The REVOLUTION begins!

Yes, after all this time the game I've been working on at Firaxis has finally been announced!! Civilization Revolution is a continuation of the civilization series which takes it into a radical new direction (hence the interesting title). It's fast paced, visceral, and incredibly strategically engaging and has been an absolute pleasure to work on. It's been an incredible opportunity to be working with Sid Meier; definitely a a dream come true. I'm constantly learning something new and his level of genius never ceases to amaze me.

The game is set to be released next spring so everyone will have to wait a bit longer before they can play it but there's an announcement trailer floating around along with some concept shots (like here). In-game screenshots will probably be released within the next few weeks, which is very exciting since that will actually show off some of the work I've done related to rendering and general graphics work. The game is looking phenomenal and I think will definitely surprise some people who thought a studio like Firaxis couldn't pull off the next-gen look.

All in all it's very exciting to finally be able to talk about what I'm working on. It seems like so often everything I do is cloaked in secrecy. From one project to the next, I get maybe 6 or 7 months where my friends and family can know what I work on, then on to the next 2 year (on avg) secret development cycle. I suppose in modern times it's a necessity in order to avoid over-exposure (ehem, Duke Nukem Forever anyone?), especially on a game like Civilization that's constantly being tweaked and relies so much on iterative design to ensure the most balanced and enjoyable gameplay.

So even though the past few weeks have kept me very busy at work, I've still had a lot of time to get a lot done at home. I've taken up collecting Star Wars: CCG cards again, which is unfortunately quite an expensive habit (seeing as they haven't been made in years). It was probably my favorite card game growing up (more so than Magic: TG) and even after all these years impresses me with it's strategic complexity and depth.

I'm also really enjoying playing with the adorable little puppy we got about 2 weeks ago. It loves to keep me up at night which is just great... yeah. She's a miniature schnauzer, and incredibly cute, but, ugh, getting a new pup takes a lot of initial effort.

As far as Star Trader work, most of what I've been working on in the past few weeks as been conceptual design work. The combat system is almost completely planned out and just needs to be implemented. I have a document that's something like 20 pages long and goes incredibly in-depth into all the space combat specifics. The last remaining detail actually involves interface design and how a bigger ship's weapons will be fired by the player (for instance, the turret hardpoints on a capital ship as well as any energy beam emitters and torpedo launchers). I'm trying to keep things as simple as possible while still keeping the player involved (via tactile interaction). This means I'm shying away from automated firing but I think this may come back to haunt me.

I've actually gotten quite a bit of code work done as well. In the past few weeks I completely integrated the new very efficient font and gui element (quad) rendering I had prototyped a few months ago back into the main engine codebase. I can now basically render the entire GUI in a single draw pass if I setup my textures intelligently (by texture atlasing for instance).

I also completely revamped my entire GUI system to use xml. It supports a brand new animation system and uses a much better skinning solution which relies upon a few layers of abstraction to reduce complexity. A GUI file defines a layout and a skin. A layout once finished should never change and contains all the windows with the different gui controls that represent any given user interface. The skin file however contains control templates and properties, which define the look and feel of the GUI and can be changed at will. I have a feeling I'll probably be working on all of the layouts and templates and eventually when I get an artist to help out (hopefully sooner than later), he'll be swapping out new art and assets in the property files.

The other thing I finished was adding support for the 360 controller to the game. I recently purchased a wireless Xbox 360 controller and PC wireless adapter for this purpose. It's actually a great controller and works great for playing some Tie-Fighter or Freespace 2. So far I've only implemented controls for the new GUI stuff I had been working on but the plan is eventually allow for complete control of the game through the Xbox controller. Now I'm not of the mind that all game genres perfectly translate to a gamepad controller (first person shooters for instance will NEVER play as good as a mouse/keyboard combo), but I think that Star Trader really is perfectly suited to allow for all levels of control strictly from the gamepad. I actually think it may work even better than the mouse/kb and have a lot of great idea's about how to make the player interactions with the controller completely seamless requiring almost no thought. I'll have more details about this at some point but don't worry, I'm definitely planning on keeping things as simple and straight forward as possible. This situation is certainly something I plan to avoid.

Another thing I had been playing around with is screen-oriented billboard line drawing, which I plan to use these for lasers and exhaust trails (think Homeworld). Although the basic implementation is complete, there are a few issues I still need to work out. Basic laser projectile code is up and running though but I really need to get the ship combat system back up and running. It's been down for a few weeks as I've been revamping my entity management and zone systems. I basically NEED to finish my zone system by next week or progress with the game is going to be completely stalled. I have some idea's about how it should work but right now I'm trying to figure out the best way to implement it with the least room for programmer error (i.e. where's entities aren't accidentally placed in the wrong zone, or objects render incorrectly because of wrong zone ownership).

Alright, that's all I've got for now. Have a good one! Later!