Submitted by Florian on
As promised in my technical progress report that was posted earlier today, let me show you some of the progress we made on the prototype we first showed a month or so ago.
Firstly, you actually command a team of soldiers in the prototype now. This obviously means you need to have the ability to select which soldier you want to issue orders to. Remember, unlike the old game there won’t be a large button panel to determine which soldier you will be commanding. In v2 you will have to explicitly select soldiers using hotkeys or by simply clicking on them on the map. A single mouse click will select one soldier while a double-click will select all of your soldiers that are currently in view. Using the CTRL modifier key you can also remove or add as many of your soldiers as you want to your selection and give them orders as a group. When giving movement orders as a group you can choose to either 'keep formation' or 'group together'. Check out the screenshot below. Note that the art on the selection boxes isn’t done yet of course, these white boxes are merely placeholders :).
Secondly, we implemented what is known as ‘local avoidance’. Simply put this means that soldiers will not bump into each other while moving to their destinations. This is important, because unlike the old game it will no longer be possible (thankfully!) for soldiers to walk through each other and stack that way. Now, we realize this is a pretty big departure from the original game. It will no doubt have a huge impact on both defensive and offensive tactics in the game, as stacking soldiers on for example corners or behind trees or haystacks was an important part of battling in Call of Combat v1. Keep in mind, however, that the game is no longer tile-based. Soldiers may not be able to stack, but that doesn’t mean they can’t stand pretty much shoulder to shoulder. In other words, you can get more soldiers behind a single piece of cover than you could in the old game if you didn’t stack. We also realize that maps will most likely have to have provide players with more cover objects than in the old game. The maps developed by us over the coming months will reflect that.