an attempt to animate spiders

**Bwian** · 09-12-2005, 21:59

er..no... that sounds like something that just won't ever happen in this game. CA have NOT changed the game engine for BI, nor would game engine changes to allow flying units add anything to a Rome based game. You would have to change so many fundamental aspects of the game, it just would not be commercially viable.

Hell...I have built some 'helicopter' style units, with rotating blades etc. but I wouldn't call them flying...they stay at head height so they interact naturally with the existing unit combat. There is NO way to make even archers fire UP at a flying unit, or stop a swordsman attacking the ground underneath ...and killing the unit. Fundamental things that make a flying unit pointless and stupid in the game. Anyone can make one.... it's really easy. It just doesn't work in the game. I really wish people would just accept that, drop the thought, and get on with making things that ARE going to result in usable things.

**Frans Ubberdork** · 09-12-2005, 22:03

Here is something interesting though. The archers shoot up at guys on top of walls.

**JeromeGrasdyke** · 09-13-2005, 10:15

Bwian is absolutely right in that the game does fundamentally think in 2D in most cases. But there are exceptions - such as the platform system which is used for the Siege Towers and Walls - where you can have men standing in the same 2D positions and the game handles them correctly.

This means that for run-of-the-mill creatures you could have hovering things which are not far off the ground (if you've played World of Warcraft you'll know what I mean), and for special cases it may be possible to create a 'fake' building which defines a set of platforms in midair with no visible geometry attached to them, unattached to the ground plane, which a flying thing could then "stand" on... this would also define a limited set of possible places it can stand. Of course it could then only hit things with missile weapons, and could only be hit by missile weapons in return.

**Bwian** · 09-13-2005, 11:51

Can't help wondering, Jerome ...

When you and the team created RTW, did you envisage entering into a discussion on the possibility flying units, in a thread about giant spiders

**JeromeGrasdyke** · 09-13-2005, 15:22

I can honestly say it never crossed my mind

We did very early on consider flying units - briefly - but came to the conclusion that it would not be possible to justify the additional complexity and development time for Rome for a feature which would never be used in the shipping product. It's like so many other things where you think "now that'd be really, really cool" and then cold, hard reality taps you on the shoulder and you have to look carefully at whether you are getting value for your precious development time.

It's the same with things like modelling tools integrated into the game, and once the number of campaign maps the original game was going to ship with ended up being reduced to one, support for the campaign editor similarly declined, which is one reason why it was never released. And if you look closely at the text files you may still see hints for city buildings which you could hide troops in, which were going to be located in set spots within the layouts, or the Port settlement plans, or the on-battlefield supply trains or marching forts.

In the end though there were so many new features which went into Rome that i'm amazed we got as much done as we did... 3D men, procedural battlefields, a grid-based campaign map, hugely more complicated cities and sieges, much more complex interaction between campaign and battle, a totally new economic and battle simulation -- in retrospect it was a bit of a monster project, hehe. But as with all difficult things, also a really fun challenge, although it did give me a few grey hairs along the way.

**edyzmedieval** · 09-13-2005, 15:30

Originally Posted by JeromeGrasdyke

In the end though there were so many new features which went into Rome that i'm amazed we got as much done as we did... 3D men, procedural battlefields, a grid-based campaign map, hugely more complex cities and sieges, much more complex interaction between campaign and battle, a totally new economic and battle simulation -- in retrospect it was a bit of a monster project, hehe.

Indeed.

But what happened with the testing?! Why are so many bugs?!

Never mind, really interesting idea with the spyders. How's about making a Star Wars: Total War?!

**JeromeGrasdyke** · 09-13-2005, 15:59

Yeah, the bugs. That was a major disappointment in some ways, and in others also a technical accomplishment. Part of the problem is the scale of a Total War game in and of itself - these games are huge, come in two parts which with most other developers would end up being two complete, seperate games, and on top of that include some very complex game mechanics on both the campaign and battle sides.

We changed our working methodology quite a bit for Rome, and it paid off to the extent that the Rome bug database ended up being smaller than the Medieval one (while the code was substantially larger), the hardware compatibility was generally excellent and the number of crash bugs and severe problems very low. What kinda bit us in the end though was that a relatively low number of chunky mechanics and AI bugs and a few largeish technical issues (the load-save one for example) slipped the net... but in the greater scope of things, 50 or so bugs is not many

It was unfortunate that our publishing agreement was quite restrictive with respect to patch creation, and that a few of the bugs that did get through were so substantial.

**Dromikaites** · 09-15-2005, 10:09

Originally Posted by JeromeGrasdyke

It's the same with things like modelling tools integrated into the game, and once the number of campaign maps the original game was going to ship with ended up being reduced to one, support for the campaign editor similarly declined, which is one reason why it was never released. And if you look closely at the text files you may still see hints for city buildings which you could hide troops in, which were going to be located in set spots within the layouts, or the Port settlement plans, or the on-battlefield supply trains or marching forts.

Even though it's too bad that those features didn't make it to the final product, you've done a really great game, Jerome. Speaking of abandoned features, do you happen to know what happened with spawn_character and spawn_army commands? Are they part of those abandoned features?

More speciffic questions:

1) spawn_character works OK for diplomats, spies and assasins. I works halfway when trying to spawn a captain or general (family member). A model af a soldier does show up on the campaign map but doesn't have a flag and seems to be just another piece of landscape. Since it does show up, maybe we don't use the right syntax for the command?

2) spawn_army command returns complaint about not recognizing the token "unit". To me this means that the command is recognized as a valid one and parsed till it gets to "unit". So it was implemented up to a pint. Again, is there a correct syntax for this command?

Thank you and looking forward to BI.