There have been some very exciting changes happening. One of which is ‘The Fog of War’. In traditional isometric strategy games this is done with a greying out of the map where it is not in your line of sight. I.e. you can’t see what’s happening there.
While that would be possible in Fort Wars, it would be somewhat expensive to calculate, and not be very interesting. Most of the weapons need a line of sight to hit the target, and since the forts aren’t mobile there is no existing way to discover what your enemy is doing like you could by sending troops in.
Instead there happens to be a very natural way of hiding important features from the enemy: obscure the ‘cutaway’ view of enemy forts. Now you can build weapons and devices without the enemy knowing exactly what’s there. That is until you take some damage – which punches holes in the exterior cladding!
I’ve also introduced a ‘neutral’ team, which does nothing ordinarily. Once you join your fort with theirs, it becomes yours to control and extend! This allows for some interesting map design.
Once we added that feature, it became obvious that the existing real-time building system needed adjustment to make bridging a gap more difficult. Previously, new joints would be fixed in place until they were supported sufficiently. The fixing gave support to the structure. Now the new joints are fixed relative to the existing structure, not the world. So there’s no artificial support. The physics parameters have also been adjusted, and when sufficient rotation occurs at the joint the structure detaches. This neatly cleans up dangling structures which get in the way.
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| Fog of War |
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| Claiming neutral team resources |
