EotA 2 Development UPDATE

[DarnYak]

We've been keeping you sparsely updated in the other thread about some mysterious “EotA 2” development. It's about time we lifted the curtain on that.

Our project, simply put, aims to reproduce Warcraft III's modding scene on a modern engine. This includes all the features that Warcraft III deserved, like:

•Customizable chat channels, enhanced friend lists, clans, etc.
•A full-featured game library, including search by name, genre, description, player count, and ping.
•Introductory displays for each game, with preview image, screenshots, descriptions, and other info.
•(Game-specific) chat channels that your client can automatically join on login.
•Easily configurable settings for each game, such as which map to play on, team setup, alternate modes, etc.
•A public games list, including search, filter, and sorting.
•Regularly updated columns for popular, featured, and suggested games.

We've also been putting together putting together plenty of great tools for developers to enjoy:

•A level editor with familiar War3 features and accessible data-editing.
•Customizable UI for each game, defined in xml and reloadable in-game.
•Full LUA scripting support for both game logic and custom abilities.
•Complete and documented example games to build off.

In short, we seek to create the most friendly experience for modders and players as possible. Both of us really believe in the potential of the Warcraft III community model, where content creators and consumers are united, the tools are geared so that even beginners can create unique and interesting things, and the ecosystem accommodates bringing ideas from the small-scale, right up to full-fledged commercial games. In a market where such an ecosystem was inexplicably absent, we wanted to step in and meet the demand.

For this reason, as well as not wanting to draw skepticism due to the ambitious nature of the project, we decided to keep quiet about our work until we had sufficient progress to demonstrate that we were serious.

It turns out that we’re not alone in wanting to deliver this kind of experience. Earlier this week, Valve announced custom games for Dota 2, which is close in both spirit and implementation to what we wanted to build.

We are glad to see that the world now has a successor to Warcraft III, because it's been long overdue. However, this is a difficult moment for us, as our prized feature of enabling other aspiring creators to make games like ours has far less relevance in a market shared by the Workshop Tools.

As it stands, we are planning to continue with our goal of bringing EotA 2 and RoW 2 to life on our own engine. We still believe we have great content to show the world, and we still feel that our platform and its potential is a better match for our long-term goals.

In hindsight, we feel that we should have done a better job regarding communication with you, the people who might still have some investment in what we're trying to achieve. So we are going to make an effort to bring you up to speed. Many of the features listed above are already implemented, and while we still have a lot of work ahead of us, we believe it's about time to show off some progress.

Hence, we'll be posting some videos and screenshots in the coming weeks to make up for lost time, and whet your appetite for what's to come.

Apologies for the extended silence,
Softmints & DarnYak

[Sparda963]

Well whenever you guys do get something up and running I will be there to play it. Had a lot of good times in those games and hanging out with all the people over the years. Looking forward to seeing what you guys have up your sleeve.

[tharky]

Okay, this is the best news I've read for this month. I lost my hope when I saw the first announcement was too old. I check reddit (there is an eota subreddit) time-to-time but there are no posts there... EotA was my favourite map in Warcraft III and it will stay like that forever. I will try my best to support the development, and the release of the game with my best. Thank you for making great things DarnYak. I and probably all EotA fans appreciate it.

[Jouven]

Props for making an announcement at last. Those features you listed sound really really really nice.

Checking that valve site, seems that Dota 2 with the new engine is in beta but while it talks about the editor there is no info on that site on how to get it. Doing a little search in the steam library it is there, on the tools section "Dota 2 Workshoop tools alpha" (ALPHA cough cough and OMG it requires 25GB!).

I think you should separate the concepts of the engine/platform EotA 2/RoW 2 will run on and the games per se when posting information in the future. It seems you got your own platform "ready" (or nearly) but then valve made "that" announcement and... %insert intentions here% but that has nothing to do?, core wise, with the games development. I think the platform/engine information caters more to the moders and content creators and the game information to the warcraft 3 players of the maps.

