Ένα παιχνίδι στρατηγικής πραγματικού χρόνου (RTS) σε 3D, γραμμένο σε MonoGame, στα ελληνικά. Σε ένα εναλλακτικό μέλλον όπου η Σοβιετική Ένωση υπάρχει ακόμη και είναι σύμμαχος της Κίνας, ο στόχος είναι η ήττα της Δυτικής αυτοκρατορίας και η οικοδόμηση ενός ειρηνικού, σοσιαλιστικού κόσμου.
A 3D real-time strategy game in MonoGame, with a Greek-language interface. Set in an alternate future where the Soviet Union still exists and is allied with China; the goal is the defeat of the Western empire.
Release v0.0.1 — the first playable cut: three asymmetric factions, a full 3D
battlefield with mutable terrain, and shooting you can watch happen.
Η σοβιετική βάση. Το πάνελ δείχνει την έκδοση της κατασκευής — v0.0.1, και ό,τι
ακολουθεί το τελευταίο tag (π.χ. v0.0.1-3-g1a2b3c4 για μια κατασκευή τρεις
commits μετά την έκδοση).
The version is the git tag, not a number in a file:
git tag -a v0.0.2 -m "MiVic v0.0.2"
dotnet build MiVic.sln # the build now calls itself v0.0.2Directory.Build.props asks git for the nearest tag at build time and stamps it into
the assembly, which the window title and the status panel read back. A build that is
past a tag says so (v0.0.1-3-g1a2b3c4); a build from a tree with uncommitted changes
says that too (v0.0.1-dirty). A checkout with no tags at all is v0.0.0 rather than
the SDK's default, which would look like a release.
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| Μάχη. Δύο γραμμές αντίκρυ, με βλήμα να σκάει ανάμεσά τους. | Γραμμή βολής. Βολές και βλήματα στον αέρα, από κάθε όπλο. |
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| Έκρηξη. Βλήμα στο έδαφος, λάμψη και θραύσματα. | Γραμμές υγείας. Κάθε μονάδα και κτίριο, δικό μας και εχθρικό. |
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| Τα μοντέλα. Όλα, παραγόμενα από σενάριο Blender. | Η ενημέρωση. Μια σκηνή με κάμερα, υπότιτλους και δικό της θέμα. |
Όλες οι εικόνες παράγονται από το ίδιο το παιχνίδι, χωρίς να παιχτεί χέρι:
$exe = "src/MiVic.Game/bin/Debug/net9.0/MiVic.Game.exe"
# Η βάση, με τα πάνελ: η έκδοση που δείχνει είναι αυτής της κατασκευής.
& $exe --select-hq --screenshot docs/images/skirmish.png --screenshot-frame 90 `
--screenshot-zoom 360 --screenshot-target-x -180 --screenshot-target-z -180
# Η μάχη: και οι τέσσερις από το ίδιο fixture, σε διαφορετική στιγμή και απόσταση.
& $exe --combat-demo --screenshot docs/images/firefight.png --screenshot-frame 40 --screenshot-zoom 45
& $exe --combat-demo --screenshot docs/images/firing-line.png --screenshot-frame 22 --screenshot-zoom 60
& $exe --combat-demo --screenshot docs/images/explosions.png --screenshot-frame 42 --screenshot-zoom 26
& $exe --combat-demo --screenshot docs/images/health.png --screenshot-frame 18 --screenshot-zoom 60
& $exe --model-gallery docs/images/models.png
python3 tools/render_cutscene.py --cutscene m1_briefing --out artifacts/cutscene `
--width 1280 --height 720
Copy-Item artifacts/cutscene/frame0100.png docs/images/briefing.pngThe cutscene command needs the size because the script's default is 960×540, and the image above is 1280×720; the file it copies is one of the composited frames, so the subtitle is the line the scene is saying at that moment. Note also that it runs the Debug build while the probes in docs/PROBE.md are run from Release; content is copied per configuration, so a model regenerated since the last Debug build will not be in a scene rendered from it.
The combat fixture puts its line on the clearest ground the map has rather than at the
map's origin, which is woodland — a firefight has to be visible to be worth
photographing. --screenshot-frame picks the moment (whether a round is in the air, or
a shell is bursting, depends entirely on it) and --screenshot-zoom the distance; the
fixture's own defaults are a wide shot of the whole line.
| Σοβιετικοί | Κινέζοι | Δυτικοί | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Παραγωγή | χαμηλή | πολύ υψηλή | υψηλή |
| Τεχνολογία | υψηλή | χαμηλή | πολύ υψηλή |
| Συνοχή / Ηθικό | ακλόνητο | υψηλό | εύθραυστο |
| Ιδιαίτερο | Σχεδιαστικό Γραφείο | Μαζική παραγωγή | Ηθικό ανά μονάδα |
Design rationale and the alternate-history tech tree are in docs/DESIGN.md. What the ground is made of, and what it is becoming, is in docs/TERRAIN.md. What is planned but not built is in docs/ROADMAP.md. How to interrogate a running client without looking at it — scripted queries, screenshots and checks in one process — is in docs/PROBE.md. How to build a briefing figure with MakeHuman, including the installation, the API traps and how to check the result, is in docs/MAKEHUMAN.md. What a skeptical pass over the whole project found, including the defects it has since fixed, is in docs/AUDIT.md.
