Development

[icycalm]

What's icycalm been coding recently?



Probably nothing.

#akbattlegrounds #akbattlemaster #2025goty #ubercoder

[icycalm]

Can't believe how beautiful it is. But that's what happens when I take over coding.

[icycalm]

I am at a point now where, if I cut some corners, I could have this running in an afternoon. But I'd rather not cut any corners because it would create what we coders call "tech debt" that I'd have to pay somewhere down the line. So I am soldiering on with it, and I say soldiering because... it's boring work. That said, if it's not done by December 31, I will cut the fucking corners and release the game with tech debt. One way or another, Alex Kierkegaard's Battlemaster will be out this year, and win Game of the Year.

To be clear: the design and most of the development aren't boring: they're some of the most fun I've ever had in my life. But getting all the details to the level of perfectionism that I like... that's boring. So I am struggling with it. The end is in sight though, one way or another.

[icycalm]

That's just one faction out of nearly 30 lol. It's not even all its units, quite a few are missing. Granted it's by far the biggest faction, the Space Marines. But still, do you know any other tactical game with anywhere near this level of variety? One of the reasons StarCraft got big is because it has 3 factions lol, unlike the normal 2 for programmer games.

Everyone who loves tactics will be blown away by Alex Kierkegaard's Battlemaster: the first and only tactical metaverse.

Still working feverishly at it, and just solved another stumbling block: the setting's theme. Initially I was going to go with Thomas Bergersen's "Sons of War": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=utujHPkjfwI



Problem with this is that it's too... energetic. Too dramatic, too nervous. It's better for D&D than to represent 40K. So I wasn't happy with it, but I liked the title because it fits well with 40K. But then I found this:

Warhammer 40,000 (Concept Theme for Amazon Studios)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vLn4O_F3FhE



This is 40K. It's grim, it's dark. It's perfect. As slow and heavy as the armors in the game.

It's from a Spanish composer with a Patreon who's been pumping out a ton of 40K music: themes for all the factions, you name it. Amazing stuff. And of course he works for Cult Games now. Here's another example:

Music to serve the Emperor (Warhammer 40,000 Ambience)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AyOtjCea4vM



It's 10 hours!!! Just in case you were wondering what you'll be hearing while playing 10-hour massive tactical battles like no one has ever seen before.

More soon.

[icycalm]

Calling all tactics fans! The first and only tactical metaverse is coming!



Prepare yourselves for battle.

[icycalm]

This release is still happening tonight but at California time because Cult Games Beverly Hills has taken the lead on this. Of course I will be online helping them make sure that all the code is coded right. Can't even take New Year's Eve off. Such is the life of the ubercoder.

[icycalm]

Great to see 40K Battle Honours already fully signed up. They snatched it within minutes of release! That's the enthusiasm that fuels me! Now the plan is:

1. Get a couple days' rest because I'd barely slept in two days to finish up before LA NYE.

2. Take a further couple days to fix all those corners I had to cut to get the release out in time for 2025 GOTY.

3. Publish some supporting material in the mission thread so players can prepare (map, rules, music for the mood).

4. Do some prep for the VTT.

5. Play.

I reckon we can play in about a week. And things should get faster from there as we figure stuff out.

The only challenge I see is getting the VTT production values to a level I am happy with. But I am willing to start fairly low and just steadily increase it from there.

No one is ready for the stuff that's coming up. Epic beyond belief.

[icycalm]

I have some news on Battle Honours!

First off, you can see the tag I added to the thread title: 40K10. This means Warhammer 40,000 10th Edition, to distinguish from other editions, but also from subgames/modes of 40K like Kill Team, Necromunda and others we'll be discussing soon, plus of course other tactics games like Marvel: Crisis Protocol etc.

I also added the player names: ysignal vs. Some guy.

Then in the mission page I changed JOIN BATTLE to FOLLOW BATTLE since the battle has been fully subscribed, and the link now goes straight to this thread instead of the Battlemaster forum.

Then I also added the season: Season 10, because that will eventually link to a page that will list all the season's missions like episodes in a TV show.

Plus there's now music! Plus you can now go to the battlefield by clicking "ENTER BATTLEFIELD"! So if you click on the music to play first, and then control-click to enter the battlefield and switch to the new tab, you'll get a pretty good idea of what the battle will feel like. Gameplay!