We are glad to see that the world now has a successor to Warcraft III, because it's been long overdue. However, this is a difficult moment for us, as our prized feature of enabling other aspiring creators to make games like ours has far less relevance in a market shared by the Workshop Tools.

Is there any community/site about it? I mean it's the first time I hear about it here, and you post no information on the requirements of this tools or release dates or how you plan to unfold its use in the future. None will know about if it's not out to begin with or how you plan on going about it.

You need a video with filters and multiracial people talking about the product... ahahaha (man those videos are so glaring)

[DarnYak]

Right now, the engine is the most important component of the project. We need the engine to be stable before making the EotA2 "game" that runs on it, hence us posting about that first and foremost. We don't want to make public announcements about EotA2/RoW2 content until we're confident that it will be in the game.

As for a website: Working on that, hopefully in a few weeks.

DarnYak

[tRuTrIx]

I am still here (lurking) and still super excited.
I want to say I have not had as much fun with any game as I had with EotA Twilight. I also quite enjoyed the other game even though I could never survive until the end.

That being said I am pretty close to an expert in web development (PHP backend), web design, and web hosting.

I do not really have anything to give other than my time and/or advice.

So if you need anything in regards to my skill set feel free to PM me or email me.

[Softmints]

Update time!

Making a proper home for ourselves online is still an underexplored pursuit... partly because we haven't settled on a name for the project yet. In the meantime, I'll just ramble about what we've been up to in the last month:

• Having ignored "art" for about two years solid, we've been doing a bunch of catching up. We've learned about creating both static and animated character geometry, and the process for importing each of them into cryengine where we can use them.
• Yak's formalised the code for "widgets" (trees, rocks, other destroyable objects), and today I got to see a spell that explodes rocks into tiny pieces (which bounce around using physics). Widgets are a superclass of units, and we've decided to try moving functionality for buffs up to widgets because that might be interesting. That means its possible to give trees a damage shield, set them on fire such that they burn nearby units, or a myriad of other things we haven't even thought of yet.
• I bought a graphics tablet (Huion H610 Pro), since we will need it at a minimum for making particle textures, and I'm hoping I'll be able to do the UI icons as well. It's important that those have a consistent and distinctive look, so it needs to be done by someone who's going to stick around. It will take practice, but I have a style in mind that I'm hoping I can make work. No WIPs yet though; haven't had time to play with it!
• Yak had some computer issues, and ended up having to buy a new video card + power supply to resolve them.
• Player input saw some necessary improvements. We've added support for configurable modifier keys (ctrl/alt/shift) since we didn't have that before, and there's now a unique identifier for every player action, so players can bind hotkeys to specific actions. So instead of using shift+Q to learn a skill, or shift+right-click to drop an item, those actions can be bound to a single key.
• The UI can now produce in-game particles and decals in response to events, which we're using to show a range indicator when hovering over a skill icon, or while aiming it. That's not a hardcoded behaviour; we've been painstaking about exposing all the functionality, even when it means having to jump through a lot of hoops to make it work.

I'm going to be away on holiday for a while, during which Yak will be stripping out a bunch of the old cryengine shooter code.

We'll get around to screenshots eventually

[Taske]

wouldnt it be easier to do it as dota2 mod?

well im excited and cant wait to see the new eota

[Softmints]

Hi everyone,

We missed posting an August update, in part because there wasn't anything exciting to report (mostly bugfixing, updating our cryengine version, and subsequent bugfixing), and in part because I was away for a while and Yak had some medical stuff to deal with (he's fine now).

