This thread is for the ArenaWars2 Development, which is currently going from alpha to beta and testing and lots of exciting changes are coming. The Team will talk more about the game, how to use the Delta Engine for a Multiplayer RTS game and we really like that this complex game is now developed with the Delta Engine.

Note: There are no screenshots posted of ArenaWars2 yet, this is a screenshot from the old version:

Hello everyone,

First things first

If you don't know Arena Wars: Reloaded, here is a trailer: Link
Arena Wars 2 will be based on Arena Wars: Reloaded in some general concepts, but it will be a completely
new game developed with the DeltaEngine.

The developement of ArenaWars2 has been active since 3,5 months. We first have ported some classes and
methods of the ArenaWars Reloaded source code and got it running with the Delta Engine. After one week, we
already had this:


About 2 months after starting, the most important stuff had been ported and runs well in singleplayer. We ported stuff like landscape, unit pathfinding/movement, AI and buildings etc., so we already have a good base for new features.

The one thing we started with in the first 2 months is a completely new User Interface and this is one of the current projects. We are nearly done with the ingame UI, but for the menu, there is still a lot of work to do. Here is a screenshot of the new ingame UI:


The 3rd month we have developed a first version of the effect editor, it's not finished yet, because there are important features missing. Over the time of development, we implemented new features, made it more usable etc. To give you some more to see, here is a screenshot of the current effect editor:


Now we are working on the server and multiplayer. It is already possible to play an entire game in multiplayer mode with the new game logic.

Next week, I'll write about technical details about porting a complete game which is originally written in dotNET and OpenGL to the DeltaEngine. So you can port some of you old games and make it running in different plattforms.

Kind regards,
Nils

Edited by user Thursday, September 1, 2011 12:57:00 PM(UTC)  | Reason: Not specified

Hi,

Like promised, I will explain how we have ported large parts of the Arena Wars Reloaded (AWR) project to the DeltaEngine and used it for developing the brand new ArenaWars2.

Because the ArenaWars2 logic is basically the same as in AWR, we had the the big advantage of having a great and already completed game (in C# .NET).
So we wanted to port as much of the old code as possible, i.e. basic game logic (for units, buildings, items, etc.), pathfinding, and camera handling.
Additionally, it was really easy for us to add fancy new features on top of the old logic, because we could easily extend the existing classes.

So here we go...

First things first: In AWR we had a lot of custom data types like Vector2/Vector3, Color, etc.. These are classes from a older engine, that has been written for AWR (and which is actually the very early predecessor of the DeltaEngine ;) ).
So a lot of the initial work was to change those data types to the engine pendants and fixing other stuff like the input control for mouse & keyboard and refactoring of the timing logic to use Delta.Engine.Time.Delta instead of the old engine's time handling.

We needed to change a lot of rendering stuff too, because we don't need to call OpenGL methods directly anymore ... and AWR was full of OpenGL calls...
So every OpenGL method in our new source code caused a compiler error. In some cases, this was one of the biggest challenges, because some of the classes had a crazy mix of rendering and game logic code; so once again we have learned: split logic and rendering stuff as much as possible ;)

Creating the 3D geometry for OpenGL is different from creating the 3D geometry for the DeltaEngine, so we had to change the geometry creation for the landscape terrain, roads, decals and water.

- Another big change was the content system: In AWR we had some kind of texture packs, now we have the content system of the DeltaEngine. Our decision was to change the logic for texture packs a bit, so we could use all of it just like in AWR (with XML files), but with the content system of the DeltaEngine. For maps, unit parameters, replays and tournaments, we just keep using the file system, because we need to load them dynamically.

- At last, if we want to draw 2D images like health bars, we only have to use Material2D.Draw instead of extensive OpenGL methods. So because many things are already done by the DeltaEngine, we deleted a lot of the old source code while porting . That was a great help and reduced the size of the actual game classes a lot!

I hope I have given you an overview of what you need to do, to port your games to the DeltaEngine. But I need to say at last: Arena Wars Reloaded is a really big project and there is a really big amount of code and content, so some work was needed, to get this working with DeltaEngine ;)

Now I'm out, have a nice weekend!

Nils