Hey everyone, welcome back to the State of the Game! I hope everyone had a great Easter!
[As much as I wanted to, I was not able to add Easter eggs to the game for Easter]So, this past week I have been hard at work implementing the Commander role type. Since the Commander is primarily an information warfare role, it is heavily reliant on the Map. Unfortunately, the map that was in the game was a hasty addition that was only there to help prevent people from getting lost. After looking at it more deeply, it was a terrible solution that ate a ton of performance and was almost entirely unusable for adding features to it. So, scrap and rebuild!
I scrapped out the old map system and started building a new system from scratch.
With the new system in place, I was able to get the primary functionality of the map back, while also adding a few features:
The map now has a grid identification system, as well as showing the orientation of both your chassis and view rotation.
More importantly, the performance of this map is significantly better and it’s easy to extend features too!
I have already begun work on a proper ‘Fog of War’ type system to handle the way commanders and uplink nodes will reveal parts of the map. In the coming week, I will be adding the proper support to only show enemies that are within your ‘uplink’ area, properly implement the comms system parts, and expand the information available to M.A.V.’s that have a comms system.
Until next week!