DORFteam

End of October Update - More Optimization, and some Redesign Considerations

This update will be pretty sparse on actual screenshots, as most of the work done this month has been on rather unexciting optimization work and fixing bugs, and new design (and redesign) proposals.

First off, just to get it out of the way first, the attached video is a new shellmap, which is the ingame map the game loads when the game first boots up. The main reason for this is to just have a very basic scene that contains things like lighting, shadows, combat, destruction, etc, so we...

End of September - Better map editor and optimization

Hello everyone.

This month was mostly spent further optimizing the game and fixing bugs. We made a short timelapse video showcasing some of the editor improvements, so if you haven't seen that video, you can go watch it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0xSitFxY6zc

First off, we finally, finally fixed that terrible bug that was causing the top row of terrain tiles on the scre...

End of August Update - Further Improvements to the Map Editor

This update will be somewhat brief, since I've mostly been having to do unrelated freelance work to stay financially stable and thus have had less time for DORF, and Thomas was on vacation for 2 weeks, so this month was not marked by a huge amount of progress overall.

That said, we still did make great progress with the map editor in particular, which now has an extremely convenient addition of the multibrush tool, which allows for the extremely rapid placement of banal environmental ...

End of July Update - More Logistics

Hello everyone,

We've spent the past month mostly working on additional logistics updates. One of the big ones was the addition of what we're terming "Slave Miner logic" (for any Yuri's Revenge fans out there). Essentially this is just an alternative method for resource construction and resource units to operate, and will mostly be applied to the Warband faction, although the test unit seen here (which most likely won't make it to the final game) is an Empire unit.

2025-07-30 23:10:50 +0000 UTC View Post

End of June Update - Working Logistics

Hello everyone,

First off, we posted a video to our Youtube page showing off the sprite tilting system in greater detail. If you haven't seen that yet, go do that: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IaOjgIA66fs

With that, all work relating to updating the game's sprite graphics system is essentially complete.

Now, to get to the meat of what was accomplished this month, we spent a lot of time a...

End of May Update - Tilting sprites, light cast from gunfire, and more!

Hello everyone,

We made a ton of progress this month, to the point where the number of additions made to the game's lighting and sprite systems make it look totally different than it did a month ago.

The biggest change this month is the addition of tilting sprites; essentially, a combination of rendering out many angles of the unit sprite, combined with physically rotating the sprite, and using an advanced parallax shader to created interpolations between each frame, allowing ea...

End of April Update - Better methods for smoke and fire

Hello everyone,

This month was mostly spent figuring out a way to improve the game's visual effects, specifically in the area of smoke, explosions and clouds of dust and similar things. Originally, most of these used either stock videos digitized into sprite animations, or were fluid simulations created in Maya. While these look fine in an otherwise 2D game, the addition of dynamic lighting and Z-sorting has led to some problems. Making sprites from canned videos doesn't allow us to ge...

End of March Update - More Units

Hello everyone,

First off, this month was mostly spent continuing to update old artwork and replace it with new stuff to fit the new graphics system, as well as redoing most of the game's color palette files, as the previous ones were very outdated (color palettes are a very oldschool way of doing things, but they do present a huge advantage for VRAM optimization). Here's a screenshot of most of the current units lined up for size comparison. Note that this is by no means all the units...

End of February Update - More Resource Shenanigans

Hello everyone,

February was spent mostly working on further optimizations and getting more working resource-related systems. While it's difficult to really demonstrate some of the optimization changes, after some reworking with the way the game loads .obj files, it now performs more efficiently than before.

The pipelines and conveyors are now back in the game in working order, and we're testing out some additional resource functions, like a dedicated solid materials refinery st...

End of January Update - Finally, The Bottom UI Is Actually Useful Now

Hello everyone,

While this month was mostly spent having to attend to some concerns unrelated to DORF, now that that has been dealt with, I can return to development. Thankfully there still was some progress made this month.