- .NET 9 SDK (the project also builds and tests with the .NET 10 SDK — the game and the test projects both roll forward, so a machine with only the .NET 10 runtime can build the solution and run the suite)
- Windows, Linux or macOS with an OpenGL 3.3 capable GPU
- MonoGame content tools are restored automatically by the build
dotnet build MiVic.sln
dotnet test MiVic.sln # 712 tests: 643 core, 44 audio, 25 map
pwsh ./tools/fetch-assets.ps1 # optional: the old borrowed models, no longer used
# Optional: regenerate every model (needs Blender 5.x; the .glb files are committed)
pwsh ./tools/blender/build_all.ps1
dotnet run --project src/MiVic.GameNo Wine and no Windows SDK anywhere. The effects compile with the project's
own dotnet tool — ShadowDuskCLI, HLSL through DXC and SPIRV-Cross straight
to GLSL, natives shipped for every desktop platform — which the build runs
automatically from the tool manifest:
dotnet build MiVic.slnThe first build restores the tool (dotnet tool restore runs inside the
build). The compiled shaders land next to their sources and are not committed —
a build regenerates them when a .fx changes.
CI (.github/workflows/ci.yml) does exactly this on every push and pull
request, and then runs three gates: dotnet test MiVic.sln, every probe in the
repository through a virtual display, and --selftest 600, which is the
client's own verdict on Greek text, the symbol atlas, the health bars, the
replay round-trip and the frame budget. A v* tag publishes a versioned GitHub
release with self-contained portable archives for linux-x64 and win-x64
(.github/workflows/release.yml).
The probes and the self-test run under a scratch profile — --probe and
--selftest write to a temporary directory unless --profile names another —
so a test can never touch a player's real campaign.
| Option | Effect |
|---|---|
--seed <n> |
simulation seed (default 20250101) |
--font-size <px> |
UI font size (default 17) |
--no-help |
hide the controls panel |
--screenshot <file> |
render one frame to PNG and exit |
--screenshot-zoom/-yaw/-pitch/-target-x/-target-z |
camera overrides for verification shots |
--font-sample |
draw a large SpriteFont sample, for font diagnostics |
--selftest [frames] |
measure performance and check the client end to end, write selftest-report.txt next to the executable, exit non-zero on FAIL; run by CI |
--inspect-models |
headless model diagnostics, no GPU required |
--inspect-ui |
headless ImGui draw-data and font-atlas diagnostics |
--model-gallery <file> |
render every model with axis markers, for orientation checks |
--fullscreen |
start fullscreen (F11 toggles it at any time) |
--width <px>, --height <px> |
back-buffer size; the default 1280×720 is a size to play at, not to inspect a model at |
--screenshot-frame <n> |
which frame to capture; whether a round is in flight depends entirely on it |
--viewer |
model viewer: one model on a locked camera |
--viewer-model <Faction/Kind> |
which model the viewer opens on |
--viewer-shot <file> |
render one viewer frame to PNG and exit |
--viewer-distance <m>, --viewer-pitch <deg>, --viewer-angle <deg> |
viewer camera, for reproducible comparison shots |
--combat-demo |
a small battle already in weapon range, for looking at the shooting |
--fire-demo |
one of every weapon firing on a repeating cycle, so rounds can be photographed |
--particle-demo |
one of every effect, laid out in a grid |
--nuke-demo |
a tactical nuke, framed |
--select-hq |
select the player's command centre at start |
--victory-demo |
knock out the rival structures so the victory banner appears |
--objective-demo |
start the demonstration mission whose objectives the opening world has decided |
--paperclip-demo |
start the Operation Paperclip demonstration: a side the victory rule does not judge |
--generator-demo |
a derelict factory on neutral ground emitting its wardens on a fixed cadence (ROADMAP §9) |
--menu |
open the front-end menu even when another option drives the client, for screenshots of it |
--editor |
the map editor: raise and lower with a brush, paint surfaces, place structures and units, set an exact starting force, save and test-play (ROADMAP §10) |
--profile <dir> |
where the campaign's progress and saved matches live, instead of the platform default |
--record <file> |
log every external command and save the match as a replay |
--replay <file> |
verify a replay headlessly and exit (0 = the match was reproduced) |
--watch <file> |
play a recorded match back in the client |
--probe <script> |
run a probe script — scripted queries, screenshots and checks in one process — and exit |
--probe-out <file> |
where a probe writes its transcript (default probe-report.txt) |
--mission <id> |
start a campaign mission |
--mission-file <path> |
play a mission authored as a file (the MissionFile format; the loader runs the script validator and refuses one that cannot be won) |
--map-file <path> |
play an authored map: a seed, edits over the ground it generates, the starting force, and the mission the ground is shaped for (MapFile; the passes are re-derived and the placements asked the placement rules) |
--mission-list |
list the campaign |
--cutscene <id> |
play a scripted scene and carry on (see Cutscenes) |
--render-audio <dir> |
export one WAV per faction theme and exit |
--render-sfx <dir> |
export one WAV per sound effect and exit |
--no-audio |
no music or sound effects |
--help |
usage |
The table is the options worth reading about; --help prints all 61. The fixture
flags are how a mechanic is put on screen without playing to it — --rivals
(Σοβιετικοί against Κινέζοι), --duel, and the --alliance-demo,
--armour-demo, --detection-demo, --emplacement-demo, --flight-demo,
--forest-demo, --ground-demo, --lava-demo and --mud-demo scenes behind
the probes. Two headless exports are also not in the table: --render-scores
and --inspect-ui.
