Teaser Videos

Retera · Apr 5, 2021

Because Warsmash as a developer focused project (for now, until it is "player ready" to be used by anyone) is hard to get into, I enjoy sharing videos of gameplay that anybody can understand. Below I will include the videos of Warsmash. On this first post, I am posting the chronological videos documenting gameplay testing over the past year until this point when things were published about it here on the Hive:

2020 Project Announcement

These are some old videos I posted publicly about Warsmash when I got the first runnable draft of a prototype.

April 2020 Systems Testing

These are some of the first tests with Warsmash after I implemented a basic ranged attack mechanic that would shoot a missile art from one unit to another (although the missiles had unlimited range).

May 2020 A New Evolution

In May 2020, the global COVID19 pandemic pushed me to live in a different location and I forgot the hard drive that had the UI files for the Warsmash custom UI that had been featured in previous videos, so I resorted to "hanging out on the beach" with a transparent UI to stay motivated. "Reforged George's Adventure" that is featured in the following video has a special place in my heart because I created it on the Patch 1.30s for a series of YouTube videos that I called "soothing World Editor" where I attempted to forsake complex modding and enjoy the simple things and make maps for the sake of fun similarly to how I did when I was young. In this spirit, "Reforged George Adventure" is a nonsensical single player RPG but it symbolizes, if nothing else, the kind of map that I hope to be able to make in 30-60 minutes and play for a bit of evening fun on Warsmash.

At the same time, I was doing systems tests like the following to try to beef up performance on Warsmash by copying more of the performance culling logic out the mdx-m3-viewer. However, the following video was an example sent to someone to discuss how my performance culling had some interesting typos...

Eventually the performance culling was more or less successful, and I was able to test some map sent to me by the user Lycan that was able to run at 60 FPS when previously it had tanked.

June 2020 A Month of Pathing

After my pandemic life changes, I still wanted to pursue Warsmash, and so to continue to be motivated I recorded this video of the Arthas vs Illidan fight rendered with the Warsmash engine, humorously titled, "the throne is mine now".

At the same time, to be serious about Warsmash I knew it was going to need a pathing system, so I copied A* off of the relevant wikipedia article. But before I did, I knew that pathing is a 2 part system. The first part is that units should not be able to pass through certain objects, and the second part is that units must find their own way around the objects. We can think of this as "pathing" versus "pathfinding", and "pathfinding" is a much harder problem. The following video, aptly titled "pathing test" shows how I was able to tell this wisp to cross over solid objects and the wisp would become stuck, attempting to go literally to where I commanded:

So, to work around this, I attempted to implement pathfinding which led to the following -- a video humorously titled "Spaz Attacks" to poke fun at how the units move in a spastic motion when doing a raw A* search on the pathing cells when each cell is considered as a search node.

Ultimately, efforts to clean up the motion and condense the search path into something more reasonable were relatively successful, and you can see me celebrating with music here:

However, further tests such as this video resulted in what I referred to in the title as "lots of vibrating".

More progress led me to want to celebrate with music and showoff some successes, however. The following video is titled "The Uncanny Valley" to highlight how the game experience I was building began to feel closer to my goal.

I was given a very wise tip that a turning cost would improve the search, so I had another celebration/showoff video including music meant to show the Ghostwolf who suggested the turning cost to me how cool things could be if I did what he suggested:

The only problem after dealing with turning cost to find "reasonable" paths was then to try to smooth these paths so that they would yield more lifelike results. The following untitled video is a pathing test that demonstrates a footmen who is able to move at odd angles around the corners of a barracks by smoothing the path between the barracks corner and the destination.

In another showoff video, I continued to celebrate further advancements and listen to cool music. The song playing in this video is "Two Steps From Hell -- False King" chosen because to me as I go to try to reinvent these game components, I feel as though there are people who will see the illusion, believe the illusion, and think of me as someone who can give them a good future even though they would not likely understand the ridiculous amount of work necessary to achieve what I am trying to do, and how the time it will take me to achieve it as a hobbyist probably extends beyond the length of time that any user would care what I was doing, making me in some sense to be a "false" king or a sort of bad leadership.
You can see in this video that there are still pathing issues not present in Warsmash today, such as how the Naga Royal Guard is not able to path to a point where his collision box would end up intersecting the wall, because he considers it to be an unreachable/invalid location.

July 2020 Units and Pathing

The summer found me continuing on my pathing system. Now after introducing the ability for units to path around solid objects, I still needed to have them path around other units. For this purpose, because I thought I heard someone on the Hive Discord channel joke that using a Quadtree would be a good solution to re-implementing Warcraft III's pathing system (and because it seemed reasonable) I decided to implement unit-on-unit collision using a quadtree tutorial from online. So, the A* search is still running to seek around the map, but it (and the raw literal "pathing"/collision system behind it) is using the quadtree to consider certain locations to be invalid.

After this, I did some more tests for fun as the world of pathing continued to bring me closer and closer to that sense of feeling that I was actually making something that could become my vision. I figured it would be somewhat ironic in this case to celebrate trying to reinvent a year-2000s-style game by playing music made from remixes of Windows XP sounds.