This is what it looks like at 4K. Note the 40K skulls background which has now also been added to the other map pages. This way no matter how you pan the map, you won't see the anti-immersive grey background again: the skulls will stay there no matter what you do. There's no escape from my metaverse!!! In Cult Engine 2 it won't even let you go further than the edge, so that will be even more immersive when I move the overworld there.

As you can see, the map doesn't include the Tyranid Hive Node, nor the little wall section. The reason is that I am still deciding how to implement them. I can just leave them slapped on in 2D as they were, or I can try to add them in 3D.

This is what the node looks like in 2D:



And I think I can make it out in 3D near the bottom-right of this image:



The above pic is not Cult Engine 3. It's Cult Engine 2.9. Haven't talked about it before, it's an early 3D prototype Cult Engine that I thought we'd never need. But it turns out it has certain advantages over CE3, so I am evaluating whether it'd make sense to play at least the first mission there, if not indeed many/all of the official ones.

Whatever I decide, it will be for the best, and I'll lay out all the reasons for you.


TL;DR: All overworld-side preparations are finished, and the only task remaining is to import the 2 miniatures plus wall and Hive Node to one of two engines. Just have to decide which one. And then we start.

[icycalm]

Now this is what I call motherfucking progress.

It is insane, beautiful, unbelievable fun.

I can spend all day dicking around with it, and I am not even playing.

But there are still issues.

Above all, this is a 3D scene, but the map is so small that if I employ any angle other than top-down, the scene is ruined because you can see beyond the map's edges. This should be less of a problem with larger maps, but we have quite a few small/tutorial ones to get through before we get to the larger ones, and I want at least one great picture from each of them to publish in the forum threads and on the overworld. And the only way I can get it seems to be top-down. Which is a shame because then what's the point of the 3D models? From this angle you wouldn't know if I was using 2D tokens as in Cult Engine 1. This is CE2.9 btw. I will make a thread about it soon and explain all.

Another issue I have that is mostly in my head and no one else will notice is that every object has to be scaled manually, meaning the units, the Hive Node, the walls, everything. And so far I've only been able to scale them by eye, meaning the size relationships between everything aren't accurate. And that's bothering the hell out of me. There's probably a way to make it accurate, but who knows how much research I have to do to figure it out.

This is what I mean when I say perfectionism. I can probably spend days if not weeks obsessing over every detail, during which time we won't be playing. Or I can cut some corners and have it ready tomorrow.

I'll do the reasonable thing and spend a few hours to a couple days max trying to figure accurate scaling, including asking for help from experts, and if I don't manage it I'll just look at many official pictures and try to match the scale as closely as possible by eye, then add "Figure accurate scaling" on my tasklist and leave it for later.

About the angle, I can't think of any solution. It's just a tiny battlemap. The pics will have to be top-down for now.

They look gorgeous even then, don't get me wrong. But these models deserve to be seen in 3D.


P.S. The Tyranid can be animated if we want it to :) But there's a catch (lower model detail).

P.P.S. I moved the earlier dev post from the Battle Honours thread [ > ] to this thread, because it's really a dev post, not a playing post.

[icycalm]

Getting very close now, this is almost playable.

I got a very cool background mat so that zooming a bit outside the battlemap in order to capture the entire battlefield doesn't look ass, and you can almost get a little angle on the shot (not shown above) to show off the 3D models. Almost. Might still not be usable, but if it can almost be done here it means that in somewhat larger maps it will be very feasible.

The wall isn't super-cool, but it's much better-looking from the sides than from straight above. I spent quite some time looking for something useful, and there weren't many options. It does the job at any rate.

The 3D Hive Node is nowhere near as detailed as the 2D one, so I am thinking of using the 2D for the sake of the top-down screenshot. It will look much better next to the hyper-detailed models than the basic 3D model.

The sizes are still all off, but I think I have a solution. The units all come "perfectly" scaled next to each other from the repository where dozens of experts have assembled them over years. So the trick is to leave them alone. Take the units as they are, and instead of scaling them, scale the map to fit ONE unit whose size roughly matches the map's squares. And if you do that, all other units should be the right size for the map. The wall doesn't matter, you can scale it until it fits the squares perfectly, because walls come in all sizes. The Hive Node, if we use the 2D one that came with the map, is also perfectly scaled by Games Workshop for this particular map.

I put "perfectly" in quotes for the unit scaling because it's done by experts whose work I am unable to check. But we are talking about hundreds of competitive players who have assembled thousands of miniatures over years. If they can't get it right, no one can. So the trick is to not mess with that part of the equation, because it's the most complex and delicate. Resizing the map and some props is nothing in comparison.

