u/Heustacio

dont worry I brought headphones

(In the video its shown my friend beating me at my own game. Btw, sorry for the poor editing, but my main pc went kaput and I had to do it on my old I3 laptop wich barely runs filmora, it was pure pain)

After a long week and a half, I think I finally managed to get the game into a playable state. Not only that, but even added quite a few features I wasnt planning to have on release.

I'll be uploading the game to here:
#https://discord.gg/qgHPYuZTd#

Have Patiente!
The game's code is far from sturdy and I'm almost certain there are still a ton of bugs that will need to get fixed. Expect crashes and please report them aswell as the crashlog in the discord so I can get them fixed.

As I have said before, I havent figured out how to make an AI yet, and as such, the game is only playable through multiplayer. 
For this, you'll need to have a peer to peer with the person you'll be playing with, you can do this with tools such as Radmin VPN. There's a guide on how to do it in the discord.

When everything is arranged there are two maps and two gamemodes you can choose. Random mode picks a team of three tanks of each type for each player randomly, while Custom allows you to pick a team up to five tanks (despite there are only six tank types for now).
If you lack someone to play at the moment, you can always go on the discord chat and ask if anyone wants a match, that was part of its intended purpose.

Speaking of tanks, here are the ones Ive added: Panzer IV D; Type89B; Panzer 38(t); T26 C; Type95 and Panzer III J.

While I originally wanted to do all Oarai's tanks first, I realised both the M3 and the StuGIII would require new features. Combining that with my scarciry in tanks in War Thunder (wich is from where I take off prints for the textures) resulted in having no more than the number of tanks I ended up adding into the game (and even the Panzer III had to be a bit nerfed due to it being superior to most other tanks). The original Panzer IV H, the first tank Ive added, was taken out due to it also being overpowered.

Those limitations are really really annoying, so if any of you own GuP tanks in War Thunder and want to help out, sending me replay files from custom battles would be a massive help for adding new tanks.

Making the tank sprites were definitly the biggest time consumption, since I rely on AI to remove the tank's turret from the chassi, they do it, but end up messing the rest of the tank, taking me some good hours to fix them back in GIMP. The T26 in particular was quite a challenge, after realising there were no C variants in war thunder I ended up picking a Vickers E and spent an entire day trying to make it look like a T26C (wich I think it turned out pretty good). 

Besides the multiplayer and the tanks, I also ended up doing quite a few things I wasnt originally planned to do:

I soon realise how the game could stall very easily if a player could see the whole map, there would be no suprise and little things like turret direction wouldnt matter. As such, I went ahead and already added a vital Fog of War mechanic. The fog of war will largely change when I add terrain heigh though, since a "mount" would be the thing limiting the visibility, for now, its about ten or so plain tiles.

I also added in some sound effects to the game, every tank has its own engine and gunfire sound now (though they may become shared in some tanks as I add more).

Finally, and this one I really enjoyed making, I added music to the game.
I really like how music impacts the game and apropriate music at the apropriate time is one of the best things that can happen. As such, I tried my best at making a somewhat smart music player.
There is a tension value that goes up if theres a lot of shooting and targeting, so if you just encountered the enemy force and youre all already shooting, it starts playing a combat music. If you manage to knock out a tank, it plays a winning music, if you lost a tank a more heavy loosing one instead, if nothing is happening, a small ambient one sarts playing.
While most soundtracks came out of GuP, I also added a few songs I though might fit in well. I dont have much though, since I want to reserve the big iconic ones (katyusha, sakijarven polka, panzerlied) for when I add each respective school into the game, so its a bit empty for now, any recomendations would be welcome.

I'll mainly be posting about the game on discord but I'll ocasionally keep doing it on reddit to atract new players, since the game is depedent on multiplayer.
While I wont be able to play much myself during this days, I will be active on discord and taking care of any bugs that are reported. 

Enjoy the Game!

I have always loved strategy games and I praise them the more detailed and complex they are. As such, I always tried to make my own, disregarding any asthetic details and concentrating fully on the mechanical properties, however, I was fairly new and inexpierenced to programing (and frankly still am a bit), and everytime I started a project I usually abandoned them halfway, not because it wasnt working, but I would loose interest.

For the past few months I have come to like GuP very much, so much indeed, that it gave me an unexpected will to pick up one old project I had  and start working on a GuP themed turn strategy game. But this time however, I organised the project, set working goals and seriously commited to project. The result was, at the end of a couple of weeks, I finally have a working prototype.

The game is exactly what i said before, a turn based strategy game where each player controls a tank force that tries to knock out each other. The tank properties are mostly adapted based on war thunder wiki and are mixed with my own "opinion" of the tank in cause. While I based the tanks stats in theire "real life" performance, I will probably end up adjusting them as its played to account for GuP natural arcadism and the game overall balance.

Besides the stats, the tank textures also come from war thunder replay screenshots, and, therefore, limits the amount of tanks I can put in game as Im not very advanced in it. I would apreciate anyone who could provide me with screenshots of tanks I have yet to unlock. 

That will be the reason I picked the fair fight of a late PanzerIV against a poor Type89. The good part is that it lets me show off the ricochet and non pen effects as I dont think there is anyway a type89 can pen it.

Each tank holds a value that represents the distance he will cover in the turn called Distance Points (DP). They can, and have to be, spent in advancing through tiles by using  the pathset tool. Each tile type has its cost that affects how much DP is spent on moving through it(despite not having many at the moment). Turning the tank also costs DP and it costs more the sharper the turn. At the end of the turn, DP is regenerated acording to the tanks velocity, this one can change if the tank turns, brakes or acelerates. There are also reverse setting, maintain velocity and I will gradually add more quality of life features with time. Speed also affects the movement time of tanks, though thaf tends to be more of a visual feature.

