• [Feature] Game now pauses if you leave the window tab or the tab is unfocused. 
• [Feature] Implemented overhaul of pathfinding system. Units will now find paths more intelligently, taking more direct routes to their destinations. This is accomplished mostly with a smoothing algorithm to prevent unecessary steps and blockly, grid-based movement. 
• [Feature] The computer now surrenders if you kill most of its units and buildings
• [Fix] Right-clicking to attack an enemy unit no longer shows the movement cursor animation
• [Fix] Setting unit and building rally paths no longer snap to a grid (felt weird) 
• [Fix] Aircraft dots no longer lag on the mini map in multiplayer games
• [Fix] Unit health no longer spontaneously starts regenerating in multiplayer games
• [Fix] The rotations of enemy bullets now display correctly in multiplayer games
• [Fix] The production menu no longer goes away randomly when you are clicking stuff too fast
• [Fix] The bomber is no longer able to kill air units with its blast radius
• [Gameplay] Removed easing functions for ground movement which are pretty but come at the expense of maneuverability. Plan to implement ground movement easing correctly on hover tanks in the future. 
• [Gameplay] Ground movement speed is normalized as slight difference in movement speed came at the expense of keeping units in formation.
• [Gameplay] Battleship build time increased from 23 to 40 seconds
• [Gameplay] Ion Cannon's health increased from 1500 to 4000
• [Gameplay] Gladiator build time increased from 23 to 35 seconds
• [Gameplay] Airstrip now requires Gunship Hanger to be built
• [Gameplay] Bullfrog damage increased from 16 to 40
• [Gameplay] Merk damage increased from 10 to 20
• [Gameplay] Bomber health reduced from 380 to 300
• [Gameplay] Bomber damage reduced from 130 to 100
• [Gameplay] Increased building build time from 30 to 40 sec for most buildings
• [Gameplay] Pop limit no longer goes to 73 but 70, as intended. Silos now increase pop limit by 10 instead of 7.
• [Gameplay] Units can now no longer target stuff hidden by fog of war
• [Gameplay] Explosive bullet types now explode if they hit a target before reaching their destination
• [Gameplay] Increased gladiator machine gun damage from 30 to 70
• [Gameplay] When a unit fires, it now reveals itself in fog of war. This makes things less confusing from a user standpoint (being fired at by invisible stuff) but also dampers the advantage units with ridiculous amount of range have (i.e. battleships and disruptor cannons).

 

Strike Tactics is officially in alpha as of today, April 13th, 2017. 

There's still room for more alpha testers, so if you're interested and have purchased the game, please email me using the contact form at the bottom of the website. 

Today I recorded 3 pre-alpha games of Strike Tactics. The game is still in a very rough, early-draft state, so if there's something you don't like or something you feel is missing, I wouldn't be worried - there is still a lot of work that needs to be done before the game nears a finished state.  

In this first video, I play a medium AI in a desert map called "Oasis."

I win the game by amassing heavy ground units (silencer, demolishers and gladiators). As you might be able to tell from the vid, there are some kinks that need to be worked out. The pathfinding, in particular. I recently redid the pathfinding system. I had a perfect system before, one in which units would never bang into each other, but it had a major flaw - it was heavily grid-based, which gave ground movement a very stiff, robotic appearance (great for mechs, horrible for hover vehicles). This new pathfinding you see in the video does not have that problem - units can move off the grid. But the drawback is that it's a lot harder to prevent collisions. I know I can get this new system working so that units never collide, but it's going to take some time. Problems like these could easily be solved with brute-force (a true physics collision system, in which positions are constantly checked and compared on every frame), but in the browser, I don't have that luxury - not enough CPU power with so many game objects. As such, all ground collision needs to be solved algorithmically, with something smarter than a traditional, brute force collision detection system.

In this next video played on a volcanic map called "Eruption," the AI sort of got me pinned down by constantly bombarding my base with bombers - to such an extent that I couldn't build more silos to increase my population cap. For an unknown reason, the medium and hard AI both seem to favor producing bombers - a bug I haven't quite worked out, or even had time to look into.  

Lucky for me, the Battleship is extremely overpowered right now so pooling all your resources into producing them is an easy win. You can see the power of the battleships in this video - I roll through the enemy AIs base in less than a minute. In the final game, battleships will certainly be powerful but by no means this powerful! I also show off some peregrines which are aces of the sky type units with air to ground homing missiles and machine guns for air to air. 

Air units are difficult to control now, because they are constantly moving and moving fast. I plan to combat this issue by causing them to land after being in the air for a certain period of time. That way, it will be easier to select them. I also might attempt air unit formations someday which is something never really seen in an RTS. The math will be difficult buy I already have some idea of how I can accomplish it. 

This final video is me getting absolutely destroyed in the early game by bombers at the control of a hard AI. Like I said, the hard AI sure loves those bombers. Enjoy!

All of the maps in ST are created in-engine using the map editor:

While the UI needs work, the functionality is complete, which is essentially to create, save and load maps for use in Strike Tactics games.

There are hundreds of map objects you can use to make maps, including trees, rocks, plants, mountains and water; all in 4 different primary biomes: desert, snow, grass and volcanic. 

Seeding

One of my goals for the map editor was to make it really easy to make maps. Most of the maps you see in the trailer were made by myself in a matter of minutes. This is mostly possible through the use of custom seeding functions. You can seed any object on the map by hitting a "Seed" button, which will randomly place the object on the map:

You can seed one particular object, or you can seed a category of objects, such as "All Desert Plants".

Currently, the buttons seed a pre-defined, fixed number, which is based on the size of the map. Eventually, I will add functionality so editors can change that number at will.

Textures

I've always had this idea of getting rid of tile-based ground textures. In the Feudal Wars map editor demo I accomplished this, by creating a complicated system in which textures were blended together with a brush tool and the HTML5 canvas. The brush would essentially create a hole in textures, so you could see the layer underneath (the brush tool was in fact, an eraser!). Then I would move around the layers based on which texture you wanted to draw with.

This method was problematic because:

1. It involved so much bitmap data manipulation, performance was atrocious on computers with bad graphics cards
2. To save the maps, I had to literally save the blended images created in the map editor 

For the Strike Tactics map editor, I've devised a much better system. Instead of creating custom textures for each blended image, I create one single blended image from each texture, which is used as an overlay. The blended image is created in-engine from the base texture: 

The benefits of this system are tremendous:

1. Maps can be procedurally regenerated using a set of instructions (i.e. I don't need to save the literal images in the map files, hence 100KB map files instead of 10MB map files)
2. Performance is awesome - I only need to draw a single BMD for each texture used, and copy it each time it is placed on the map

Z-indexing

All map objects have z-indexes, which determines the vertical stack order in which they are rendered. For example, a tree has a higher z-index than a mountain and will therefore be shown on top of a mountain:

If you place a mountain on top of a tree, the entire texture is instantly re-ordered and redrawn and the tree will still be drawn on top:

Eventually, I'll add functionality for custom z-indexes, so you can control the vertical stacking order. 

Map performance

I learned a lot from making the Feudal Wars demo. The more sprites you have, the worse performance gets. Thus, I've completely redesigned the map generation system for Strike Tactics. Instead of creating sprites for each individual terrain object (trees, rocks, plants, etc), objects are rendered to textures which make up the base texture tiles on the map. With this system, you can have 1 map objects in a tile, or 500, and the performance will be exactly the same.

Place as many objects on the map as you want, without having to worry about it slowing down performance.