The Last General

Hello generals! This is the classic monthly recap compiling all the little progress updates I do on Discord weekly (or more often).April started with an April Fools joke where I switched to working on The Last Mayor (a city builder) instead of The Last General, causing mass panic and a few people to leave the Discord (almost everyone finally realized it was a joke and came back now). We also reached 125000 wishlists on Steam, it's wild how fast it's growing! Here is a bunch of stuff I have been working on, besides fixing little things here and there all the time: ECONOMYNew panel showing income and expenses (screenshot).When running out of money your entire economy throttles down, including construction, unit production and salary payments. Operational costs now increase faster as your army grows, representing inefficiencies in a larger organization.CONSTRUCTIONConstruction panel now shows costs, and it deducts 25% of the cost when you start building and the rest during construction.Construction preview ghost now changes colors to indicate where you can and cannot build.You can no longer build anything if you can’t cover the initial 25% downpayment.Added error messages and sounds so you know what’s going on.Added sounds during construction.Now you can rotate buildings in 22.5 degrees increments instead of 45 degrees, so you can place them in more specific orientations when needed.MAPUCHE 64 HELICOPTERFinally added a second attack helicopter to the game!PRODUCED UNITS ASSIGNMENTNew produced units now join existing companies that need them automatically with the same prioritization system used for unit requests and transfers between echelons.CONTROLLABLE AIR DEFENSESI added first and third person control of buildable air defense systems (Legion C-RAM and DSAMS) (screenshot)MENUSAdded a menu with 3 procedural maps to choose from for the alpha: Anatra (6km x 6km), Braccia (8km x 10km) and Calda (8km x 14km).Added some particles animations until I can implement my actual...

Today it's the 3rd anniversary since I started developing The Last General! Here is a pretty long video compiling some of the videos I captured during those 3 years (some never seen before and some new ones from yesterday and today). What's your favorite part?

Hi generals! February was a veeeery busy month preparing the game to start the first alpha playtest!NEW VEHICLESAdded the NAFT4 fuel truck and TM-21 Volley MULTIPLE NAVIGATION MESHESI worked quite a bit on navigation mesh generation to reduce edge cases that were causing some tiles not to generate, then started generating multiple version of the navigation meshes for different unit sizes (infantry, small vehicles, large vehicles) NEW DETAILS SYSTEMMade a new details system and got rid of the previous slow grass system. This new system has tile caching and optimizes updates to keep entities in fixed positions when possible and skipping updates on entire chunks early for super fast performance. The system also works for any details near the camera, not just grass, so I am also able to add a ton of little rocks, debris and other objects when needed. I also replaced all the grass for much fluffier and nicer looking ones. Of course the game won't have that many little rocks and trash on the roads unless there is a lot of destruction in the area, this video below was just a tech demo of this new system.NEW UI SYSTEMWorking on UI in Unity was pretty painful and inefficient using the traditional UGUI system, so I decided to try UI Toolkit and OH BOY! That thing is awesome, I can code the UI in a similar way to making a website, work much faster and make it much more flexible and maintainable. So I started migrating most of the existing UI to this new system and adding more (like pause menu, in-game settings, graphics settings, etc)MIPMAP STREAMINGTo prepare for the alpha going to players with all sorts of hardware I looked into GPU memory usage, and realized a long time ago I disabled mip map streaming because it wasn't compatible with Unity DOTS (the system I am using for large worlds performance). So I decided to implement my own mipmaps streaming solution. This means textures load at different resolutions depending on how close or far objects are relative to the camera, ...