Warcraft Tactics demo released

The new Warcraft Tactics (WCT) demo is out. Although this is a project hosted by wc3c, I'm hoping it will have some appeal to people here as well. For those who have never checked the Warcraft Tactics forum in wc3c (most people reading this, I suspect) I'd like to take this opportunity to invite you there to check this out. WCT is a turn based squad level game, inspired by Final Fantasy Tactics (for those who have never played that, gameplay is also reminiscent of Fallout, Heroes of Might and Magic, and the "Shining" series by Sega).

This new demo shows off most of the basic features that will be in the final version, including moves, attacks, items, and several of the passive skills. This is not really a game so much as a demonstration, but it does show off the engine (nearly 700kb of code) and most of the features of the game.

The demo iteslf can be found here (second post):
http://www.wc3campaigns.com/forums/s...threadid=14822

In case that doesn't whet your appetite, perhaps a few screenshots will:

(teleportation)


(attacking)



(more screenshots can be found here)

(stats)


(movement)

Screenshots look pretty impressive. Good work.

Here's what I thought of the demo:

The dialog system is good, but too slow.
Using the teleportation splat tile generates itself, meaning it doesn't show all tiles at once.
Stat System seems effective.

Also all the menus keep coming up, the only way I could exit the game was to select STATS from the main menu so I could get the war3 menu to exit. Seems good!

Thanks so much for the feeedback.
Regarding the dialog system, given the complexity of the game, it's hard for me to imagine a different way to implement everything. Final Fantasy Tactics, which served as the inspiration for this, was similiarly slow paced. This isn't ideal, of course, but people who enjoy turn based tactical games have more patience with such things than, say, tower defense fans (not that that's an insult to tower defense fans - they're merely different tastes).

With respect to the teleportation graphics, each "tile" is a unit, which generates a splat. Calling up 400 units at once (20 rows, 20 columns) to create the solid blue field causes a 2-3 second lag in gameplay no matter what, at least on my computer. I decided that if such a lag was inevitable, I might as well make that pause more interesting by causing the tiles to light up in that "random fill" style. The random fill is no slower than the lag would otherwise be, but far cooler looking, imho.

Finally, with respect to accessing the wc3 controls, *any* button on the "main menu," when pushed, will give you back control of the curser and allow you to hit F10, not merely the stats button.

Is there any way you can speed up the dialog system? I didn't mean it was slow like click click click click. I mean it's slow when 1 menu goes to another, just the time inbetween. Having that sped up would be a major bonus.

I'll look into it, but the way the menus "flow" makes it difficult to make it much faster - a very slight amount of code takes place between them, which create that split second between menus.

WOW!! I love FFT & Shining force.......... this is a must for me.. as you can see by my sig & name, I'm a huge FF fan. how long till relase??

i got board of fft fast... its a good game, but i prefer rpgs, btw: not my type of map, but u are an exelent map maker. verry well made map.

A while, unfortunately. I'm probably going to start coding skills soon, but this is a long term project, and one that progresses relatively slowly, even when I'm devoting huge amounts of time to it. Hopefully by the end of the summer, I'll have enough progress to release a more advanced version of this.