A plain launch opens the menu: Συνέχεια continues the campaign (the first mission not
yet won), Νέα εκστρατεία starts over, Αποστολές offers the missions the campaign has
decided, Μάχη is the skirmish, and Φόρτωση restores a saved match. Esc pauses, and
the pause panel carries Αποθήκευση — a save is a checkpoint a player makes on purpose:
the match's seed, scenario and command log up to the tick, restored by replaying forward.
Progress and saves live in the user's profile (--profile <dir> moves it; a probe or test
should always say so).
| Key | Action |
|---|---|
WASD / arrows |
pan |
| mouse wheel | zoom |
Q / E, middle-drag |
rotate |
Shift + middle-drag |
pan |
| left click | select a unit |
| left drag | box-select units |
| double click | select every unit of that kind on screen |
Shift + click/drag |
add to the selection |
Ctrl + 1…9 |
store the selection in a control group |
1…9 |
recall a control group |
| right click | order selected units to move or attack |
F1 |
toggle help panel |
M |
mute the music and effects |
F11 |
toggle fullscreen |
Esc |
quit |
Production lives behind a selection: click one of your own buildings and the
Παραγωγή panel appears in the bottom-left corner with a button per unit that
building can make. Costs (Π materials, Ε energy) and build time in seconds are
on each button; a button is greyed out when the unit is locked behind a higher
tech tier or you cannot afford it. Jobs are queued, and the panel shows the queue
with the ticks left on the current item.
| Building | Produces |
|---|---|
| Κέντρο διοίκησης | πεζικό, and the structures |
| Εργοστάσιο | tanks, artillery, anti-air, aircraft |
| Σχεδιαστικό γραφείο | research projects that raise the tech tier |
With a design bureau selected, the same panel lists the research projects, and a Παραχώρηση άδειας section hands one of your designs to the Κινέζοι — the alliance's whole point, since a licensed unit bypasses their tech ceiling. When nothing is selected the panel shows a short hint instead of disappearing.
| Project | Purpose |
|---|---|
src/MiVic.Core |
Deterministic simulation. No graphics dependencies, no floating point. |
src/MiVic.Audio |
Procedural chip music: scales, sequencing and synthesis. |
src/MiVic.Game |
MonoGame client: rendering, camera, ImGui UI, model import, particles. |
src/MiVic.Map |
Draws a match as a flat SVG/PNG picture from simulation state. No graphics device, so it runs from the probe, from a test, and on a machine with no GPU. |
tests/MiVic.Core.Tests |
Determinism, fixed-point maths, RNG, pathfinding, campaign and replay tests. |
tests/MiVic.Audio.Tests |
Music generation, scales and WAV encoding. |
tests/MiVic.Map.Tests |
The map writer: determinism of both formats, what each layer draws, and reading a PNG back. |
- The simulation is deterministic. Integer millimetres for positions, Q16.16
fixed point elsewhere, a fixed 20 Hz tick, and a PCG32 generator. No
float, nodouble, noSystem.Random, no dictionary iteration inMiVic.Core. - The client owns no game state. It reads the simulation, interpolates between ticks for smooth motion, and submits instanced draws. Rendering can never change the outcome of a tick.
- Determinism is enforced by tests, not convention.
DeterminismTestscontains golden hashes of a fixed scenario; if a system change alters the simulation, that test fails loudly.
Milestones M0–M7 complete: deterministic simulation core, heightmap terrain, slope-aware A* pathfinding, full-3D free camera, instanced rendering, Greek ImGui UI, a glTF model pipeline, unit selection with move and attack orders, an economy with the three factions' production systems, combat with the morale system, licence production between allies, a deterministic AI opponent, per-team fog of war, the victory and defeat conditions with a Greek end-of-match banner, recorded replays that reproduce a match exactly, a three-mission campaign, a particle system, and procedurally generated faction music.
| Metric | Value |
|---|---|
| Entities | 510 — 3 factions × (166 units + 4 structures) |
| Terrain | 129 × 129 samples over 600 m, 42 m relief |
| Surfaces | 9 types on the navigation lattice, generated from the seed |
| Navigation | 65 × 65 cells, slope- and surface-costed |
| Instanced draw calls | ~1 100 on the standard skirmish — one per model part in frame, not per unit, so a turret can aim |
| Frame time | ~3.2 ms average on the development machine; CI runs software rendering, so it reports no budget |
| Models imported | 49 configured slots (57 generated .glb files); 31 load in a skirmish |
| Pick round-trip | 170/170 |
| Tests | 712 passing (643 core, 44 audio, 25 map) |
Every number in this table that a program can measure is now measured by one: the
entity, instance, draw-call, model, replay and pick figures come from --selftest,
which CI runs, so the table and the client cannot disagree without a red build.
The two it cannot measure — terrain relief and navigation resolution — are
constants in the simulation.
Vision stamping is staggered across ticks (each unit contributes once every ten ticks) and the A* inner loop avoids integer divisions entirely; together those took the worst visibility sample from 28 ms to under 8 ms.
Frame time is a property of the machine and the GPU, so the honest statement is
the one the self-test prints rather than a number in a table. On the development
machine a measured run averages ~3.2 ms with occasional 20–40 ms outliers that
land on an early simulation tick. Under CI's software rasteriser the average is
tens of milliseconds and the budget line reports False, which is why CI treats
the frame budget as information and the functional checks as the gate. The
self-test does report one cost worth watching on any machine: the fog mask
rebuild — 14 ms average, 26 ms worst in the software-rendered run — is a
periodic CPU and texture-upload stall every ten simulation ticks, and it is the
largest single thing the frame does outside the simulation. A 600-frame run
allocates ~84 MB and triggers nine gen-0 collections. See
docs/DESIGN.md and
docs/AUDIT.md.
