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[ leiavoia.net ]
PROJECT COMPLETION:
36%
CURRENT VERSION:
v0.2 "Switchboard"

NEXT VERSION:
v0.3 "Zombie"
[due ~September 2004]


SCREENSHOTS

Screenshots from AXIS versions 0.1 to 0.2

Harvester Wars! - February 5, 2004

The basic Harvest mission AI was coded today. While very simple, it's wonderful to watch play out. I had to laugh out loud the first time it worked as i watched a pod run out to collect a single energy tab on the map and happily race back home to deposit his findings into his axis' energy bank. So what happens when you put one well which spews out energy tabs every few turns in the middle of two competing axes? Some rather interesting emergent behavior. For this experiment there were only 2 axes: the reds and the blues. They were given a few random pods each and all pods were assigned Harvest missions in the general vicinity of the well. The object of a Harvest mission is to collect energy tabs in the field around a general area until their user-definable "basket" is full, at which point they return to base to deposit their holdings. They quickly establish preferred paths to the area as you can see in the screenshots. I also witnessed some mild cases of cannibalism and piracy since destroyed pods drop all their collected specials. The two sides eventually lose pods to the other side (combat is still obscured and random at this point), but you can see how well they mine the area for anything they can scrape up.

Wrapping Up The GUI - February 1, 2004

Here we have a slice of the ongoing GUI work. This is the Pod Chute panel where you can create, edit, and place pods on the map. At this point, most of The Panel's sub widgets are in place or at least functional. Some could still use some minor optimizations, but the system works very well and feels tight. I even took the time to give the map window an integrated free-floating minimap with configurable transparancy!

Pod Assembly Box - January 29, 2004

This is the pod assembly box. This pops up whenever you want to create a new pod and fill it with shapes. It shows work done on a variety of GUI sub-widgets including shape icons, shape tags, shape lists, pod details box, and combat cards. The pod assembly box was also a widget inter-communication puzzle that took several days to figure out, with trying to get the shape buttons to update the card and similar tasks. This screen also shows a help dialogue which has been in the game code for a long time now. The goal is to give AXIS as much in-game help as possible. All this, and you may also notice some slight changes in the theme, which has been updated to be a little more sleek, colorfull, and expandable.

Shape Graphics - January 25, 2004

Here is another combat card and some smaller shape tag widgets. They now have 3D rendered shapes. Players should (with some difficulty at small sizes) be able to distinguish shape type, material, and force type at a glance. Shapes were rendered in Blender v2.31a.

Economics - January 23, 2004

Lots of new things. Now we have the new economics panel showing the simpler and revised backend economics system (shapes are purchased for a fixed fee). In this shot you can see the current balance of your energy bank plus any debt you owe, interest rate, cool 100-turn history graph ("bank statement" :-), purchasing bar, list of shapes in your reserve, and a "combat card" which shows all of a shape's statistics. No actual shape graphics are included yet.

Map Specials - January 10, 2004

This shows the beginnings of collectable and uncollectable map specials, including wells (the rocky thing in the middle) and energy tabs (gold stars). Here we find the red and blue axes squabling over a well which is churning out some energy tabs every 2 turns.

Combat Resolution Algorithm - January 8, 2004

This shows the debugging of the combat resolution algorithm, which is responsible for determining which pods are involved in combat every turn, in leiavoia's local workspace. As you can see, there are 6 seperate combats about to take place on this turn. Interestingly, the algorithm worked perfectly on the very first try; about the only thing on this project that ever did...

Setup Screen - December 24, 2003

Nothing fancy, but here is a working draft of the setup screen. You'll see this before setting up the map and after starting a new game or getting hooked up for a multiplayer game. Players choose their axis color here and the host can also change the game settings.

Wired - December 9, 2003

This is the networking screen in progress, minutes after getting in-game chat working (one-way) between two instances of the program.

Network Screen - September 24, 2003

Moving ever onward towards the next milestone, this is the first screen to kick off integration of the networking system. This screen will be used to connect players pre-game. Not finished in this shot.

We think PNG graphics are really cool, so if the graphics on this website display with ugly backgrounds and broken transparency, it's because your browser is either old and decrepid or is made by Microsoft. Either way, you really ought to get a better browser. All content, artwork, and design aspects of this website and the AXIS project are copyright 2003 TAP Group (The AXIS Project)