Army Ants
Army Ants, a game I developed, is finally being released to the public! Go <a href="http://matthewbozarth.com/masters/army-ants/" target="_blank">download </a>it and tell me what you think.
"Four players wage battle in a rotating arena where the gravity changes every turn. Use this to your advantage and drop rocks and mines on the enemy. We used Nvidia’s PhysX engine running on a hardware accelerated physics card to run our destructible terrain which was drawn with metaballs."
<img src="http://raydenuni.com/files/images/portfolio/army_ants/AA2_600.png" border="0" class="linked-image" />
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"Four players wage battle in a rotating arena where the gravity changes every turn. Use this to your advantage and drop rocks and mines on the enemy. We used Nvidia’s PhysX engine running on a hardware accelerated physics card to run our destructible terrain which was drawn with metaballs."
<img src="http://raydenuni.com/files/images/portfolio/army_ants/AA2_600.png" border="0" class="linked-image" />
<center><object width="450" height="356"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/6hTDyVoEdCo"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/6hTDyVoEdCo" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="450" height="356"></embed></object></center>
Comments
Slightly like worms. <img src="style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/smile-fix.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid=":)" border="0" alt="smile-fix.gif" />
Nice video though.
--Scythe--
Although I would love to try it.
Nevertheless, my criticism:
- DirectX 10, is DX10 necessary?
- This is a PC-only game, why is it optimized for XBox 360 controllers?
- In the video it looks like only the half screen, maybe 2/3, is used when the level is fully zoomed in. Performance issues?
I'm aware it's 'just' a student project, so I know from my own experience that optimization, performance and usability probably weren't top priority items. Just a little feedback. <img src="style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/wink-fix.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid=";)" border="0" alt="wink-fix.gif" />
Must have taken quite some work.
Yes, the video isn't the most action packed. I will be uploading a shorter, better cut video soon.
DirectX10 is necessary. The terrain is done using Nvidia PhysX, and then rendered using the geometry shader to do metaballs. Geometry shader is a DX10 only thing. Also, it is a student project and making it as widely available as possible wasn't the main goal.
It *should* work with a gamepad as well as a keyboard. I highly recommend you don't play with a keyboard as being able to aim with analog stick is pretty crucial, but if you have a decent gamepad it should work fine. The reason we built it to use 360 controllers is that they are really nice and we had access to them.
I'm not really sure what to say about the zoom issue. It's zoomed in as far as we want, and if you are on the edge of the screen, then that's how it is. We didn't really run into any performance issues in development.
I know my opinion is rather biased, but I find this game to be very fun. I have play tested it so many times, and I enjoy it every single time. It is a little bit slower paced because it's turn based, but the the strategic options made available due to that make it worth it. I really wish you guys could play it. We demoed it at GDC last week and got a lot of really good reception from the general public as well as developers from Blizzard, Square-Enix, Insomniac, and others.
That's awesome. I hope your next gameplay video better demonstrates some of the strategic options you are referring to.
I'm not sure how biased you actually are in assessing the fun level. I think it's natural to think a game you made is good, but oftentimes due to all the hours of playtesting, the fun of the actual game wears off. I know this happened for a little bit with my project, but then when new people played it and actually started having fun it breathed a new life into it for me. <img src="style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/tounge.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid=":p" border="0" alt="tounge.gif" />
I was going to ask how you were rendering such a complicated set of metaballs in real-time. <img src="style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/smile-fix.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid=":)" border="0" alt="smile-fix.gif" /> That's a really neat effect. It looks weird when one of the dirt pellets grows to meet the surface it's colliding with, but it also seems like it makes it really satisfying to push the dirt around. It clumps together and gloms the way you'd want it to. I wonder if there's some way to decrease the weight of the balls when they get close to a surface so that they don't grow in size when they connect. It would look a bit like water droplets with surface tension.
A general summary of how it works is the location of each physics box is added to the vertex buffer, and then in the geometry shader, for each point passed in, he assumes that is a sphere and draws the metaballs from that using marching cubes (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marching_cubes).
I agree with you.
Is DX10 still using COM? If so, that game is quite an achievement, in my opinion. I think it looks fun.