Around that time, I also recorded a video of myself killing a paladin on Warsmash for a bit of fun, but the Paladin dies and then his body is able to still be attacked and able to walk away because the definition of "dead" is not well defined in the system. So, the video is pretty funny, but would not make for a good game experience:

In the meantime, as I continue to advertise to people that I think that rewriting Warcraft III is a good idea, someone sent me a very interesting map to try on the engine, and so I recorded a video of myself flying the camera around and browsing this interesting world:

Along that same line of thinking, I was able to play one of my own old personal maps from many years ago and enjoy Warsmash's lack of a movement speed cap, which causes speed capped custom units to teleport when told to move:

August 2020 Systems Tuning

My video archive did not have a lot from August, but there is this video of work I was undergoing to attempt to make the turn rates of the characters more consistent with what is stored in their game data. Comically, I titled this video "Turn Rates Trying to look like Real life" (suggesting that Blizzard's Warcraft III is the real life).

September 2020 Unit Combat

The following video, "Everybody Attack the Rock Golem", depicts several advancements in Warsmash's combat system. Around this time I was rewriting some of the ability layers into something more serious that would support more of the stuff I wanted to support. We also see in this video that melee units are able to attack and we hear the sound of their attacks, which was a new advancement made around this time.
Along with melee attacks, these improved systems also included the behavior of combat units to "chase" as well as to attack. Ranged attacks now had limited range and engine work was done to allow these ranged attacks to engage the pathing system to find a path towards the destination unit and chase it. While to a Warcraft III player the following video is nothing special, for me this was a systems test that showed that I can still get 60 FPS on this Java-based program code even when I have a huge horde of units in this sort of "chase" mode. This was an exciting achievement in Warsmash, but units were still not able to be considered "dead" and so the immortal negative-hitpoint Rifleman used as the dummy chase target for all the other units inspired me to play the "Invincibility" music from Sonic the Hedgehog in the background while recording this video.

While pursuing improved unit combat, I also realized that units need to be able to attack buildings not only from touching their "collision radius" but also any time that the unit touches the pathing map of the building. In short, we have to do image processing on the TGA pathing image file to determine from where a unit is "within range" of the building. The following untitled video documents a venture into implementing this system, where a footmen can attack a custom building that has the pathing map of a bridge with diagonal and unusual shape.

Around this same time, attack types and armor types were put into the system inspired by the ideas on Mojo StormStout's Warcraft III Strategy Guide , as well as the notion that some weapon types interact in different ways with the game world:

Now armed with the fun of different kinds of combat and weapon types, I also tried loading the Rebirth mod on my system, for a bit of fun. You can see in this video that some of the Rebirth models were not fully supported yet on Warsmash (this is not the fault of the Rebirth developers!).

Getting inspired by this, I revisited an old favorite Warsmash test map -- Night Elf 03 -- and let myself enjoy a world where ranged attacks had a limited range, and units pathed around objects and around other units. This was fun for me because it was so different from earlier tests in the year back when my configuration had been launching on Night Elf 03. With combat sounds, pathing, weapon and armor types, pathfinding, and a little game music thrown in, I really started to feel like I was experiencing the Warcraft III game again.

However, one of the next elements that I needed was for the combat system that I had created to have a sense of value. Grim though it may be in the face of a global pandemic, my units needed to be able to die. So, I implemented a system that would clean up the shadows of units and unselect them after they died, as shown in the following test. Rest in peace, Beach Goers [that is the name assigned to the modified night elves that I was killing in Reforged George Adventure]!

In another test, now with an Annihilator unit that made it easier to achieve unit death for testing, I attempting causing a lot of unit death and observing if the unit death animations were playing as intended. In particular, the transition from "Death" animation to "Decay Flesh" animation to "Decay Bone" animation has a lot of edge cases when we deal with units such as Rock Golems, Mountain Giants, and Demolithers that have varying settings for whether they should decay when they die. In the background, we can hear me listening to some music from the game Undertale, which has heavy themes of "Determination" (I was probably thinking about how long it takes to implement all of these systems that I took for granted for my entire life, and how important it is to stay determined to keep working!)

At the same time, I was also trying to brush up on my implementation of different weapon types, and that included finishing up the Huntress's Missile (Bounce) weapon type. In this video I celebrated how comedic moon glaives can be when they have no limit to their bounces:

The following weekend, being a bit of a showoff and for fun, I recorded a video titled "launching the alien technology from the end of the world". I probably linked this video to someone on Discord in an attempt to show that my progress was beginning to close in on making the sort of engine that I intended, despite always throwing me off a bit by feeling "alien".

Another weekend went by and I was working on improving the little things again. This time I was back at it with the pathing system. There are a lot of corner cases, so to keep myself interested I changed to a new custom map.

A lot of these videos were quick recordings to share with someone how my basic systems were functioning, even though I was recording clips of the systems that had been implemented earlier in the year. As my Calculus teacher used to say, "A picture is worth a thousand words!"

