The Great Tribes

Zemlainin

Chieftain
Joined
Mar 21, 2017
Messages
22
Hello everyone!
I'm developing a 4X game - The Great Tribes. I want to share my successes with you. Can I do it here?

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An excursion into history
I want to tell you about my project, which I have been working on for more than six years.
I started in 2016 with a concept and a map generator in 2D mode, but it turned into 3D.

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Looking at these old screenshots and the latest ones, it makes me cry, but it's not a tear of sadness, but joy, what a huge amount of work has been done during this time!

For the most part, I was doing the project alone, but during the development, people are constantly joining the project and falling off. I am grateful to everyone who has contributed at least a little to the project and even just supported me with a kind word!

In the last year, several people joined the project, who began to make a significant contribution. These are several concept artists, 3d modelers programmers, historians and screenwriters. The work went faster!
 
Technical aspects
The game is being developed on a self-written Java engine using the LWJGL library. The game runs on Windows and *nix platforms.
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I want to test on Mac OS, but I don't have a MacBook yet.

An important issue of compatibility of our game with integrated Intel graphics has been resolved. A test sample laptop with Intel HD Graphics 630. Everything works! FPS 15-30 frames.
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The minimum system requirements will be higher: a video card with OpenGL 4.3 support, 4GB of RAM and an AMD Athlon 2X dual-core processor.
Recommended requirements are a GTX 1060 6GB graphics card, 8GB of RAM and a six-core processor.

Why do I need a six-core processor? I fully implement multithreading support, because artificial intelligence works very fast :)
 
Key Features
The indirect operation, the player can transfer some control functions to A.I.

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Gameplay

  1. Nowadays there are 6 races in the game, the starting one depends on the player's spawn location.
  2. There are nomadic and sedentary ingame tribes, on the first stage players can choose both. If a player has chosen a sedentary tribe, he can set up a colony and manage and control it from the first minutes of the game.
  3. Territories of countries are divided into regions, each of them being managed separately. Each region can include several cities and settlements.
  4. In the game, you can find neutral locations that are managed by simplified A.I.
  5. The game has a generation of ruins that players can explore.
  6. On every tile of the game field, there can be useful resources to obtain, but first, the player has to explore it.
  7. Two types of resources: renewable and exhaustible.
  8. Every settlement is split into districts and each of them can be built up independently. The amount and variety of districts are unlimited.
  9. There is a simulation of dividing the population into different social strata, with individual interests and demands.
  10. In addition to castes, there is a division into factions that unite people with common goals, like scientists or warriors.
  11. Religion is formed by the player's choice of gods to worship, as well as defining sins and virtues to create dogmas.
  12. Player forms the culture of his civilization using a special ingame constructor interface, depending on national priorities.
  13. The game economy is based on barter. There is a constant trade turnover, both within one country and in the international market.
  14. Each product has its own production chain, depending on the available resources and known technologies.
  15. The science tree is non-linear and self-intersecting, its research depends on the player's actions. Many technologies can be explored in several ways. For example, sea navigation can be investigated without access to the sea, but through active use of navigable rivers.
  16. In the game, there are 15 directions of progress, for which the player receives research points.
  17. Rivers and canals have their own throughput, some of them may be unavailable for navigation.
  18. Battles have principles of real-time strategy, like Total War. But now that idea hasn’t been implemented, so combat actions remain as hidden calculations of the results.
  19. Each army isn’t a single unit, but a system of separately controlled brigades, consisting of different types of fighters.
  20. Every troop group is constructed by the player, choosing various types of used weapons, armour, methods of movement, and special machinery.
  21. A.I. has no advantage over the player, like information about the territories and player’s progress.
  22. A large number of random events take place on the game map, including those related to the player’s actions.
  23. The game implements the functionality of man-made and natural disasters.
  24. Diplomacy has an extended structure, with the ability to form alliances of several players in a special constructor.
  25. In the game, it’s possible to change the internal policy of the state to adjust the needs of the population and its attitude to the ruling authorities.
  26. Parliament, councillors, and elected leaders can act as applicants for the wishes of the people.
  27. Rulers and significants have separate mortal personalities.
  28. Ingame personalities have their own characteristics that affect country management. For AI they are also starting points for decision-making.
  29. The player’s actions influence the environment.
  30. The game has terraforming functionality.