Firstly, we finally got around to making use of that seemingly pointless UI box in the very bottom of the screen. Selected units will show up in this section as icons, which will shrink dynamically as more units are selected to allow for more to be displayed...

End of December Update - Interpolation Progress

Hello everyone,

This post will be quite brief; unfortunately, due to some real life circumstances, not much work could be done on DORF this month. However, that isn't to say nothing has been accomplished. More progress has been made with the planned frame interpolation feature that Thomas has been working on.

As can be seen in the attached video, this will be instrumental in getting smoother movement out of vehicle and aircraft units. This doesn't just look better, but is also a...

End of November Update

Hello everyone,

Progress this month mostly consisted of continuing to replace old SHP assets with new, updated graphics compatible with the lighting system, as well as making a number of derelict junk assets (these will be used in resource collection).

 
This includes a lot of civilian city assets, which, while many already existed, required adding damage, garrisoned and light frames....

End of October Update - A Whole Lot of Junk

Hello everyone.

This month was mostly spent on trying to fill out a lot of the game's resource assets; while there will be conventional mines/resource caches that can be plundered, a lot of the game's resources will take the form of wrecked vehicles and equipment that can be salvaged.

 
A lot had to be tweaked from how this stuff worked in OpenRA; OpenRA originally only allowed for i...

End of September Update - 3D Sprites

First off, one of the biggest developments this month is work being underway to allow for 3D sprites. This sounds like a contradiction (well, it basically is), but what this refers to is getting 2D sprites to rotate along all axes three-dimensionally, as can be seen with the attached video. How the hell does this work?

From a conversation with Tovl:

So my idea is to actually have full 3-axis rotations (for units that benefit from it) with a nominal 32 f...

2024-10-01 03:25:10 +0000 UTC View Post

End of August Update

Hello,

I'll keep this one fairly brief, as most of you probably saw the short trailer that was posted to youtube a week ago, which contained a better demonstration of a lot of the updated visuals than what could be posted here. If you haven't seen that, here is the link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TD-9CMs6_TY

Of course, some more progress has been made since that video went live. As you can ...

End of July Update - Shadow and Lights are (Almost) Done

Hello everyone,

I know some people have complained about the massive amount of development time that the whole dynamic lighting system has eaten up, and that you would like to see more parts of the game fleshed out instead of seeing seemingly endless updates related to the new graphical system, and unfortunately, this month's work has almost entirely related to lights and shadows.

The good news is that all that stuff is bordering on being wrapped up. Aside from some specific th...

End of June Update - Shadows and Lights

Hello everyone,

 There are still some kinks that would need to be worked out, but we now are on the cusp of fully functional shadows cast from units and terrain, as well as individual point lights cast from units and map objects.

 As can be seen here, light emanates from a single point in the middle (where that glitchy candelabra object is) and the surfaces of the surrounded tanks ar...

End of May Update - Big Pile o' Stuff

Hello everyone,

This month was mostly spent doing prep work for the mountain of non-player assets the game will need, and it's still not done, nor have any of these assets been implemented ingame. As there's been a bit of a design shakeup regarding the game focusing more on scrap-collection than in previous iterations of the game's design, that means we're going to need more scrap assets ingame, and since scrap is (obviously) made of disused items, vehicles, tools, etc, and since an is...

Boring End of April Update (which should have been posted 5 days ago)

Hello everyone,

I'll try and be brief, since not a whole lot was accomplished this month due to having to deal with some external things (work, school, expenses, etc), and most of what we did complete is more in the vein of developing tools to make development itself easier.

While the shadow casting system is still being a work in progress, we needed a method to actually figure out the positioning of the shadow mesh relative to the sprite it is supposed to be cast from. In a nor...

Belated End of March update - Warband scrap mechanics and randomization

Hello everyone,

I'd meant to have this update ready by the end of last month, but some things got in the way. This month was mostly spent trying to get the new shadow system working, replacing old artwork with new stuff that is compatible with the new lighting system, and changing up Warband's unit roster.