I was also at this time still fighting with the pathing bug that "unreachable locations" would force the pathfinding system to search over the entire map in a very slow way. The following video, pointing out this issue, notes it as "HUGE Lags" in the title.

That same weekend, I also decided to take a break from pathing and try to implement a lighting environment. This was a bit harder for me because most of my interactions with OpenGL were achieved by copying from other people, but I was not aware of any open source projects with Warcraft III style 3D lighting environments. They probably exist, but I mostly just look at things very specific to this social sphere and on the Hive. So, I was just following some more generic OpenGL tutorials for this one, and again I celebrated the little things when I was able to make the world lights sync up with the clock at the top of the screen. The music sampled in the background, in honor of the animated Clock for the Day Night Cycle, was chosen to be the song "Clocks" by Coldplay while I was recording.

October 2020 Creating Experiences!

Until this point, I had been hyper-focused on systems. I was doing all of this system development, but I wanted to do a test where I put it all together and tried to enjoy what I was creating for what it is. A game engine system. So I created a custom map that was deliberately very simple and tested these combined systems all in one. I played as the Night Elves on a short 5-minute adventure to defeat a band of Orcs and their towers. I gave myself siege units to destroy the towers, and I made sure the siege units could not attack from within their minimum range, so my Ballistas had a hard time with the Grunts who chased them. This systems test also revealed to me that I did not yet support the death of Structure objects. The structures would leave behind their shadows and ground texture decals. There is also a moment where a Ballista is still alive, but has 0 hit points, which is weird. These are the kinds of bugs that come up during systems tests.
I did not have hero characters, but I gave myself Shandris. She is a good unique unit who feels like a hero. Near the end I even had her charge a tower, which is not a strategically good decision, but I was getting overconfident. This helped me to ensure that the tower would auto attack multiple times in sequence. There was also effort in preparation for this video to make arrow missiles render properly, because they require axis-specific Billboard Lock which was not present in the mdx-m3-viewer at the time that I copied from it, and so I had to do a bunch of vector engine work to make the tower attacks in this video look as good as they did.

Around that same time, I tried playing Starcraft on Warsmash! This video includes commentary and mostly speaks for itself, portraying how the Warsmash engine and all of these details described up to this point are reusable for a mod such as Project Revolution mod. Please note, the Project Revolution mod shown below is a Warcraft III mod and is not my own work. I spent 1 hour configuring Warsmash to load Project Revolution to setup this video; I did not create the Starcraft themed fan models shown at all, nor did I put them together into the MPQ archives that contained them.

A few weeks went by and I was still passionately wishing for the future, yet celebrating how far I had come. I made a short video of Arthas meandering in the frozen mountains of Northrend on a custom map that I put together. To add a sense of mystery, I played some World of Warcraft mountain music while recording this one. One of the engine upgrades I had to make for this video was to make Arthas's horse tilt as it moved across the mountainside. This kind of pitch/yaw unit character tilting was not present in the mdx-m3-viewer, although it fully supported arbitrary rotation so adding this sort of feature was not difficult.

After that, time found me on a different computer on a laptop. I did not have Warcraft III to use with my Warsmash installation so I downloaded a 100 MB compressed version of Warcraft III that I created back in my youth to make sure I would always have a Warcraft III install ready for me anywhere on Earth that I go for the simple cost of 100 MB of download from my cloud. After one or two source modifications to allow missing sound files, Warsmash was quickly running on my 100 MB asset bundle, and so I found myself testing bridges on the laptop in this video titled "More Bugs !"

However, from my laptop, I was still able to make some code progress, and we can see the first iteration of a walkable bridge in this video aptly titled, "Overcoming Obstacles, Crossing Bridges".
Overcoming Obstacles, Crossing Bridges
The next thing to fix after that was the Confirmation 3-arrow indicator on the right click, which I added to incorporate the logic of the walkable bridge.
Green Arrows for my Vampire
The previous test revealed a lot of "bobbing" around of the Vampire, though, so after that I fixed the interpolation decisions used to tilt the units:
Interpolation Changes
Later on, I found myself back the big computer, and was discussing with someone online about Warsmash systems and the CUnit.update(...) method in the code. This was a good review of how things were working.
examples of CUnit.update(...)
The following day I tinkered with the idea of an autocast ability on Warsmash. In general, I have not made most abilities even today on Warsmash, so this was really the only experiment into autocast abilities that I have done yet on Warsmash. But, at the time this gave me a good opportunity to spawn in the cooldown and autocast button models for later use that are still sitting in the Warsmash UI to this day, waiting to be used when they are needed.
2020 10 25 23 40 07

November 2020 Advancing Systems

After reviewing autocast buttons, CUnit update logic, and other unit and ability system behaviors, I moved towards investigating the notion of a "build" system. This video is the first footage of a peon who has a Build menu, although the video itself focuses upon icon click sounds with the ability icons:

Teaser Videos

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