WAR! System

[mixxit]

I wanted to share a dirty quick vid of the war system we've been developing on infinitys edge. This particular battle field is the level 5 welcome quest and takes place against the drakkin (who appear as human in titanium) and the deathfist orcs.

The idea is to try and spread gameplay out across the game so it's not just about grinding content you've done a thousand times before. This is one of many systems we hope to develop over the coming months and we'll be sure to share some more information on those when we can make some videos.

In this campaign, the yellow markers are waypoints you can reinforce with your troops and the orcs are the enemy. There are 1800 orcs and unique monsters that come at you throughout the 30 minute campaign and you must fortify the central wall, protect your general and defeat the final warlord to receive the quest flag to complete the mission.

It still needs some more funky features and possibly an rts style resource system, some balancing and maybe more types of squadrons/artillery you can buy before we put it other zones in the world but here it is as it stands, hope you enjoy it!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JoIaLBpfCG4

[BuzWeaver]

Very cool, nicely done!

[Shawkab]

Haha that's awesome

[RichardoX]

I must give props. Those formations look incredible. :)

Did you make a ton of grids? It would be cool to make individual mobs have individual tasks so they don't all clutter together on one mob.

[mixxit]

Used 3 grids for the orcs to come from and used MoveTo to move to custom waypoints for the squads and keep formation during move, they return to their position after engaging but because of the amount of orcs that come they can sometimes get seperated from the full squad before they return to their position. It's important for the player to get in there and deal with whatever squad has been seperated and/or overwhelmed but that can get really nasty when they start stacking on you!

[RichardoX]

Ahh that's sweet, so... each row is on a timer that is called when the event is started. Once the event is started, they all get on a timer that makes them join their respective grid? That's a load of work my friend if that's how you did it. I once had an idea for this... basically you would have a leader on a primary grid and his henchmen following him closely. I never put it into writing but the idea would be that the lieutenant would have a position check timer every 1second or so. In the timer, he would signal the npc's following him. On each npc, they would have individual quest files that would use the move npc function which essentially called the position of the lieutenant -5 -5, etc.. so they would always walk along side him without actually walking on top. Then, if the lieutenant died, you could make them scatter or do whatever you wanted.

[mixxit]

Na not really the only timer is the one that spawns the orcs and picks 1 of 3 random grids :-)

As for the squads that's a pretty easy one. When you talk to the general and tell him to position a squad at a waypoint, it searches the entity list for the sergeant and his troops and tells them to MoveTo().

The squad members know which position they should stand in because there is a variable set for each of them:

a) My sergeant's mobid
b) My X row position in the squad
c) My Y column position in the squad

When the entity list is checked for any squad members that match that mobid it uses the sergeants target waypoint coord and adds the necessary difference for their row and column position and moves them to the correct location!