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Frader

Hell Commander - RTS - Alpha 3 - Download available!

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Hell Commander is a real-time strategy game based on the Doom Universe. The game is part of the final project I'm doing to get my computer engineering degree.

NEWS: Alpha 3 has been released! Unit balance has been changed to better match the original Doom games.

Game overview:
Players will play the role of an Evil Commander with the objective to possess all human infrastructures. They will win the game whenever they manage to control all UAC buildings. These buildings will be of different kinds and will be distributed across the map. They will also be defended by UAC forces that will fight against all players that try to possess them. That possession will be done using lost souls. That action will take a few seconds and the unit will have to survive in order for it to succeed.

Every player will start with an Icon of Sin placed in a different spot in the map, and some little cash in the form of energy. All units of that player will be summoned in the Icon of Sin. Also, the Icon of Sin won't be destructible by other players and will keep providing energy.

Apart from being a mere objective to win the game, UAC buildings will provide advantatges to the ones controlling them. To start with, there will be power plants that will provide extra energy to summon more units. The rest of the buildings will be required in order to summon specific types of units. For example, a player may need to control a barracks in order to make shotgun soldiers. In the same fashion, a spaceport and a laboratory may be required to summon mancubus demons.

To keep things balanced, some buildings will have stronger UAC forces defending them. Also, a minimum time controlling some types of buildings will be required to make the most powerful units (such as the cyberdemon). Finally, there won't be enough buildings in the map to allow all players to make all types of units. So once the UAC forces are defeated players will still need to fight each other for their control.

TO-DO list:
- A player's visibility. Fog of war.
- Adding objects to the map (barrels, torches, pilars, etc).
- Victory screen.
- Setup options (setting a player's name and other game options).
- Merging both server and client into one single executable. The option "Host game" would then be added.
- Sound?

Limitations:
There's just one map available althought everything's prepared to allow more of them. I don't have any plans on making them for now as i find it a very time consuming task.

Things you may want to take a look at:
All unit properties are defined in a text file called unittypes.xml (movement speed, attack damage and range, etc). That file can be found at the path you installed the game. You may also take a look at map1.xml and gamevalues.xml. It would take a while for me to go over all the properties you can change there, but everything's pretty much self-explanatory. Don't be afraid to ask anyway.

How to start a game:
Everything's packed into a nice installer so you shouldn't have any issues regarding this. Make sure to let DirectX update, otherwise your're likely to see missing dll errors. Links to the executables will be created on the start menu. Once the game is installed you can start the config dialog to set the graphics settings to your liking.

1) Start the server. Don't close the console window.
2) Start a client (either locally or on some other computer).
3) Select "Join game" and enter the IP address of the server machine. If both server and client are on the same machine, you can leave the default IP (which is the localhost address).
4) Repeat steps 2 and 3 to add more players. Press ready on all the players to make the game start.
5) Play!
6) You can close the server's console window once the game has ended.

Note: the included map is for just 2 players.

Some ingame keybindings:
All keybindings are inspired by Blizzard's RTS games. So if you played those you'll feel at home.

Ctrl + <num> - create group
Shift + <num> - add units to group
Hold alt - show unit healthbars
A - attack (select a ground position to do an aggressive movement)
D - show debug stats
Enter - chat message
Esc - cancel action
F10 - leave game

About this version:
I called this version an Alpha as the game still lacks some functionalities. While it is already playable, there are still things that need to be added. Others may require to be polished out. So why I'm making this early version available to you? The reason is simple: feedback. So please, let me know what your thoughts are!

Screenshot:


DOWNLOAD LINK
Version: Alpha 3
Size: 23.7 MB

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Looks pretty sweet. The JDoom models were an excllent choice and really fit the the RTS type well. However, can you only control hell? OR can you also play as the Uac?

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Ok, so was playing through, and the 'needs x to build' times felt extremely long. I had a lab and a spaceport, and after waiting 2 minutes I still didn't have anything higher than barons. There's also the matter of the build times - it takes a long time to build just t1 units (1000 cycles), and the increase to build time for the bigger units felt very small in comparison (1,500 cycles - not increased, straight up 1,500 cycles). The unit speed also seemed rather low, but when I started messing around with the lost souls I can see why it's so low when increasing the speed just 3x makes them all jerky. Increasing the saturation of nodes or whatever it is the monsters use for pathing would be nice, although it might affect latency, as I was getting some nasty lag with only 15 or so lost souls out, though that might just be my 2 1/2 yr old laptop (dual core 8400 M, 2 gigs of ram ... with vista).