If the tank has a target, and it has a clear line of sight, it will automatically rotate its turret to the target. If the turret manages to catch the target before the tank gets knoked out, the shot is taken. Due to that, turret alignment at the end of the turn is an important thing to consider and can be, aswell as chassi direction at the end of the turn, manually controlled in the right midle part of the UI. 

When the tank fires the shot, however, its probabilistic. The chances of the shot hiting the tank vary acording to the distance, speed and amount of turns (both of the tank and of the targert), target's speed diference, precision and estabilization of the tank. (later, when adding crew mechanics they can provide bufs and debufs to the hit chance)

When the shot hits,  its a coinflip beetween hiting the hull or the turret (track hits will come with crew mechanics). The efectiveness of the shot is not probabilistic though. It takes into account the armor values of the side of the part hit, the linear penetration power of the tank firing and the angle of the shot. This can lead to a ricochet, a non pen or a hit. If the tank is hit (penned), regardless of where, the tank is knoked out, just as in the show. 

NO HEALTH BARS!!!!

Visuals are definitly my biggest bottleneck right now. While I did try my best at trying to make pretty sprites for the tiles and buttons, I am not good at that, and even despite I have an asthetic overlay over the tilemap I left it empty because I couldnt draw good textured to fill it in. It is a harsh reality that most tile textures and effects the game has had been borned on chat gpt and I meerly enhance and clean them on GIMP(or restructure them in case of roads). While I would really like to completly disregard asthetics like in another projects, it is GuP afterall, and that theme greatly requires them.

There are lots of things that arent yet implemented in the game, but wich I will work on after getting the multiplayer demo running. Somethings the game doesnt take into account yet include:

-Terrain heigh, but it will be my first priority  and I already have a pretty solid good idea on how it will work.

-At the moment, player visibility is global, wich means every tank on the map can be seen by both players. A visibility mechanic, however, is something easy to implement and will become one of the top priorities.

- Blocking the turn end when a tank still has DP can lead to a softlock if the the player doesnt have anywhere to go and his DP is beyond the braking cap of the tank. This will get fixed when I add an option to colide with obstacles and other tanks wich would lead to a completle change on velocity and on direction aswell as impacing the tank crew performance when thats added.

-Crew Mechanics are also on the list, though this ones will probably grow up in time as they connect with most aspects of the game.

- Gun calibre doesnt matter, only the penetration properties, it will matter though with size of explosion effects and sending small CV33s up through the air.

- While I have sound effects off the tanks engine, shooting, ricochet, etc.. I havent added in the game yet.

My next goal is obviously to make the game playable and, as I do not know how I could make an AI decide wich tile it shoud move to, that goal would be multiplayer. A peer to peer multiplayer demo would allow people to play and feed me with bugs and things that need to be changed. Of course the demo will have more than just two tanks, but they will all probably be early war ones, as thats what I have in war thunder.

When I finish that, I will make a discord server I can use as a repository for the updates and to get feedback.

Let me know what you think or if you have any sugestions!

(Sorry about the quality, I had to convert this from a .mkv)

I really dont want to make a texture for each way the road is turned, even less when I made curves.

Edit: Its solved. I made a higher resolution base of the road texture and rotated without interpolation for the other direction of the road and both of its curves. It came out really nice at the end. Thanks

I tried my best. I really did. The economy sudently colapsed when trying with its focus tree revival, just as I managed to get the dept to gdp under the gdp growth. Than Salazar died. Than oil crises. What the hell am I suposed to do?

It’s widely believed that while Character.AI’s definition box allows up to 32000 characters, its actual hard limit is merely 3200. I really don't like this number. I find it way too small since I mainly use c.ai for complex RPGs rather than talking to individual characters. I need that space for world lore, character info, AI behavior rules, and many other details.

So, I decided to test this to figure out if that 3200 hard limit actually existed, or if anything past that mark was just completely ignored.

Here is my experiment:

First, I used a character I had already made before I knew about the 3200 limit. Because of that, its definition had a little over 5000 characters. If the 3200 hard cut existed, it would mean that whatever I added to the very bottom of the definition would be completely ignored by a wide margin.

So, I added a simple test block at the end (Image 1) and, in a debug chat, gave the AI a direct command to print that specific block (Image 2). As you can see, the AI printed it perfectly, proving it can in fact read well beyond the 3200 mark.

But to me, this seemed too easy for the AI. I was giving it a direct command to search through its definition for a very specific block. You wouldn't use direct commands like that in an actual RPG.

With that in mind, I added a new block to the bottom of the definition (Image 3). But this time, I formatted it just like any other block of lore. Of course, I made sure it had absolutely nothing to do with the actual lore of my RPG so the AI wouldn't get influenced or confused by its general training data.

Then, without using any [Debug Mode] indicators, I sent the AI a normal roleplay message (Image 4). I just included clues and keywords that described one of the fictional items in the block I had just added.

As seen in the last image, the AI was able to correctly identify and describe the item while staying completely in character! This shows that the bot can and will go past the 3200 mark, even when not given a direct command to search its definition.

(Note: I did this using the Character.AI mobile app without c.ai+.)

I was defending in my Horten's campaign and one of the first things I saw was what I thought it was a T28, I quicky grabbed my at gun and put three holes up its front. When the battle ended, wich had gonne surprisly well only two casualties, I sent out the engineers to repair it and than I noticed what it actually was.
Im so glad I thought it was a T28, it is the first time I ever face a landship and it looks so damn intimidating I would probably hit it in the wrong spot with the nerves,
How can the suspension even hold up on the weigh?

Isnt it just right clicking with the case on it? Im on Above and Beyond btw