the basic idea i have is your basic outer space based game, spaceships obviously. i just want to get started , and try it, without going into details, i want the space ships flying past planetary bodies that affect their trajectories. The physics may change, but of course its all related to a gravitational field, which may have local distortions. so i want to build this environment with simple ships flying past objects that affect
their flight. whats the quickest road map for me, where do i start?

thanks!
brian

Try a different engine, this doesn't seem suited to spring.

not sure if bot.

anyway, someone pass the THIS link

How die brw314

welcome to the spring comunity. You decided or have been decided to post your brilliant idea, which while maybe really excellent, my soon lead to a seemingly undeserved explosion of hostilitys. The reason for that beeing that unlike you, many newcomers, are unwilling to lift a finger to see there work acomplished, which leads to understandabel resentment of this virtual village against outsiders who dont comit themselves to the engine or one of the games, you can get for free.
Free?
Free!
Really for free, free of fee, free of advertising, free of censorship, free of moding limitations. From here on, you have four ways to chose.

1. The easy way Mapping:
(Link to Tutorials there)
(Place links here)

2. The hard way: Modding
(Link to Tutorials there)
(Place links here)

3. Be our guest...enjoy the games, share whatever think worthy of sharing, and we will do the same. Keep away from idea threads.

4. The Door.
You can use it on your own feet, or get carried away by moderation or the trollz. Your choice, definatly the last one you make on this board. Have a nice day.


PS: Frictionless spaceshipphysics might be better off as homeworld mod.

<hopes not to ridicule himself, cause he doesn't know a thing about the engine>

Isn't a hightmap similar to what a gravitational field is.

If a planet/star makes an indentation in the hightmap, a unit passing near that planet/star, would in spring normally get additional acceleration (maybe depends on typemap). In the space scenario the addition would just need to go into one of the x/y-axis, and voilá :)

Problems:
* Afaik maps have defined size, so you cannot move in a indefinite space (except with wrapping).
* No clue if it is possible to move parts of the map (planets) around (terraforming is possible, but to what extend, what about texture etc?).
* The hightmap is just a plain, and I think you can have only 1 - so the gravitation configuration is only valid in that plain - your spaceship can only "realistically" move in one (bended) plain.

Maybe the planets could be modeled as units in space. The calculations for newtons simplifications ("laws") aren't to hard - they'd need to be done for all units (full graph) every frame.... no clue what that means for the CPU :)

Spring is really the wrong engine for this, but I think it'd work somehow for a "3d" shoot'em up in one plain :)
</disclaimer>

Ay, you could model a gravitational well with the heightmap... and thats were the whole stuff ends. First you need to rewrite the pathfinder, in addition you would to rewrite the unitspeed in dependency of the orbitchange.

The.. same rewrite goes for Projectiles.. as everything is constantly falling around a planet... thus staying weightless, you would have to spin the map, which could be countere by also spinning the camera .. recreating the illusion of space standing still. Please excuse me im motionsick already.

Vomit some Code first on how you want to do this stuff. Any talk further is futile. Man, you get enough trouble just making a RTS the bends to customized ruules. If you want to do such unplayable (because mindboogling) stuff, you can rewrite way better engines. Also.. any rts in space has taken out the third dimension and realist physics, so gravity wells are just exponential in deepness increasing swamps.

Hehe - didn't want to encourage to really try this - was just juggling a crazy idea (and was curious what unintentional stuff can be done -> hack)

usually hacks have a tendency to backfire in some unexpected and ugly way...
What happens if someone adds singularitywarheads to one of your capitalships which deform the invisible gravityheightmap? You would assume that it would vannish again after some time, and so would the players, firing on the gravitywell that is planet, reterraforming the gravityplane into a plane. And so on, and so forth...

I guess the real deal braker is, that any movement along a eliptic curve would look.. as the pathfinder goes back and forth between the fastest route (a curve) and the gravity map, would be that the spaceship would shake like having a eppileptic seizure.

The space physics might be possible with varying degreees of sucess but its useless to discuss this for now.
http://springrts.com/wiki/Game_and_Unit_development#Mod_development
http://springrts.com/wiki/Simple_Mod_Tutorial
http://springrts.com/wiki/SpringTutorialGame
http://springrts.com/wiki/Lua_Scripting

ok, thanks for the feedback(s) i was thinking a 2d model might be a place to start. i need to take a closer look at spring. If spring isn't the right engine for this , why?, and what is? could you elaborate ?

it seems the tutorial links are very abbreviated, i was looking for a simple project code that i can download, this:

http://springrts.com/wiki/SpringTutorialGame

and

http://code.google.com/p/springtutorialgame/

is empty and this associated link has been hacked:

http://springfiles.com/spring/other/spr ... z-download

Im reminded of the CA experiments showing Commanders being bumped around and rotated and smudged with custom gravity and other forces

http://code.google.com/p/springtutorial ... alGame.sdd

??

Nothing wrong with either of those links, content is there and safe.

wut?
I checked and everything seems to be in place & working.
direct link to browse that source online is
http://code.google.com/p/springtutorial ... alGame.sdd
Cant see anything that looks "hacked" on springfiles.
Did you run anything yet on Spring? You will have to familiar yourself at least briefly with how playing spring games work before you can make one.

The tutorials are kind of outdated/wrong in some aspects though, yes.
Thats just how it is.

applying forces on unit is as easy as
Spring.AddUnitImpulse ( number unitID, number x, number y, number z )
or
Spring.SetUnitPhysics ( number unitID,
number posx, number posy, number posz,
number velx, number vely, number velz,
number rotx, number roty, number rotz,
)

viewtopic.php?f=1&t=25591 for an example video of forces applied to units.
If it can be used to make real newtonian spaceflight physics you will have to test yourself.

Some mods have things like "gravity turrets" that pull units in and out... you could re-make one of those to look like a planet or star, and bang, there's gravity

or, we just forget the gravity thing, and at first just make a space mod? like Homeworld*?


*my god, that was an amazing game.

Beeing in a ship near c, i find this mod development taking seemingly forever. Will there be decent advances when i drop down to normal speed?