--selftest used to be run by hand. It is now a CI step, which is how the
Linux-only crash it had carried (an unguarded kernel32.dll call) and the
unreadable SDL window title it reported were found and fixed.
The Soviet campaign is twenty-one missions — Η Σοβιετική Εκστρατεία — played in four
chapters and printed in unlock order by --mission-list. The chapters are data:
MissionsSoviet writes them, MissionCatalog composes them, and CampaignCatalog
says which of them the track hands out, in what order.
| Chapter | Missions | What it adds |
|---|---|---|
| Η Πτώση του Βερολίνου | b1_vistula … b5_reichstag |
the base and the attack, the economy and the era, the ground itself, the emplacement and the fog, then the assault |
| Επιχείρηση Συνδετήρας | pc_paperclip |
the moving objective — people who are not an army |
| Κορέα | k1_yalu … k5_38th |
the ally: a side fighting its own war beside yours |
| Η Σύγχρονη Εποχή | m1_bridgehead … x10_fullscale |
the full-scale war, and the alliance that breaks |
Every mission opens on a briefing, and every briefing is the host's: the same
figure, in the same study, played from the menu before the match (see
Cutscenes). A test in CutsceneFileTests holds the rule to the shipped
content, so the next mission somebody adds cannot quietly skip it.
Objectives are declarative predicates evaluated twice a second, not scripted callbacks, so a mission is as deterministic and replayable as a skirmish. A mission replaces the last-team-standing rule: the objectives decide the outcome.
A mission's starting force is generated: the scenario searches for each team's base, lays out a command centre, a power plant, a factory and (for a side that gets one) a design bureau, and spawns a formation whose composition is a fixed ratio — three tanks, an artillery piece, an anti-air vehicle, an aircraft and six infantry per twelve.
A map can replace that with an authored one. MapDefinition carries two
placement lists — structures and units, one role and one exact position
each — and an exactForce flag:
exactForcefalse (the default, and what every map did before the flag existed): the mission's generated layout is laid out, and the authored placements are added to it.exactForcetrue: the placements are the starting force. Nothing is generated for any team, so the map is exactly what is on it. The mission is still attached — its objectives, triggers and roster are what the map is played for — and each team in play still gets the standard opening stockpile, because authoring the order of battle is not the same decision as authoring the economy.
In the editor (--editor) a Μονάδα tool places units at the cursor and the
Ακριβής σύνθεση checkbox switches the mode; the panel counts what has been
placed, and the save refuses a force the loader would refuse. The rules are the
same ones a player's construction is asked: a structure needs ground it can be
founded on and must not overlap another, a unit needs ground its own movement
class can cross, and the loader checks that every judged side has a command
centre — a side that can neither build nor be beaten is not a side. Unlike the
generated formations, an authored position is never nudged to the nearest legal
cell: a file that names a spot means it, or it is refused with the reason.
tools/probe/exact-force.probe drives the whole path headlessly: three
headquarters and three units placed by name and coordinate, an invariant check
that six placements are six entities standing, and a save.
A mission can open on a scripted scene: a set, the figures standing in it, a
camera that moves between framings, and a monologue. Every mission of the campaign
opens on one: starting a mission from the menu plays its briefing first and starts
the match when the scene ends; --cutscene <id> plays one on its own, and --menu
still opens the front end. The host is the same man in every briefing — the imported
elder in the study — because a briefing is the campaign speaking with one voice, and
only the words change from chapter to chapter.
A scene is a file — src/MiVic.Game/Content/Cutscenes/*.cutscene.json, versioned
and validated like a mission or a map. It carries a set model, a cast, a camera
track in millimetres and milliseconds, and the lines in Greek with a duration
each. The loader refuses what a director could not play: no lines, a camera that
runs backwards, a line spoken by somebody who is not standing in the room.
The figures are recognisable and unnamed. The campaign is an alternate
history, and its statesmen are archetypes — a greatcoat, a moustache, a pipe —
who are never captioned and never name themselves or each other. That is a rule
of the fiction rather than a naming preference, and the asset names, the file
names and the script all keep it. Two Blender generators make the art:
build_sets.py (a room, open on the side the camera looks from) and
build_personalities.py (the figure).
The figure is built on the same parts contract as the soldiers, so the head and arms can turn — and round where a soldier is square: cylindrical limbs, a trunk that widens into a domed shoulder line, a coat that flares to a rounded hem, and a head that is one warped surface rather than a stack of boxes. A soldier is read at forty metres as a helmet and a shoulder line, and every corner he has survives that; a personality is the whole frame at three metres, where every corner is a corner.
The head is a sphere grid with a face warped into it — a brow shelf with sockets cut under it, a nose that runs from between the brows to a tip and then turns back in, cheeks, jowls at the corners of the jaw, a chin, the jaw narrowing towards it. The surface carries the form and a painted map carries the detail: the figure samples three textures, a 2048×1536 face, a cloth map and a flat neutral one for the metal, assigned per part. Skin, hair, the eyes, the brows and the moustache are painted rather than modelled, because a pore is not a polygon and a moustache is hair rather than a shape — and the eyes are painted in one place from one set of coordinates, because the round they were painted in two produced a pupil floating off its own socket with the white showing under it.
tools/blender/face_uv.py is the single definition of that mapping, imported by
both the generator and the painter, so the hairline the mesh is cut along and the
hairline the paint is drawn to are the same function rather than two that agree
until somebody edits one. The hair is the same surface pushed out and combed back
over the crown, flat across the top where the reference's is flat.