During September, we:

• Added support for lightning effects (think chain lightning or finger of death).
• Added textures to targeting simulation. This means we can skin/colour the line, circle, or otherwise that shows where your ability will cast.
• The UI can now read directly from lua tables, which is a big deal: the equivalent of adding javascript to html. This is probably the most important UI feature since adding the <Flow> node about 18 months ago.
• The test-game we're working on now has the game logic for rounds, and a collapsible scoreboard.
• Yak managed to survive a bushfire which knocked out the power for several days.
• I did my first batch of ability icons in late August. They're acceptable for use, but I still have a lot to learn. I haven't yet managed to establish a particular style, and drawing "actual things" is a lot trickier than fireballs or other abstract/formless projectiles. I'll keep learning as I do it.
• I am currently working on "costed" actions. We've had support for abilities having a cost (mana, life, etc.) for ages, but that needs to be abstracted to give units, items, or abilities themselves a purchase cost. Being a "costed" action also includes having a cooldown, charges, and charge replenishment time, which are features used by both abilities (cast charges) and shops (stock count, restock time). Once that's in, we can easily add shops.
• Talents/upgrades are the next big thing on the list.

RIP Yak's lunch, it got burned because I was asking questions earlier.

[Dekar]

Might want to give http://game-icons.net/ a try. Free icons that can serve as base to rapidly crank out icons with some coloring work.

[Softmints]

@Dekar: Thanks, I'll investigate it.

October has been a coding-heavy month, which doesn't make for the most exciting updates. But, briefly:

• In my quest to get shops operational, I ended up working on all sorts of related mechanics: resources, charges, events, inputs, UI, and lua support: all of which needed polish and a bit of tweaking to work together and make shops function. The good news is, now they do!
• Yak has been working on talents/upgrades, which is a tricky system to design well. Dynamically modifying skills requires a lot of flexibility, but we also want to keep our skill definitions clean and readable, without being mucked up by talent clauses. We've made progress, but it's still a WIP.
• I'm going to be polishing shops a bit, then probably moving into icon and particle work for a while.

[Softmints]

November!

• The simple "tech demo" game we've been working on has been pretty bare-bones for a while, so I spent some time doing scripting for that and fleshing it out.
• Shops were due an important detail: they need to understand what you already own so they can sell you the next level of a talent, rather than the same level 1 talent again (similarly for items, levelling up hero abilities, etc.). That's now added, along with UI support for it.
• Yak finished off upgrades, which I'm eager to try out in the tech demo.
• Importing a character model with animations proved to be trickier than expected, and ate a lot of time without results.
• Currently, I'm back in the out-of-game UI working on the settings menu; making it easy to adjust resolution and texture quality and so on. Cryengine has decent support for that, so most of the work has been making it look nice and integrating it properly.
• It will also be possible to declare preferences like "I want the minimap on the left/right", or your preferred camera zoom, which individual games can accommodate.
• Yak is currently working on writing a patcher for calculating and distributing updates.

[Softmints]

December: it hasn't been as productive as we'd have liked, though part of that is due to the holiday season.

• I spent more time on the client UI, preparing for the patcher and finishing off the settings menus (there's a lot more options now). Also added a proper login screen.
• The patcher itself turned into a much bigger tangle than we expected, and Yak's spent most of his time on that. We'd like to get it right, because asking people to re-download everything if it doesn't work would be a pain.
• In-game chat is now working, which is something we've been meaning to get around to for a while. I had to write a text input field from scratch, which was a weird experience. Yak kicked us off with a traditional 'Hello world'.
• The chat display also handles system messages and game announcements, and is easily adapted to different games and settings.

Happy new year!

[Dekar]

Is the website up yet?

[Softmints]

January.

• Patcher is completed, yay!
• The big thing on our plates at the moment is handling lua running in separate environments for the client/server. Since we're currently aiming to use a predictive networking model, there are differences between how the client and server behave, and we want to minimise the amount that people who don't have a head for netcode (like me) have to think about that when making a game.
• We had some promising results with 3D model import + animations earlier in the month, though it wasn't a focus at the time.
• I have been working on audio, getting things set up both in the client and the game. Interestingly, adding sounds to the client UI has caused me rethink some of the layout/visuals; that'll probably be an ongoing theme.
• Congrats to Yak, who reached rank 1 in HotS!

