will release a 1.0 release candidate version, in order to have a
stable version with a simple version number.

Then, I will release an alpha version of the 1.1. It's a bit broken, but with the following changes:
- imperative orders, to force the attacking of your own units, or to ignore enemy units and focus on an objective (hold control while validating the order)
- stacking orders: "do this, then do this..." (hold shift while validating every order)
- units, buildings, techs, abilities (and more) are defined in a text file called rules.txt
- in a map, the author can add a tech to a player, and forbid specific training, building or researching (useful for tutorial or campaign missions, for example)
- scout towers, guard towers, and cannon towers (these special buildings don't require a meadow, allowing many of them in the same square)
- "direct" fly: now the dragons fly straight to the objective, ignoring the land path
... and more changes not implemented yet.

I will probably continue to add as many valuable features as I can until the program collapses under its own bloat. The code is more a prototype anyway, with its limits in terms of flexibility.

8 comments:

Anonymous said...

It may be a prototype, but many people have had much enjoyment out of this project. People don't seem to have a habit of commenting on here, or even checking taht regularly, but believe me when I say Sound RTS is probably the single best strategy game available for the visually impaired at the moment. It also doubles up as one of the few multiplayer games, and as one of the most enjoyable free games out there.

Whatever happens I genuinely hope that Sound RTS sparks someone, be it you or someone else, to carry on advancing the rather lacking strategy genre in audio games after Sound RTS "collapses under its own bloat".

CX2 from audiogames.net

Anonymous said...

CX2 here again, got a couple thoughts that might be helpful.
Select most wounded, or all wounded, units in the square
Defend option so you can have footmen and knights guard paths and bridges, might also let ranged units have more chance to avoid getting hurt. This would help allow the old warcraft 2 tactic of having footmen up front with archers behind, as much as archers are used still.
Attack specific building command. It might be too powerful when used against units, though the ability to attack units of a specific type might be nice. That could get tricky though if it let you bypass footmen and knights. Mostly I'm thinking so you can tell them to attack a barracks in a square over a farm for example.
Dismantle ability for peasants? Giving back perhaps a quarter of the resources from a building?

Just thought I'd throw these out here, and see if any stick. I don't really have my heart set on any of these, apart from possibly selection of injured units to help get them healed up faster. This is especially an issue in smaller maps which lead naturally to shorter games. For example JL1, each footman cna be very valuable... but you equally don't want to pull too many away at once for the same reason you don't want to let them die, the enemy might break through in this eventuality.

SoundMUD said...

@CX2:

Select wounded units: probably.

Defend option: interesting, there are several ways to do this; with the current design it would consist in concentrating units in a path or bridge with a special command ("block"?).

Attack specific unit or building: done in 1.1 alpha 0, imperative order; just hold down control when validating the order.

Dismantle: no, but in 1.1 alpha 0 you can attack your own units (with an imperative order).

Anonymous said...

Yeah block sounds good. A way to stop the enemy from going for ranged units etc. As to the attack thing, interesting. The version I had been playing with (beta 10P) doesn't even seem to have an attack action the best it can do is go to the enemy. It might be tricky working block into this though, since they could try bypassing the melee units. All this said though archers still seem pretty weak, in a game I managed to kill 30 archers with no losses using all melee units. In particular knights kill them, fast.

As to dismantle, yeah I know it probably isn't a good thing. Just you never know.

cx2

Anonymous said...

I have to say that I found this game a short while ago, and man oh man, it's great. After I lost my sight, games like the Warcraft series, and Starcraft (always my two favorites) were just undoable. On top of it, it's free for anyone that wants to play it. You can't beat that.

Anyway, reason for posting here. Thanks for the game. I haven't tried the stable yet (just finished installing like thirty seconds ago) but maybe possibly fitting more things into squares? I don't mean cramming more gold/woods, but more buildings maybe. Since I have no idea what the scale is for a footman compared to a square, it's hard to judge but it seems too "empty" (Yes, I know I can do this in my own map editing, but I haven't tried that yet either).

Again, thanks, and can't wait to keep watching this game progress.

Ravager from Audiogames.net forums

SoundMUD said...

@Ravager

Thanks!

The stable 1.0 version have almost no changes, it's just a base so I can continue to experiment fearlessly in the 1.1 branch (coming soon). It will have towers: they won't require any food, of course, and they won't require any meadow...

In a map file, edit this line for a higher number of meadows:
nb_meadows_by_square 2

Storm Dragon said...

I have a couple of ideas, not sure how good they are, but here goes:
Would it be possible to add scouts? They would wonder around and report back to you as to where enemies, including their buildings are. Because they only find things and report back, they would avoid combat, making them harder to kill. Perhaps what they find could be stored in a queue so it can be reviewed. Also, a search and destroy command for attack units, they would wonder around attacking buildings and enemy units, and it would automatically put them in defend mode. This would be useful for getting your soldiers to harass the enemy while continuing to build.
For mages, it would be neat to have a way to set a trap for teleporting enemies. Maybe make it so that it is an upgrade for them and requires a mage to be in the square to be blocked.

SoundMUD said...

@Storm Dragon
About the first suggestion, it will be possible to stack several orders, so you will be able to ask a unit to go there, then there, etc.
About the second suggestion, I might add someday an "enemies_only" parameter to define which units will be affected by a teleportation ability.