The figure is checked by number as well as by eye: tools/measure_figure.py
compares twelve silhouette widths from crown to chin, and one colour, against a
committed baseline, and CI fails the build if it has drifted. Both kinds of check
are kept because they fail in opposite directions — the profile constrains width
and never form, and the eye catches form and cannot measure. See
docs/ART_PIPELINE.md §2.2.
tools/blender/preview_model.py draws a model from four sides in the Workbench
engine, with vertex colours and an orthographic camera: the same flat colours the
renderer stores, without the rebuild-probe-wait cycle that a scene render costs.
The briefing figures are imported, not generated. The generated figure above is
good at a uniform and a silhouette and was never good at a face, and a face is what
a briefing is: three metres away, for eight seconds, with nothing else in the frame.
tools/blender/build_makehuman.py builds those figures with MakeHuman through
MPFB2 instead — a real skull, a real skin, and a skeleton with an Idle clip rather
than rigid parts. docs/MAKEHUMAN.md is the guide: installation, the API calls and
the traps in them, and how to check the result.
What it does, in order: the body is a proxy fitted to a targeted basemesh, and the
face is pushed towards the reference by nine weighted detail targets; the skin is
old_caucasian_male, scaled by 0.78 because the pack paints for MakeHuman's own
lighting and the face otherwise arrives clipped; the pack's clothes are repainted into
one grey — a closed-front field jacket that a placket, a line of gold buttons and a pair
of red collar tabs, all built as geometry by tools/blender/makehuman_uniform.py, turn
into the tunic of the reference portrait; the hair is repainted a dark grey and its
hairline given the reference's temple peaks; and the moustache is a mesh from the
community bodyparts06 pack, widened and drooped, over paint worked into the skin map —
the paint is measured off the mesh rather than a UV layout, because the head is found
from the head bone and in the rest pose the fingers reach further forward than the nose
does. The pipe is authored, not found: tools/blender/makehuman_pipe.py sweeps a shank
and lathes a bowl and weights every vertex to the head bone, so it is smoked, not held.
base.obj is a stand-in that is never meant to be seen and is deleted before export.
An imported figure brings its own materials and its own images inside the glb, which is a second provenance for a model's colour: the generated figures have no material at all and are coloured by a map found next to them by name. The loader asks the model for its own texture first and falls back to the sidecar. The new path is used for cutscenes only; the soldiers keep the parts contract until it has proved out.
There are no voices: the words are typed on screen in Greek over the faction's own procedural score (a briefing is scored by its own side). The motion stays diorama-honest — a man at his desk, not an actor on a stage: he breathes, draws on his pipe (a wisp of smoke climbs off the bowl), takes it in hand for a moment, and sets out the front with one open hand. The arm that takes the pipe is a two-bone solve rather than a direction like every other bone, because a direction is not a place: aimed at the mouth, it folded through his own chest and left the fingertips 69 mm from the pipe. See docs/MAKEHUMAN.md §4 — the room is lit by the petrol lamp on the desk and nothing else, the light breathing with the flame, and the window behind the books is night. Space ends the line being read, Esc skips the scene, and every line is also the transcript's.
tools/probe/cutscene.probe drives the whole thing in CI: it advances the
scene's clock explicitly so two runs photograph the same two moments, asserts
that the scene has something to draw and that a finished scene has said every
line it was written to say, and saves two frames. tools/render_cutscene.py
turns the same scene into MP4, GIF and a contact sheet with the subtitles burned
in: the frames come from the probe, which seeks rather than waits, and the words
are composited afterwards because the game puts them on screen through ImGui,
which a headless probe cannot draw.
Explosions, smoke plumes and dust are CPU-simulated billboards drawn in two instanced passes — additive for sparks, straight alpha for smoke and debris. Deaths are reported by the simulation as events and turned into effects by the client, which is strictly one-way: particles can never affect a tick, and an enemy dying out of sight spawns nothing. Structures smoke in proportion to the damage they have taken.
Damage is resolved on the tick a weapon fires, exactly as it always was — a round on screen is a picture of a shot that has already happened, and giving rounds real flight time would put them in the simulation, where they would change the outcome of a tick and every recorded hash in the project.
The client finds the shots without being told: CombatSystem sets an entity's
attack cooldown to its weapon's reload only on the tick it actually fires, so a
cooldown that was zero last tick and is positive now, with a target, is a shot.
Each weapon then draws itself — a rifle a thin tracer, a tank gun a fat round with
a flash and a crack, a howitzer a shell thrown in an arc, the Κατιούσα four
wobbling rockets trailing smoke, anti-air twin rounds that burst in the air,
aircraft and drones missiles on smoke trails, the Ηλεκτροπυροβόλο an electric arc
between two points. Impacts match the weapon, and a wreck keeps exploding after it
dies.
Three things are drawn with their own geometry and their own pixel shader rather than as billboards, because a billboard is the wrong shape for each of them: a shockwave is an annulus, the body of a detonation is a low-poly sphere shaded from its own facets, and a tracer is a streak shaded along its length.
--combat-demo, --fire-demo, --particle-demo and --nuke-demo exist to look
at all of this without playing a match; see Screenshots.