First up, the shadow system. This still is not ready, but should be finished sometime before the end of April. Right now the fundamentals are in place, however, the system is ...

End of February Update - More Lighting Shenanigans

Hello everyone,  

As mentioned in the last post, this month was mostly spent trying to port over tons of older assets to work within the parameters of the new rendering engine. While I had not gotten as many new assets in as I'd hoped, we did manage to further optimize the game engine, as the new rendering techniques and the large sprite sheets they required were massively increasing the game's load time.

Specifically, the older system simply had a singular types of sprite,...

The Long-Awaited Lighting Update

Hello everyone,

As promised, we now have a functional prototype of the long-discussed lighting/shading engine. As seen in the video above, the actual lighting portion of it is essentially complete; a new lighting option has been added to the map editor, giving a plethora of options for lighting conditions, such as the height and position of the sun (or moon) relative to the land, its intensity, its coloration, as well as coloration and intensity values for ambient values, allowing f...

End of the year update: DORF now has physics

Hello everyone,

First off, thanks to everyone who voted for us in the IndieDB Best Upcoming Indie Games list. I honestly wasn't expecting to see that, given how little I kept that page updated.

This month was pretty busy for reasons beyond this project, as you might imagine, but we did manage to implement a projectile physics system, and neat little things like ammo casing ejection systems for certain units. 

2023-12-28 03:36:57 +0000 UTC View Post

End of November Update - More Resource Buildings

Hello everyone,

This month was pretty slow, with some real-life issues consuming a lot of our programmers' time, meaning there isn't too much to show in the way of new gameplay features.

We do have some new units and buildings to show off though though.

While each faction has different methods of refining and transporting resources, all sides still ultimate...

November Update - More Map Tools & Resource Lines

Hello everyone,

This won't be an exceptionally big update, but we still want to show off more progress.

Gustas has been continuing to update the map editor to include more improvements, which now includes some simple terrain LAT painting tools, so no more tediously placing dirt->grass transition tiles piece by piece.

Note that this is something of a preliminar...

Quick October Update - Slopes, Cliffs and the Map Editor

Hello everyone.

You may have been expecting more updates regarding resource mechanics, but since our new programmer Gustas has gotten onboard, we've made some major progress regarding revamping DORF's level editor and general terrain features.

Already, we now have working terrain elevation tools, featuring a convenient painter tool that lets you change brush sizes and automatically changes adjacent tiles to the correct slope shape:

2023-10-12 20:00:21 +0000 UTC View Post

Update on the End of September Update

Hello all,

Unfortunately, this month was plagued by (mostly) real life problems, and so progress in terms of adding additional resource mechanics was a bit slow. To top it off, there's a gamebreaking bug that's currently being sorted out that makes capturing footage correctly of the new additions impossible, so it'll probably be about another week or two before I can actually post update screenshots/videos here. I am also thinking it may be best to not include a community poll in Octob...

September Poll

Hello all,

This month, you can decide on whether we should focus our efforts on continuing to work on more naval units and field guns like last month, or focus on adding additional content related to resources.

More specifically, naval units would consist of more submarines, corvettes and capital ships, as well as things such as amphibious units (such as tanks and APCs capable of moving over water terrain). More field guns would consist of more crewed field artillery, s...

End of August Update - Ships and Field Artillery

Hello everyone,

Seeing as everyone voted for a tie between working on more naval content and more field guns and artillery, that's what I've been working on.

First off, naval units.

We are aiming for something a little bit closer to accurate scaling for units, and thus naval units will be quite large. Of course, as mentioned before, there will be a n...

August Community Poll

Hello all,

You know the drill, we're doing another monthly poll. While there are still more civilian assets that could be added to the game, I think it would be best to focus more on underexplored parts of each factions' unit roster. So, here are this month's options.

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Naval and Amphibious Units: This would include warships such as destroyers, submarines and battlecruisers, as well as landing ships and hovercraft, and even amphibious tanks and other units that can ...