@Dekar: Following 'best practice', we are waiting until we have some legal stuff out of the way before putting up a site.

[Softmints]

February:

• The big news this month was Amazon's announcement of Lumberyard, a game engine forked from Cryengine (which we currently use). They have some neat features and very favourable licensing, and we are considering switching while the engines are still similar and it is easy to do so. We'll be making our decision after GDC next month, by which time Crytek will presumably have made some announcements of their own. This is great news in any case, since whichever product we choose, we'll have access to some great new features!
• The client is now fully equipped with audio and background music, which is a big improvement. Hunting down suitable creative-commons assets was a lengthy process, but we managed to find agreeable ones.
• I had to make some compatibility fixes for some of our older test maps and the editor; they tend to fall behind when we're not actively testing with them.
• Adding middle-click drag was fun; apparently it's a well-liked feature in other games, and I can see why! We also added support for custom cursor graphics in general.
• Splitting lua into separate environments consumed a lot of Yak's time this month, but it's finally done and we're still working through some of the bugs.
• Shops and tooltips got a bunch of necessary improvements as well; I now have a working implementation of the RoW2 shop (though it still needs more features like queuing items).
• Congrats to Yak, who is now rank 9 in HotS!

[Softmints]

Still chugging along. It's March!

• As expected, the big news this time was Cryengine V, whose announced features are also pretty solid. We haven't picked a horse yet, but both engines are free (makes collaboration/getting more people involved easier), and have full source code available (which is extremely valuable to us). We are presented with quite a luxurious choice.
• We are happy to finally have a properly animated 3D model working in the game, shooting fireballs from its hands and walking around correctly. We have ensured it respects cast times and varying attack speeds and other important mechanical details.
• Yak also spent 2 weeks hunting down obscure engine-related bugs that needed to be dealt with.
• I was experimenting with 2D art this month, and have mostly settled on the style I expect we'll be using for the UI + interface icons. (Props to Dekar for pointing out game-icons.net, it's been helpful.)
• The UI gets various improvements, like better buff icons and configurable digital clocks and other stuff that is generally assumed to exist. Now that I've settled on a 2D art style, the rest of the UI is due to be prettied up (which I am looking forward to doing).
• But first: 'augmented reality' for entities. This is the UI that displays over or around units, such as life bars, unit circles, etc. We've had those in for ages, but the implementation needs an upgrade so it can react better to hovering/selecting a unit. This presents some interesting possibilities, because we can have range indicators, rally points, an ally's items, or a bunch of clickable buttons appear when a unit is hovered.
• Yak is now back to working on unit actions (actual fun stuff), which involves projectiles and physics and convoluted examples that I ask him to make sure will work.

[Softmints]

April:

• Entity 'augmented reality' is now fully implemented. This system has significant interaction with hovering and selecting units, so the two have some coupling.
• While the UI has had styling options for some time, we have now added Stylesheets which can display different textures/particles according to certain rules. This is a powerful tool used to implement team colours, showing different bars for units/heroes/buildings, applying settings like colour-blind mode, player cosmetics, etc.
• Stylesheets also required text-displaying elements in the UI to get an upgrade; they are now more adaptable to different styles (so individual teams/heroes can have their own tooltip colours, for example).
• Yak has been digging into the engine code, working to integrate the physics engine with skills and actions. We want to be able to do anything from pushing/pulling a unit, to creating a tornado which sucks in projectiles and particle effects, or locally amplifying gravity. The projectiles in particular have required some reworking to make them fit.
• Units in the engine can now be ordered to traverse a 'lane'. The implementation is very simple at the moment and will get dedicated AI behaviour later; the nice part is how easy it is to draw a lane in the editor! It beats placing and sequencing regions for sure.
• And finally, I'll share some of the icons I was working on over the last week or so. These are probably too "comic-book" for our final style, but it's been a learning experience getting this far!