The ground is meshed from the simulation's own height field and surface layer, so what is drawn is exactly what pathfinding reasons about. Water and lava are separate surfaces drawn over it with their own shaders, animated from the frame clock rather than from a texture — the only way a project with no authored assets can have moving water. A separate mesh rather than a flag on the terrain's vertices, because the terrain vertex alpha is already the faction paint mask and borrowing it would let a team's colour bleed into the sea.
Nothing is ever built or spawned on water or lava. Produced structures and units are placed at an offset from whatever made them, and that offset knows nothing about the map — so every site is resolved to the nearest solid ground before the entity appears. Without that, a factory on a shoreline eventually puts its next building in the lake, and a structure in the sea is one the player cannot reach, defend or use.
Bridges are the way across. Building one spans the narrow way over the water and converts the cells it crosses into the shallow-water ford surface that ground units can already cross, capped by a maximum span so a bridge cannot be thrown over an ocean.
The soundtrack is generated, not recorded: no audio files ship with the game.
Each faction is written in its own musical tradition — the Σοβιετικοί get a
minor-key march with a harmonic-minor cadence, the Κινέζοι an anhemitonic
pentatonic song with grace notes, and the Δυτικοί a twelve-bar blues shuffle with
a boogie bass, backbeat and slightly detuned sawtooths. The generator is
deterministic, so a theme is reproducible and testable, and --render-audio <dir>
exports one WAV per faction for listening.
Combat audio comes from the same chip: rifle cracks, tank reports, artillery
launches, anti-air bursts, explosions, armour impacts, an alarm and a looping
engine, all rendered from noise and oscillators by SoundBank and exported with
--render-sfx <dir>. The client plays them at the position of the event, panned
by where it sits relative to the camera and attenuated by distance, with a budget
of six effects per frame so a five-hundred-unit battle cannot flood the mixer.
Impacts are detected by diffing entity health — the only reliable signal that a
shot landed, since a unit's cooldown also moves when it fails to find a target.
See docs/DESIGN.md.
Each team has a visibility grid at navigation resolution: visible cells show live enemy units, explored cells show remembered terrain, and everything else is black. Enemies in cells the player cannot see are not drawn at all. The fog itself is a terrain-shaped overlay textured by a per-team mask, not a grid of dark tiles — see docs/DESIGN.md for why that distinction matters visually.
A replay is the match's inputs, not its state: the seed, the scenario, the entity capacity and every command the outside world issued, each stamped with the tick it was issued on. Because the simulation is deterministic, replaying that log into a fresh world reproduces the battle exactly — the file stores the state hash it ended on, so verification is one comparison.
MiVic.Game.exe --record match.mvic # play; the match is saved on exit
MiVic.Game.exe --selftest 600 --record m.mvic # record headlessly
MiVic.Game.exe --replay match.mvic # verify: exit code 0 means exact
MiVic.Game.exe --watch match.mvic # watch it back
Commands the AI issues are deliberately not logged: the AI is part of the
simulation and re-derives its orders from the same state, so recording them would
apply each one twice. That keeps a 500-unit battle's replay at a few kilobytes.
--selftest records the live skirmish, replays it in-process and reports
replay round-trip, so a determinism regression fails the build rather than
showing up as a desync later. See
docs/DESIGN.md.
A probe is a script of commands run against a live match in one process: advance the simulation, ask what the world and the renderer are doing, photograph as many moments as you like, and assert the answers.
tick 40
parts 509 turret # where the gun points, from the renderer's own aim
events 4 # where the shots went
expect "the turret faces the shot" 33.7 33.7 0.2
MiVic.Game.exe --turret-demo --probe tools/probe/turret.probe --probe-out artifacts/probe/turret.txt
It exists because testing here used to be a process launch, one screenshot and a guess per question, and most of this session's bugs were settled in seconds by a number that no screenshot could have shown: which axis a rotating part turns about, whether a turret faces the shot it fired, how many cells of each surface exist, how many of them are in frame. The command set, the output format and worked transcripts are in docs/PROBE.md.
tools/probe/base-ground.probe is the same idea asked of the map: where each faction's base
ends up on the standard seed, and what the ground under it costs every movement class to
cross — which is how a base standing in a lake is told apart from one on a shore without
looking at either.
VictorySystem decides the match on a fixed interval: the alliance wins when the
Δυτικοί have no structures left, the Δυτικοί win when the Σοβιετικοί and Κινέζοι
are both reduced to nothing, and a mutual wipe-out is a draw. The outcome is part
of the state hash, so it is as deterministic as the rest of the simulation. The
client shows a centred Greek banner over a dimmed battlefield: ΝΙΚΗ, ΗΤΤΑ
or ΙΣΟΠΑΛΙΑ, with the reason underneath.
Units auto-engage enemies in range and can be ordered onto a specific target, which they will chase. Range is horizontal; only anti-air and aircraft can engage aircraft. Morale — the Δυτικοί weakness — falls with local force balance and recent casualties, scales reload speed by up to ×1.5, and below 0.25 sends a unit routing away from the enemy until it rallies above 0.40.
Two Σοβιετικοί roles exist purely because of that asymmetry. The Κατιούσα is rocket artillery: a harder-hitting, longer-ranged salvo than a howitzer, but the impact point scatters up to 26 m off target and everything hostile inside 22 m takes full damage — devastating against a formation or a building, poor against one moving tank. The Κομισάριος is unarmed, cheap and worth killing: it steadies the morale of friends around it. (Its stated initiative cost is not modelled yet.)
