Considering Spring for a future project, need answers.

[CarRepairer]

Unlike others here, I think it would be more worthwhile to use air units and restrict their movements (Using a custom pathfinder, or MoveCtrl, or some other way) than to use land units that look like air units.

How about, every time a move command is issued to an air unit, it's intercepted and a new set of waypoints is given. All you'd need to do is check the location of the move command and if its in certain areas, decide what to do. If the command is issued in near the local planet, ignore it. If it's issued near a distant planet, add some waypoints (move to the start of the warp lane, move down warp lane, move to original destination).

[Pxtl]

Yeah, the reason I've been so active in this thread is that I already went through the mental gymnastics on something similar... never actually wrote a line of code, of course (yeah, I'm that guy) but contemplated how to do a similar "space with zones and tunnels connecting them" topology. The pathfinding for that setting would be simple enough that you really could just D.I.Y and make your spaceships follow your orders directly, thus getting aircraft/gunships to obey your pathing needs.

[Google_Frog]

I agree with carp. Writing a simple node based pathfinder for interplanetary movement sounds a lot simpler than using ground units.

You can block all orders that would cause a unit to move outside of a legal area. If the user orders a unit to move to an area that is legal but disconnected from it's current area you can do some simple node based path finding and give the unit an order queue or moves and hyperspace jumps.

Basically you can intercept, allow and give orders in any arbitary way using lua so this stuff should be possible. You would not be writing an entirely new pathfinder, you would just tell be telling units how to navigate your overarching node network of planets while leaving the actual movement and local pathfinding up to Spring.

You could also do Freelancer style hyperspace lanes. As in a system where there are fast travel bits but there is no limit to the space you can traverse normally in between.

- Spring supports having "ground types" that alter the speed of units

This speed boost is limited to 200% of original speed. Twice as fast doesn't sound fast enough for this. With either implementation you would need to change the speed of your units via lua while in lanes.

[MidKnight]

Ideas are good and all, but, IMHO, you want to get something material running asap, if only to get an idea of how things will be like.

[Johannes]

- Spring supports having "ground types" that alter the speed of units

This speed boost is limited to 200% of original speed. Twice as fast doesn't sound fast enough for this. With either implementation you would need to change the speed of your units via lua while in lanes.

You're not limited to 2x if you also lower the modifier to <1 in other areas.

[Ardis]

I'm still planning this out, so I don't have much to show yet, all I have so far is a text file with ideas and a few low quality renders of some of the ships I plan to include (most of which aren't even finished.) I was just trying to find out what would be possible and what wouldn't be. It's already obvious that I'm going to use Spring now because I don't seem to have to give up anything (yet) to make it work and also because as difficult as you make some of this stuff sound, it's probably far more difficult to make another game engine do something it originally couldn't. The downside is, it looks like I will have to set aside time to learn Lua before I can actually get to work on this game.*

I want to avoid the idea of units straying outside the lanes because that would give them waaaay too much space to fly around. What I might do, so someone doesn't have to use the warp lanes exclusively, I might give one of the factions a specialty structure that creates an artificial warp lane between two systems or sites that aren't connected that both have the structure, but this might complicate things because this might have to alter the map then. I would also need a way to prevent fighters and other ships that are too small to have their own warp from entering warp lanes.

* EDIT: Now that I think about it, I would probably have to learn Lua if I were going to mod a commercial game engine anyways.

[AF]

Look for zwzsg's map palladium, the heightmap is some kind of movign sine wave that changes as time goes on. CA/ZK also has terraforming features

[knorke]

start small
make a unit, put it ingame, make a map, make a hello world widget.
that will probally keep you occupied until christmas.

[Argh]

make a unit, put it ingame, make a map, make a hello world widget.
that will probally keep you occupied until christmas.

Other than saying "gadget", since you want to deal with gamecode right away, I 100% agree with this.

Basically, start dealing with the learning-cliff (it's not a hill, it's not a curve, it's a cliff of Dewm), then you'll be in a much better position to talk about stuff and ask for meaningful help.

Baby steps, man. Learn about implementing content and gamecode. Your game design plans will probably change as you move forward and see areas of interest and challenges.