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Terrascape is a game backbone for anyone to write a game set in open terrain. I plan to release a good half dozen games myself written with Terrascape as the backbone and other teams have also expressed an interest...

I've made such dramatic speed ups to the Terrascape engine so i've decided to release an interim Alpha release for those of you who are following the project.

Since the last release i've also started work on the unit & scenario data structures so you can now drive about in Hummers, Land Rovers and the Abrams tank.

I've signed up Rachel Nusbaumer for the music score and Kevin Bolt has joined the team and is soon to deliver his first model of an Apache AH-64, so expect Aerial flight soon!

Here's a full run down of keys and the major issues i'm addressing at the moment.

DRIVE CONTROLS
W - Accelerate
S - Brake
A - Turn Left
D - Turn Right

CUPOLA CONTROLS (Abrams only)
NUMPAD 8 - Lower Barrel Elevation
NUMPAD 2 - Raise Barrel Elevation
NUMPAD 4 - Rotate Cupola Left
NUMPAD 6 - Rotate Cupola Right
NUMPAD 5 - Centre Cupola & Barrel

CAMERA CONTROLS
UP CURSOR - Pan outward
DOWN CURSOR - Return to normal view distance
LEFT CURSOR - Rotate Camera
RIGHT CURSOR - Rotate Camera

PLATOON CONTROLS
F1-F12 - Select Platoon (demo has 2 platoons)
1-0 - Select Unit in Platoon (1-3 Hummer, 4-6 Land Rover 7-0 Abrams)

PARTICLE ERRORS
Dust clouds look like flames when they did look like dust.
Dust scaling starts too small and ends too big.
Dust raises too far into the air.

OBJECT ANIMATION ERRORS
Wheels arn't rotating as the vehicle moves anymore.
Front wheels turn around the wrong axis.

UNICODE ERRORS
Selecting Japanese creates strange text onscreen.
Selecting Chineese, Taiwaneese or Korean crashes the program.
Selecting a non-existant platoon with the F-keys not accounted for.

GRAPHIC ERRORS
DBPro BETA logo in corner.
Some Interface graphics are a bit sad.
Some graphics cards will be unable to load the matrix texture causing the program to crash with an error at line 1000 and something. Need to know what graphics cards please.
Terrain takes too long to update when switching units.

FEATURES OBVIOUSLY MISSING
No unit AI.
No collision detection.
No weaponry.

FEATURES TO BE IMPLEMENTED VERY SOON
Aerial flight physics.
Limb configuration via unit .dat file.
Waypoint AI & route optimisation.
Primitive strategic map and planning interface.

You can grab the 26.9mb file here:

Terrascape XI Alpha 2.5: http://freescape.successionthebetrayal.com/TerrascapeXI.zip

I'm still struggling with including Japanese native support so i've put it on the back burner for a while whilst I start writting the strategic interface and the AI.

I read up on some documents about route-finding because I was really really bad at it, after reading the first paragraph on a document on A* I immediately realised how much of a newb i've been - and I finaly learnt the word which describes what i've been doing with my strategy AI all this time too - Heuristics It's my word of the week so i'll be getting it into as many forum threads as possible!

I'm now looking for ways of going beyond A*, because it is not enough for me to conform to the standard, I want to beet it

Although i'm absolutely sure the techniques i've thought of so far are not new. Firstly I am making the heuristic function polymorphic to adapt to the different units so that an abrams doesn't try to go over a hill that a hummer would and a helicopter will fly strait over it.

Secondly I am not just going to calculate the next tile to enter, i'm going to calculate up to the next few direction changes so that the unit then adapts it's route to round off the corners and therefor not need to slow down so much.

Anyway, I read up on RTS AI's too, and from that it very much looks like the games industry is still behind the AI design for my WW3D project from three years ago (sadly it stayed a design as I never actually coded it). I've made further enhancements since with 'dynamic relational task dependancies' which is a fancy way of saying a list of things to do, so I think it is fair for you to expect the computer to play a competent strategy game

I think i'll be a few weeks now adding AI, weaponry and new units as the models arrive - so I wont be releasing a new demo for a bit.

Although I was only getting 10 FPS in this, I loved it! Great job man.

Eeeeeeeeeek! 10fps !?

I trust that was only in the starting town where there's a fair few buildings and trees and a whole platoon of units?

Or was that after driving out in to the open too?

Or maybe your computer is poorly specced?

Please say you have a naff computer...! It's supposed to run between 20fps (towns) and 120+fps (open, some foliage)... At least it does on my machine.

I'm glad you like it anyway

ESC was creating a heightmap program called "Terrascape" but had to change the name due to legal reasons.

Just a bit of trivia

Bah, is there any names left without a trademark on them?*boggle* who are ESC? Do they have a web page?