The Κινέζοι answer technology with automation. Ρομποτικό Πεζικό and Ντρόουν are tier-3 hardware restricted to them alone: they have no morale, so they never rout and get no morale-driven reload bonus either, and they cost energy instead of water because there are no crews to feed. Drones fly, which means terrain ignores them and only anti-air can engage them.
The Δυτικοί army is a bill. Propaganda costs one material per eight armed units per tick and sets the morale baseline — +0.10 while it is paid, −0.20 when it is not — and Μισθοφόρος contract infantry cost a wage every tick and down-tools (routs, and will not fight) the moment the treasury cannot cover it. The status panel shows the bill and says which obligation went unpaid.
The battlefield has nine surface types, generated from the world seed on the same lattice as the navigation grid, so the same seed always produces the same mud in the same place. Passability and cost are a lookup in permille of flat ground, with zero meaning impassable, which is what lets the existing cost-driven A* pick terrain up without changing its algorithm.
| Γρασίδι | Λάσπη | Άμμος | Χιόνι | Βράχος | Ρηχό νερό | Βαθύ νερό | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Πεζικό | 100 | 200 | 120 | 150 | 180 | 250 | — |
| Ερπύστριες | 100 | 250 | 150 | 180 | 180 | 300 | — |
| Τροχοφόρα | 100 | 300 | 160 | 200 | 180 | 450 | — |
| Αεροσκάφη | 100 | 100 | 100 | 100 | 100 | 100 | 100 |
Mud and snow are then scaled by the mover's ground pressure, which is where the faction asymmetry becomes physical. A Σοβιετικοί tank runs at 750 ‰ of baseline pressure — a light hull on wide tracks — against 1100 for Δυτικοί and 1250 for Κινέζοι, so the same mud that costs a Soviet column 187 ‰ costs a Chinese one 312 ‰. That is the T-34 lesson: the rasputitsa hurt the invader more than the defender, and the light hull kept moving where the heavies sank.
- Deep water is impassable to everything on the ground and irrelevant to aircraft. Shallow water is a ford: crossable, never cheap, and the reason a flooded map is still playable.
- The generator guarantees a crossing. Deep water can strand a unit on an island, and a unit that cannot path anywhere reads as a bug rather than as terrain. After classifying, the generator floods outward from the largest patch of ground and carves the narrowest gap to every stranded patch into a ford. Deterministic, and bounded: a patch walled off by cliffs rather than water is left alone instead of being retried forever.
- Spawning respects it. A unit whose spawn point lands in a lake is moved to the nearest free dry cell, and formations spread out instead of stacking on one point.
- A* is memoised per search. A cell is looked at once as a node but up to eight times as a neighbour, so the surface lookup is cached; without that, adding terrain tripled the test suite's runtime.
- The ground wears. Driving over a cell churns it, by the mover's ground pressure, and it settles over time. Worn ground costs more, and the surcharge multiplies the cost a unit already pays — so the same churned field is a nuisance to infantry and a bog to a tank. A column of armour churns its own route and slows itself down, drawn as the ground darkening towards mud.
- Research lightens it. «Βαθιά Μάχη» multiplies the team's mud and snow penalty by 0.5, so a researched Σοβιετικοί tank runs at 375 ‰ of baseline ground pressure — the faction that handles mud best is the one that can research its way to ignoring it. The multiplier is per team, so an ally who never researches it still bogs down.
Still to come: the mud churn counter (wet ground driven over becomes deep mud),
Anything damaged, and anything selected, gets a health bar floating over it: a dark backing with a coloured fill that empties from the right — green, amber, red. Bars are camera-facing quads drawn between the units and the fog, so a bar never gives away a unit the player cannot see. A healthy unit nobody asked about gets no bar at all, because a bar over every unit is noise.
--selftest reports how many bars were drawn, which is the check that damage
reached the interface and not only the simulation.
A Γέφυρα button appears in the support panel once a faction has a factory. Clicking it arms a placement and the next click on water spans it: the simulation picks the narrow axis so a crossing actually crosses, converts the water along it to a ford, and charges for the work. A site that is not water, too wide, or unaffordable is refused without charging — a misplaced click costs nothing but the click.
Snow shortens sight to 65 % for units standing in it. Snow blinds as well as slows, so an advance through it is made nearly blind and scouting matters more.
Abilities are data in AbilityCatalog, validated by SimWorld.TryUseAbility
(faction, era, prerequisite project, prerequisite structure, cooldown, cost) and
resolved in ascending slot order. The Υποστήριξη panel lists what your faction
can call in; clicking a button arms it and the next left-click on the ground is the
target.
| Ability | Era | Who | Prerequisite | Effect |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Τροχιακό Πλήγμα | 3 | Σοβιετικοί | Κόκκινος Ουρανός + design bureau | 350 damage in 55 m, enemies only |
| Τακτικό Πυρηνικό Όπλο | 4 | Σοβιετικοί + Δυτικοί | a standing Πυρηνικός Σταθμός | 900 damage in 110 m, friend and foe |
| Έλεγχος Καιρού | 4 | Σοβιετικοί | Κόκκινος Λογισμός + design bureau | turns a 70 m area to mud for 60 s — no damage at all |
A nuke does not distinguish friend from foe; the orbital strike does, because it is aimed. Losing the nuclear plant takes the capability away with it, which makes the plant the first structure in the game whose value is not its income.