Technical side

  1. A game map is created using procedure generation, depending on set parameters.
  2. In singleplayer there can be up to 50 A.I. In the future, this amount will be increased, but that needs testing for the latest game stages that weren’t implemented yet.
  3. The game engine supports multi-threading, which allows it to support much larger maps with a really big amount of A.I.’s.
 
I have already shown the Mongolian tribes, and now I am ready to show all the remaining ones. Now we have models of all six races in the game. I think it's not difficult to determine who is who?











 
or blog somewhere where all this is going on?
.
This is only an early alpha version. Therefore, there is no Steam page yet. But I have a Discord server where people who liked the project gather and there you can get into the testers.
 
Development Diary No.48

This is probably the longest writing and I would like to believe the long-awaited development diary. The diary was postponed due to the abundance of news about the trip to IGROPROM and then a lot of events shifted the focus from the diary to the side.



I sat down to write more than a dozen times, but everything constantly merged into some kind of whining that everything was not going according to plan and the received energy boost from the events was going away.

I am writing a truly global strategy in which the scale of everything that is happening from the first minutes of the games should be visible. And the first thing a player sees in our project is the scale of the game cards.

I was comparing the sizes of the maps, maybe they are no longer accurate and something has changed since then.

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I start every working season on a project by refining the game map, rendering, or finishing the engine. This allows me to get involved in the development process faster.
During the entire development period, I spent a lot of time studying the algorithms for generating maps and conducted many experiments to find the best solution. As a result of my efforts, the new generation system works very fast and allows you to create huge maps quickly and without delay. I am very pleased with the result of my work, I think that the new card generation system will be able to surprise and interest players. Of course, in the future I plan to add new elements and features to the system in order to further increase the diversity of the game world.

Throughout the winter season, I have been working on several interrelated tasks in parallel.

The first task was to rewrite the entire generation for sid generation (Sid, (from the English random seed from seed — grain, beginning) — a value consisting of characters (including numbers), which is used as the basis for generating games of the world).

The second task is to introduce the concept of height difference. It turned out to be quite a difficult task, especially in terms of laying rivers.



The third task arose in cheat mode, when the player can see the entire map, there was an obvious problem with friezes when loading new visible areas.
We had to work on optimizing resource utilization. I decided to use parallel loading of resources in different threads to speed up the loading process and implemented preloading of resources to reduce the waiting time. Resource loading has become significantly faster, which has improved the overall performance of the game.
But there is still work to be done in terms of additional optimization of the resource loading process to refine the caching function.

The fourth task is the implementation of all units of the first epoch for the six races and animations for them. We have coped with this task.



The fifth task was to finish building packs of all races. We have practically coped with this task, there are very few specialized buildings left (hunting camps, mines, quarries, sawmills, pastures and fields).

The sixth task is to implement a programmatically scalable user interface. And we have solved this problem -

The seventh task was to write the second iteration of the musical accompaniment to the game. It's ready too. Now it remains to make transitions and pauses between the music.

The nearest plan

The planned tasks should be solved by November 20, 2024, and we will take the new build to IGROPROM.

The engine:
- Optimization of the caching function.
- Optimization of model loading.
- Implementation of music track management.

Models:
- All models of buildings of the first epoch.
- Animal models and their animation.

Textures - update the textures of the map. The task is difficult (or costly) and is still questionable.

UI/UX
- Implement the main game interface.
- New design of the unit window and control buttons.
- New icons for units and cities.
- Finally make a city interface.

Gameplay
- You will have to rewrite a bunch of code within the new client-server paradigm. A huge job that is even scary to take on.
- Software implementation of the city interface.
- To complete the interaction of the city with the outside world.
- Complete the consumption and extraction of resources by units.
- Implementation of the scientific branch of the first epoch.

The work is moving, and I have already begun to slowly return to the project after my summer working season.



There will be a lot of interesting news soon!
 
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