Game-development Log (7. Attack and explosions)

1. Introduction + WebAPI for map tiles
2. Visual Studio Online
3. Loading data to Vector Tiles
4. Rendering image tiles
5. CDN Caching for map tiles
6. Adding Units and Basic Interaction
7. Attack and Explosions
8. Performance checkpoint
9. Bootstraping
10. Real-time with SignalR
11. Persistence and Authentication
12. Scaling up the loader process
13. Polishing the experience

Work-in-progress: https://site-win.azurewebsites.net

On my last post I've added interactivity to the units. On this post I'm taking it further by adding an attack option and corresponding explosions :)

First of all I've included an extra tank on the map that's not controllable by the player. Hence, a nice target to be attacked (although non-destructible).

The attack is triggered in the same way as a regular movement, by dragging the unit. When on-top of another unit it changes to an attack cursor, showing additional info.

I've implemented the explosion using the particle lib at http://scurker.com/projects/particles/

To place the explosion on Bing Maps I've used the pushpin's "htmlContent" property to create a new canvas where the explosion is rendered.

I've also used a custom html pushpin to display the attack details. For now only the range isn't hardcoded.

And that's it for now.

Game-development Log (6. Adding units and basic interaction)

1. Introduction + WebAPI for map tiles
2. Visual Studio Online
3. Loading data to Vector Tiles
4. Rendering image tiles
5. CDN Caching for map tiles
6. Adding Units and Basic Interaction
7. Attacks and Explosions
8. Performance checkpoint
9. Bootstraping
10. Real-time with SignalR
11. Persistence and Authentication
12. Scaling up the loader process
13. Polishing the experience

Work-in-progress: https://site-win.azurewebsites.net

Time to make things more interesting by adding some interactive units to the map. Pretty beefy update that, although highly hardcoded on some places, should lay the foundation for what's to come.

Here's a small video showcasing what's currently deployed on Azure.

Game-development Log (5. CDN Caching for map tiles)

1. Introduction + WebAPI for map tiles
2. Visual Studio Online
3. Loading data to Vector Tiles
4. Rendering image tiles
5. CDN Caching for map tiles
6. Adding Units and Basic Interaction
7. Attacks and Explosions
8. Performance checkpoint
9. Bootstraping
10. Real-time with SignalR
11. Persistence and Authentication
12. Scaling up the loader process
13. Polishing the experience

Work-in-progress: https://site-win.azurewebsites.net

The map that was displayed on my previous post was using an Azure Web-Site to render the tiles. On this iteration I've included a CDN so that the tiles are cached and the latency is minimal when serving them.

Generically speaking this is my target architecture including a CDN:

1. The map displayed on the browser requests a tile to the CDN
2. The CDN checks if it contains the image or not
3. If not, it queries the tile-server for that particular image
4. The Tile Server generates it as described on my previous post
5. The CDN stores the image tile 
6. The CDN returns the image to the browser

Game-development Log (4. Rendering image tiles)

1. Introduction + WebAPI for map tiles
2. Visual Studio Online
3. Loading data to Vector Tiles
4. Rendering image tiles
5. CDN Caching for map tiles
6. Adding Units and Basic Interaction
7. Attacks and Explosions
8. Performance checkpoint
9. Bootstraping
10. Real-time with SignalR
11. Persistence and Authentication
12. Scaling up the loader process
13. Polishing the experience

Work-in-progress: https://site-win.azurewebsites.net

New iteration, tons of new stuff:

• Create a mixed-approach for the problem of having data pre-generated vs generated on-the-fly
• Binary Vector Tiles
• Render image tiles
• Blending with Bing Maps
• Improved loader process to fix/optimize roads and railways