Έλεγχος Καιρού is the payoff of the whole ground-pressure system: the Σοβιετικοί soak a 70 m stretch of ground into mud for sixty seconds, aimed at whoever has the worst ground pressure. It deals no damage — the mud is the weapon. Terrain is no longer a pure function of the seed, so the surface is part of the state hash and the ground reverts exactly when the effect expires.
Terrain is drawn as it is simulated. The ground mesh takes its colour from the
simulation's own surface layer, so mud the player can see is mud the pathfinder
charges for, and water is flattened to the water line so lakes read as lakes rather
than as dark pits. The mesh is re-built from TerrainLayer.Revision, so a weather
control cast appears on the ground the moment it lands without meshing the terrain
every frame.
The Καταδρομέας is the Δυτικοί era-V edge: fast, hard-hitting, fragile, and invisible to the enemy until it fires. A shot reveals it for five seconds, and any enemy unit within 40 m detects it regardless — so stealth is a way to choose your moment, not a way to become untouchable. Hidden units are neither targetable nor drawn.
The Σοβιετικοί can licence a design to the Κινέζοι from their build panel. A licensed unit bypasses the Chinese tech ceiling entirely, which is how the alliance fields hardware the Κινέζοι could never research. An AI plays teams 1 and 2: it manages power, builds what it lacks, researches, grows an army, gathers it, and attacks once it is large enough — all through the same commands a human issues, so it stays inside the determinism contract.
| Σοβιετικοί | Κινέζοι | Δυτικοί | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Parallel production slots | 4 | 6 | 3 |
| Build speed | ×1.10 | ×1.50 | ×0.80 |
| Unit cost | ×0.90 | ×0.70 | ×2.20 |
| Resource income | ×1.00 | ×0.90 | ×2.50 |
| Research speed | ×1.25 | ×0.70 | ×1.00 |
| Tech ceiling | 4 | 3 | 5 |
Resources are Πόροι (materials), Ενέργεια (energy) and Νερό (water). Command centres produce materials and water, power plants produce energy and water, and every other structure draws energy as upkeep — a team that cannot pay its upkeep stops producing. Every construction job and every unit costs all three, paid when it is queued, so a queue can never be filled with resources the team does not have. Income scales with the faction's wealth multiplier, upkeep does not: the Δυτικοί are rich rather than productive, so their bottleneck is factory time, never money.
Σοβιετικοί factories cannot build a design directly. The design bureau must first run a prototype — twice the cost and twice the build time, one at a time — which approves the design for production and delivers the prototype itself as a real unit. Infantry is exempt, because it comes from the command centre. This is the faction's real weakness: the army cannot pivot late, because a design the bureau has not proven is not available. Research runs at the design bureau and raises the tech tier, which is what keeps the Κινέζοι out of the aircraft tier entirely.
Next: a balance pass over the branched alternate-history tech tree, then campaign scripting for scripted events between missions.
The AI already respects the fog for everything that moves: AiSystem will not
order an attack on a mobile enemy the team cannot see, and it asks the same
visibility grid the client draws. What it deliberately knows is where enemy
buildings stand — a structure does not move, so an order against one is an
order against a place, and requiring live eyes on a base six hundred metres away
would mean no army could ever be sent. Giving it a scouting memory of its own is
a feature, not a bug fix, and it is on the list. (This entry used to read "make
the AI respect fog of war (it currently plans against the whole map)", which had
stopped being true.)
Greek needed four separate fixes, all now verified automatically by --selftest
(see docs/DESIGN.md):
- ImGui glyph ranges must include Greek and Coptic.
- ImGui's atlas uses straight alpha, so it needs
BlendState.NonPremultiplied. MonoGame'sAlphaBlendis premultiplied and draws every glyph as a white box. - The window title must be set after the window exists, because
SDL_CreateWindowmarshals its title argument as ANSI. - The
.spritefontneeds explicit Greek character regions.
The UI font is Noto Sans (SIL OFL), used both asa runtime TTF for ImGui and, compiled through the content pipeline, as
Content/Fonts/UiText.spritefont for world-space labels.
A glyph range is only half of it. A symbol from a block the font has no glyph in is drawn as the
same box a missing Greek letter is, and — unlike a missing Greek range — nothing about it looks
wrong until somebody reads the panel: √ on a completed objective and ▶ on the running
production job were both drawn as boxes for months. Every non-ASCII symbol the interface draws is
listed in src/MiVic.Game/Ui/UiSymbols.cs with the font path that draws it, and --selftest
checks each one against the atlas and the compiled SpriteFont.
The symbols Noto Sans cannot supply come from Content/Fonts/NotoSansMath-UiSymbols.ttf, a
seven-kilobyte subset of Noto Sans Math
(SIL OFL, as the rest of the fonts are) merged into the same atlas entries. It is built from the
catalogue by tools/build-ui-symbol-font.ps1, so the two cannot disagree about which symbols it
is there for.
MiVic's source code is released under the MIT License.
That covers the code, the generated documentation and all of the 3D art. Every
model in the game is generated by the scripts in tools/blender/ and committed to
this repository, so nothing has to be downloaded to build or run it. One part of
one model is the exception: the briefing figure's moustache is
grinsegold_moustache by grinsegold, from the MakeHuman community bodyparts06
asset pack, shared under CC-BY — the credit is here, and the mesh is edited
(widened, drooped and repainted) as the licence allows. The MakeHuman system
assets the figure is otherwise built from are CC0. The
tools/fetch-assets.ps1 script and the borrowed models it once fetched are still
present but no longer referenced by the game; those files are not committed and
remain under their own licence. See
src/MiVic.Game/Content/Models/README.md.