The scale issue will be encountered again and again in the 3D VTTs. Some experts have said that they find it really hard to fine-tune the scale of characters in TaleSpire for example. I am sure we won't even notice that issue. I am just saying it to show that this isn't something that is easily solved or perfected. And with 40K there are some units that are really titanic, the size of a small child, compared to which the Space Marines barely come above its toes. You really need to get the scale right on all that stuff, because angles and lines-of-sight matter, not to mention aesthetics; but it really does look like the competitive scene has done almost all the work for us here.

As for music, we use the same solutions we've been using for Pathfinder.

Just need to figure out rulers and dice-throwing, then rebuild everything from scratch using my latest insights, do a little testing. And it's done. Really one day's work, but I will probably take at least a couple to be sure.

I hope you guys are already thinking tactics!

[icycalm]

So as you might have gathered from the UE Tactical Movement: Grid vs. Tape Measure discussion I just posted in the Ultimate Edition forum, we will be playing the initial 40K tutorials in Cult Engine Zero (internal codename: Discord) but with visualization powered by Cult Engine 2.9 (internal codename: Tabletop Simulator) via a mostly top-down perspective.

Let's get the main issue out of the way first: Will this give us an ugly result?

I don't think so. In fact, I think the result is beautiful:



Yes, the perspective isn't 3D, but all the objects are, and I can occasionally post an isometric-ish screenshot so players can admire the battle in full 3D, especially in the larger battles where it's easier to take 3D pictures without showing the edge of the battlefield, thus ruining immersion.

Now, the players themselves won't be able to manipulate the camera, and though a music track will be provided for every battle, it's not the same as hearing it in-engine. These are obvious drawbacks.

But the upshot is that we'll be able to burn through dozens of missions in a fraction of the time it would have otherwise taken us, thus completing entire Warhammer seasons and catching up to the latest releases without sacrificing precious weekend time that should be reserved for the roleplaying campaigns. Tactics fans will be able to carry the entire Warhammer tactical metaverse in their pockets all day every day, and interact with it via Discord on their phones 24/7/365, working together with as many friends as they want to push back the "fog-of-war" of the overworld and unlock new locations, missions, modes, programmer minigames and of course lore in the form of books, comics, TV shows and more. And isn't this unheard-of tactical metaverse experience worth sacrificing some immersion for?

Moreover, keep in mind that the official missions ARE NOT the main dish in my tactical metaverse. The main dish are the Stronghold missions I am designing, which will be unique to my Battlemaster, and where we'll HAVE to use Cult Engine 3 because these locations have been built in this engine and look like this:







These are battles that will take a full day, or even multiple days, and they'll HAVE to be run on weekends. They'll be the biggest and most complex Warhammer battles ever fought, by far, in comparison to which the official missions will be mere training material to sharpen your skills and, if you do well in them, build up your army with free units.

So players who tackle the Stronghold locations WILL be fully immersed in 3D, with music, weather and spell effects, and so on, for hours a time. But these occasions will be rare so that they don't impede our roleplaying scheduling. They will be tough battles too with lots of calculations, so people will need a rest in between them anyway.

THEREFORE, by utilizing CEZ, CE2.9 AND CE3 to power different aspects of Battlemaster, I manage to both achieve the ultimate in immersion in the Stronghold/CE3 battles AND the ultimate in metaverse gaming in the official/CEZ&2.9 missions.

There are many more benefits to this dual approach. For example, I can keep running the official missions even when camping with spotty internet connection, because I don't need to connect to a VTT or stream or anything like that. And if I give the Tabletop Simulator file to someone else, they can GM in my complete absence, but without fear of screwing up, since they can pause the game when any issue arises and just ping me or others for advice.

Finally, keep in mind that all this is merely the CURRENT implementation of Alex Kierkegaard's Battlemaster in ALPHA form. There's no telling what the future will bring, and I personally fully expect to eventually switch completely over to CE3 and even Cult Engine 4 before long, with ALL battles running with full automation on an always-on server, so that each player simply logs in, plays his turn, and logs off. We'll absolutely get there one day, but we have to start from somewhere, and I believe this hybrid approach that we're starting with is the optimal way to maximize the often conflicting immersion and metaverse requirements.

ALL THAT said, we still haven't run a single battle, so who knows how it will all pan out. So I reserve the right to make any changes I deem necessary at any time.

It'll probably work out fine tho.