For some reason, the "red rings" around the metal extractors, showing their extraction radius, isn't working sometimes.

I've noticed that the red radius rings ONLY show up when the constructor whose menu is being used is building.

Examples:

Commander Not Building:


Commander Building:


Not Building:


Building:


I've turned off all the metal extractor related widgets to no avail.

Please fix.

edit: After turning off all the widgets, I've discovered that one of the widgets is at fault. Will report back.

The Geothermal Marker widget is at fault. You can close this thread.

Extractor rings are more or less rendered moot by mex snap.

Is it possible for mex snap to do optimal placement for multiple mex spots within its extraction area? For example I have to turn it off on geyser plains as it never places properly on the doubles.

Yeah it doesn't place mexes properly on spots like that, but on Geyser there's no need to turn it off either - just place the mex where you want like you'd do without it for those spots.

Where it does get in the way is bugging out on BB and such at places.

Johannes, I have tried doing that and upon inspection mex snap seems to place optimally for only one of the points. Even after manually placing it in the right spot it will adjust for one (I believe whichever is closer).

Perhaps when you last tested, the optimal for 1 and 2 points coincidentally matched up?

It's not just 1 map that mexsnap doesn't work properly on. I've played several maps where it places the extractor too far away from the center to get full yield from it. Comet Catcher for instance. In other words I don't trust it, I'd rather do it myself. It's fine to make lua scripts, but please make sure they actually work before you release them, and especially before you make them defaults for BA. This is especially true when one script doesn't do it correctly automatically, and the other prevents you from doing it yourself.

Please make sure to not post slander and FUD when attempting to report bugs: mex snap works flawlessly on Comet Catcher, otherwise post a screenshot of it placing the mex in a suboptimal position.

I would imagine BA, being a game based on Total Annihilation, is designed to be played on maps with Total Annihilation style metal maps (one spot per mex)... if you wish to play on other types of maps that's fine, just disable the widget.

derp

I always thought of those maps as entirely covered in metal extractor spots.

You assume a great deal and investigate less.

metalspots were map features in OTA, by your logic you would place metals spots on every inch of map.

In OTA metal-maps it was a map variable and metal extractors all extracted the same amount by reading that variable.. in Spring you are literally putting metal on every square of the metal map so yes, you "place metals spots on every inch of map".

Check out this paper. It's pretty expensive, it takes a very complex manufacturing process to cover it in white spots like that.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bleaching_of_wood_pulp

Edit: Also, maybe my point is being missed here... with the exception of overriding engine functionality there is no such thing as a traditional Total Annihilation style "Metal Map" in Spring... the only way to simulate the functionality is to paint the entire map a uniform green and set the extraction radius in your map to something smaller then the unit size of that of your smallest metal extractor.

I make no claims as to if this "metal snap" widget would be entirely superfluous or even functional on such a map... so if that was inferred from my statements I apologize.

For those not in the know, the planet Core Primes surface was composed of metal, and you could place a metal extractor anywhere and it would extract a half decent amount of metal. There were no spots, everywhere gave metal, the map was literally made of metal.

Since speed metal, we've not seen many maps of this kind here, though possibly because speed metal took it to such an extreme...

Hardly. Just that none of us want to do metal maps because well, spring cannot handle that sort of map geometry well

What do you mean? Being a metal map or not has nothing to do with geometry.

It does aesthetically... you could make any Spring map just have a solid green metal map but to make it like a Total Annihilation "Core Prime" style metal map you need vertical walls at least twice as tall as your tallest unit... this results in terribly stretched textures. When most maps didn't look all that great that was OK but with the quality we're seeing from maps these days an ugly stretched vertical face would look out of place... that said, theoretically you could have your vertical terrain geometry splatted with a higher resolution texture or what have you... maybe when I'm done my current thing that is completely unrelated to Spring and get a computer that can handle Spring I'll try.

It's worth noting that map heights in OTA were very short. On the range of like 0 - 100, whereas in spring, it's not uncommon at all to see 0 - 1000, so texture stretching is a very real issue.

Look at kaiserj's industrial maps. He's actually done really well with them, but they are pretty similar to the design of metal maps (give or take) and as you can see, they have issues here and there.

Extrapolate those issues to an honest to god metal map, and you have no end of very ugly problems.