Custom Unit Shaders
This won’t mean a whole lot to most of you, but suffice it to say that CUS handles a lot of things like units cloaking, displaying normal maps on units, displaying teamcolors and even animating trees. Yep, you heard me, animated trees. It’s not a huge thing, but it does affect immersion. From now on, when you are on a map with vegetation, that vegetation will sway and bend to the breeze. It’s relatively minor, but it’s a nice touch. Working CUS also fixes some other issues, like spectators viewing cloaked units, and how units uncloak when they aren’t yours (it’s less ugly now).
Control Victory
So last time I mention this, I was going on about how it worked. I mentioned that it worked well, but there were still some bugs to sort out. I’m happy to announce that with the help of Lurker, all of the bugs have been squished! The scoreboard also now will display bots. This is a HUGE deal and will now allow you to actually play against ShardLua. It still needs more testing, but I am confident that it is ready to go!
HighGround (Map)
Another map has been added to the map pool. It is called HighGround. There are control points on each loading zone, and 3 in the middle. The lack of easy access to the middle makes taking and holding the loading zones all the more important. This map was previously released under a different name and for various games. I have rigged it specifically for Evolution RTS and it is live on the test server (more on that in a moment).
Here is the layout of the map:
And here is a more angled view of it:
New Soundtrack!
This I am EXTREMELY pleased to tell you about. The EnigmaTNG has graciously allowed for the use of his music in Evolution RTS. This music is replacing the previous soundtrack in it’s entirety. I hope you like it… It’s really, really good. Make sure to go to his page on BandCamp and show him some love! I won’t spoil what tracks are in, but suffice it to say that this album is part of the War tracks: http://theenigmatng.bandcamp.com/album/world-of-madness
New Alpha Testing Host!
If you have been wanting to check out the changes to Evolution RTS, but have not been able to do it using the source code repository, don’t worry! Now you can check it out with friends or alone with a bot (Make sure to only use ShardLua… the others will probably crash).
Just log in and join the Alpha Testing Host. The lobby will download all the new files that you need automagically (It’s likely to be a pretty big download (300ish mb), so… warning).
Just a warning… At any given time, this game version could be broken. The server itself is dumb and doesn’t do any sort of checking. It simply auto updates the server to the latest commit version in the Source Repository, so YMMV.
Chobby (A new lobby!!!)
The past few days, I have been involved in a project to create a lua lobby in the engine itself. This means that you would go ingame to play single player / multi player, like other games. It’s really nice and it just had its first public release! Currently the release is focused on another game (ZK) as that particular game has quite a few users and the hope is that bugs can be squished more quickly as they are found. When Chobby is ready to be used with Evolution RTS, I will be updating the steam packages to use it. The screenshot I will show here is branded for ZeroK, but you can see how it is looking so far:
News notifications (Chrome and Firefox)
This item is fairly minor, but if you would like to get news updates on your phone or in chrome/firefox, you can simply click the link below (button is also in the footer on the site). This service is provided by pushpad. Unfortunately, my host, Inmotionhosting, does not support LetsEncrypt, so to acquire an SSL certificate for this site would be prohibitively expensive. Pushpad acts as an intermediary and facilitates the notifications.