Note: These icons were done as practice and to experiment with establishing a style. Some are based on icons in other games and aren't planned for actual usage. Several utilize resources from game-icons.net

[Softmints]

May:

• Our website is now built, and is working on a local test server. It is based on the Drupal content management system, which is essentially "Wordpress, with flexibility". If we need to expand or add new sections to the site later, some of which might behave differently, Drupal makes that easy. It did have a steepish learning curve when I started out (which is expected), but it was worth it to secure a good foundation. I'll be migrating it to a production server sometime soon.
• Yak has wrapped up pfields and forces, as well as adding some important missing features to our action definitions. Hours of discussion go into shaping the final product, since we need to balance both ease of use, and being able to compose complex new spells quickly and succinctly. It's not easy to get it right.
• I also spent a bunch of time this month researching art styles and experimenting further with icons. Gathering reference material is pretty gruelling.
• Yak got a new dog this month!

[Softmints]

June:

• I spent a ton of time this month setting up our servers and polishing the website. We are fortunate to have two physical servers available for use, one of which will run game instances, while the other juggles our website, in-game authentication, chat, email, patching, and so on. We are using linux for both, which will be helpful in keeping costs down later (windows instances are up to 50% more expensive on amazon cloud hosting, for example). There is still a bunch of code to write to integrate all these features, but it's coming along fast.
• Yak has completed our upgrade to Cryengine V, which has temporarily broken audio and a few other things I'll have to chip in to fix later.
• Yak also improved support for a number of action-related features as well, including subskills, dashes, cooldown groups, reassigning targets for projectiles, etc.
• The most exciting thing to happen this month (for me) was finalising our style for icons. It took a lot of iteration to arrive at something we're both happy with, and I am personally very satisfied with the result. Making icons is now a quick procedure, with a lot of flexibility in colours and shapes, while maintaining a consistent style.

To demonstrate, I had one icon [heat core, left] open, and was copying in the vector shapes for another [moon, right], when this happy accident in the middle occurred. I think this is a pretty cool example of how versatile this shapes + gradients approach can be. You'll be able to see more in action when our official site launches (soon™).

(Again, these icons are practice.)

[Softmints]

July~

• What a busy month! I've basically turned into a web developer?
• Our website has seen a lot of work, on styling, on features, on backend, and improving our development pipeline. For our initial launch (which isn't happening just yet), we've decided that RoW will be given the spotlight, as it makes sense for us to initially focus attention on one game. EotA's section of the site will be launched later into the project.
• Making a visually appealing website without character art has been a challenge. We obviously want character art to be there, but it's not ready yet.
• Yak has produced our functioning dedicated server binary, as well as refactored parts of our codebase to reduce compile times (they were getting high). The port to linux will be an experience...
• We're currently working on our long-term infrastructure for chat, lobbys, and game-hosting. There are other hosted solutions out there, but we have decided to build and maintain our own because the technologies are well-documented and we value having full control over our own data and systems.

[Softmints]

August:

• It's been a long month, with almost our entire focus on backend server infrastructure. It's not my favourite thing to work on, but at least enough of it is done to get us through alpha.
• Cryengine 5.2 came out this week, with an FBX importer. This is a feature we've been wanting for years; it streamlines the process of getting static and animated models into the game. That's especially helpful for non-artists like us who don't use the tools often, and should make future collaboration easier.
• I've also taken a second pass at the game client, looking to improve UX. The ideal result for any client is that user can easily find what they want to do, with a minimum of clicks/effort required. For familiar contrast, the Warcraft III client is very dated: it has long animations between screens, the game list isn't visible at the same time as chat, finding maps has no tagging/filtering: all of which add friction to getting things done. Some of these problems are easy to solve, but others (like good layout of menus, clear navigation, and giving windows the right amount of space) are more challenging.

[Softmints]

You can read this month's update over on the new site!

As mentioned in a previous update, we are initially focusing on RoW, so there isn't any EotA content to see yet. But we will get there eventually!

https://riseofwinterchill.com/blog