Anyways, like any other alpha, it looks like it really needs testing and balancing. And uh, if people make models, would you be willing to add some more monsters, or make a whole separate faction for realm667 monsters? The unit categories aren't that complicated.

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Damn, It doesn't work for me. I keep getting something saying out of video memory, but I guess this was just my computer. Oh well. I guess I may only gaze upon the screensots!

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I noticed in the beginning when I had a lot of imps selected and I gave them a place to go a bunch of them seemed to 'forget' where they were going and just stopped moving while the other half kept going. I didn't really seem to notice this issue later, though.

I'm assuming there's going to be a little map tool?

Cacodemons seemed to die really easy.

I didn't notice a difference in build time between the monsters.

Mouse movement was kind of choppy.

The most important part is likely how the game was coded. I'm running a dual core laptop and I noticed that it's using all of one of my cores and not touching the other. The game doesn't seem to give the cpu any breathing room.

Edit: I don't want to seem like I'm just bashing it. I realize it's very early and I have to say that it is coming along very well. I was pointing out the issues that I had that will hopefully lead to making the game better. I hope you continue to work it out as I would be very excited to play it when it's complete!

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Is the source code available? Will there be an executable for Unix?

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I've hd a play of the map (yeah, in single-player), and it is quite impresseive, doom works suprisingly well as an RTS.

some things I would say is that build times and prices arent incredibly varied. i would have had normal zombiemen in the game also, yes they are weak, but they would be very cheap and very near instant to build. the cyberdemon was way too cheap, i would have it at least 1500 (i think it is dcurrently 300).

sometimes the actions were unresponsive, and on numerous occasions when i had a bunch of units selected when i gave them the action to move somewhere one of them would stay standing untill i gave it a seperate command to move.

i am looking forward to when this does get more features, however.
maybe a single-player campaign as well as a multiplayer as well, as a suggestion.

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I don't know what you used (Other then OGRE, of course.) but this game takes up a hell of a lot of resources to play, even for the extremely simple graphics.

Anyways, I thought this showed a lot of potential. Kinda boring to play as the hellspawn when they can only summon monsters and not build anything, I would like to see the UAC playable as well. Take a look at DOOM RTS, it (although unfinished) had a lot of good ideas in it.

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Firstly, thank you all for taking the time to try this out. I've just been reading through the comments and I was quite surprised to see most of you seem to have performance problems.

I have to admit I've been running all my tests on a kinda powerful machine. It's a Core 2 Duo E6600 (2.4Ghz), 4GB of memory and most importantly, an ATI HD 4870 512MB. I've just tried a fast stress test and created 64 units. Making them move rised the server's cpu usage to about 30%. While being a little higher than i'd wish, the game was still pretty responsive.

Actually, the server is just taking a mere 3-4Mb and rarely going further than 5% cpu under "normal" conditions.

Having said this, my guesses are that you guys may be performance capped by your graphics card. If you could try this out, open the config dialog and set antialiasing to "none". Also, it would help a lot if you could include your system specifications (cpu, memory and graphics card) when reporting performance problems.

Also note that it's perfectly normal for the client (game.exe) to take a full core. Unless you reach your vsync cap, the game will be trying to push as many FPS as possible.

I'll get back to you to answer the other questions which were non-performance related.

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Well, my CPU is triple core, 4 GB RAM and a ATI Radeon HD 3200 graphics card, and it still has somewhat poor performance.

I will try to configure the graphics card as you said, but I recommend trying to tune down the resources needed.

Keep up the good work.

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AveryMaurice said:

Well, my CPU is triple core, 4 GB RAM and a ATI Radeon HD 3200 graphics card, and it still has somewhat poor performance.

I will try to configure the graphics card as you said, but I recommend trying to tune down the resources needed.

Keep up the good work.


Please report back once u've disabled full screen antialiasing.

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Frader said:

Please report back once u've disabled full screen antialiasing.


I just opened up Catalyst, turns out fullscreen Anti Aliasing wasn't on in the first place. :/

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Changed anti-aliasing from level 4 to 2, no lagging with 7 groups of 8 lost souls. Could've also been that I think I had opera opened to this page when I was playing ;) Think I'll mess around with unit balance a little more ...

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AveryMaurice said:

I just opened up Catalyst, turns out fullscreen Anti Aliasing wasn't on in the first place. :/

What I meant is you should open the game's config. It's a shortcut called "Hell Commander - Config" in the start menu. Then look for antialisng and set it to none. I bet you have catalyst set to use "application settings" almost on everything. That means you'll get antialiasing if the game requests it.

I didn't think about this when i did the install package and just included the graphics settings i had on my computer. And those settings had antialiasing set to 4. So if you have an older card that isn't able to cope with that, you should lower it.

