raaar wrote:I've been reading rumours about devs wanting to remove TA legacy stuff for years (3do, bos/cob, tdf processing, etc.). I don't expect legacy support to be improved or encouraged, but I don't want it removed either
that is just my constant pushing to have superflous stuff like the above removed as there is NO real reason to hold onto any of the specific items in the engine's code. As a community I feel us having bos/cob makes it even more bewildering for people starting in spring as people will point them to BA or something. TDF is code bloat imo. 3do renders badly, has no access to glow or translucency, behe does have a converted to convert from 3do btw but he is unable to dig it up due to IRL priorities at the moment..
raaar wrote:But removing 3do, bos/cob or unit info tdfs is going to be a lot more troublesome. Having applications to convert to the new recommended formats is good, but forcing a conversion is not, because it also forces game devs to use other tools.
if the tool is made available it takes like MAYBE 5 minutes to replace your old unit def to lua. The remainder really are about the same for manual conversion. TDF doesn't really exist any more as flozi says. it was the extra parsing to support it that I was advocating the removal of.
raaar wrote:Some game devs (like me) may also have written external applications to make managing their game easier, which would need to be adapted to processing lua files.
I wrote a .tdf editor years ago in c# for shits and giggles, outside of you, I am the only one who wasted the time playing with that(I did it to refresh my coding knowledge).
raaar wrote:As a game dev I expect engine devs' ongoing work to make my life easier, not harder.
bos scripts are limited in comparison to lua, it is like saying you want to go uphill biking on a tricycle and I zip past on my mountain bike. Even lua defs are significantly more powerful. See flozi's weapon def inheritance code. or my generalized script that builds out my unit animation scripts based on parameters in a def file.
raaar wrote:One of the big advantages Spring has is it's ease of using the legacy formats TA used and make similar games. It may end up being THE hub for many TA mods that are out there still using the original TA engine (I still don't get how it hasn't happened already).
It's ease of use in legacy formats? Like the dated 3do builder or the unstable and very dated scriptor? They are less stable than upspring IMO. It isn't ever going to be the HUB of OTA mods as there was massive amounts of conversion work for projects coming to spring. I know, I did that dance 8 years ago. ESP when you are somehow having the idea that you can easily import an OTA model. Most of them have only half of the faces with the bottom half being a void due to people only seeing models from one direction in ota.
Trust me, I can fire up gundam annihilation in OTA but if I tried to play it in spring it would take a good deal of effort. Not that it matters I play GRTS whenever
I please. I do keep a working copy for personal use...
Picasso, only compile AIs. We already have CRAIG.... just sayin..