Oh and I've been trying the game on a laptop with an integrated Intel graphics card. While the game is surely playable, i have to reckon it feels a bit laggy. But at the same time, i feel it is mainly due to the mouse not moving very smoothly. I mean, even if the game runs at 20fps, a smooth interface would make it feel much more responsive. I'll have to take a closer look at it.

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About the case when you make a group of units move and one (or a few)keep standing still, could be considered a known bug. It happens when the destination the unit wants to go is occupied with some other unit. In such a case the pathfinding algorithm fails to find a route (as none exists) and the result is no movement happens.

I'll eventually solve it by somehow having the unit move as close as possible to it's destination.

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ArmouredBlood said:
The unit speed also seemed rather low, but when I started messing around with the lost souls I can see why it's so low when increasing the speed just 3x makes them all jerky.


You actually found a bug. The funny thing is it was caused by a fix to another problem i had before this realease. Anyway, I'm playing with a solution that should let u set 10x speeds if you wish ;)

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Aight, think I've got a pretty good balance going. I modded it to fit starcraft style gameplay more than warcraft so sorry if I f'ed up how you wanted it to play out. Now I just need to play it against someone, heh. Any takers?

oops, forgot link to the modded unittypes.xml.
http://www.mediafire.com/?mkjyjztgmkq

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I've just uploaded Alpha2. Check the updated link on the first topic. The changes are mainly bug fixes (4 in total). Particularly the two bugs previously commented here should be solved.

I've also changed the default video settings so antialiasing is disabled.

Lastly, I've added a new parameter in gamevalues.xml called instantUnitBuilding. Setting this to true will let players build all types of units instantly and will also remove any building restrictions. The goal of this is to help during the process of game balancing.

Make sure to make a backup of any XML you may have modified.

Also, I will consider including modded XML files on further releases. I admit the ones I included on those releases aren't too well thought. So if you can work out something better it will be welcomed.

Once again, thanks for all the feedback.

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ducon said:

Is the source code available? Will there be an executable for Unix?

GhostlyDeath said:

Is there going to be sourcecode?


I had already thought about that and I couldn't get to a clear decision to any of the questions.

In all honesty, I have mixed feelings regarding the realease of the source code. Do I want to see modded versions of my game? Would anyone actually take the time to do them? Would someone actually learn something from it? I can't find a clear answer to those questions right now. To make things worse my code is full of variable names and comments in spanish and catalan (yea, english is my third language). So it would be quite challenging to understand to others.

At the end of the day thought, this is part of my final degree project. So until I finish it and i get my grades I won't release anything for sure. Then, we can talk about it.

Regarding the Linux version you'll be happy to know the game is based on libraries that also work under those OSes. What that means is that it could be ported with minimum changes. I could consider doing so myself or let the community do it if i finally decide to realese the source.

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Frader said:

I had already thought about that and I couldn't get to a clear decision to any of the questions.

In all honesty, I have mixed feelings regarding the realease of the source code. Do I want to see modded versions of my game? Would anyone actually take the time to do them? Would someone actually learn something from it? I can't find a clear answer to those questions right now. To make things worse my code is full of variable names and comments in spanish and catalan (yea, english is my third language). So it would be quite challenging to understand to others.

At the end of the day thought, this is part of my final degree project. So until I finish it and i get my grades I won't release anything for sure. Then, we can talk about it.

Regarding the Linux version you'll be happy to know the game is based on libraries that also work under those OSes. What that means is that it could be ported with minimum changes. I could consider doing so myself or let the community do it if i finally decide to realese the source.


If you release the source code, it has the potential to be picked up by others who will improve the game and make it better and to fix bugs. Someone could fork the game and make their own modification of it depending on the chosen license, they must legally follow it.

Also, you can still determine what a program does, but might not know why it's like that and to figure that out. This is usually the case for parsing dis-assembly. But if there's comments, someone can always pipe it through a translator.

EDIT: It seems from some of these posts so far that people are interested, if you don't act when they are you may never get that chance again.

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I've just released Alpha3. The download link is on the first topic.

For this version I've completely modified the unit values (health, damage...). The goal was to make them more similar to how they were on the original games. I've also changed their building requirements. The result of all that is that the game feels much faster now. So make sure to check it out ;)

Finally, I've also added an ingame chat. I didn't realise how much i needed it until i started a couple games over the internet :P

There are some other minor tweaks and fixes. For those of you that reported mouse lag I've included an executable called "game_gpu_flush.exe". It includes a tweak to solve a problem I suspect could be causing mouse delay to those with low-end graphics cards. It would be great if you could try it out and report back as I don't notice any real difference on my computer.

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