Spring RTS Engine

Spring is clumsy in many aspects

its the nature of things that you cant get all people happy.
Artist basically want a box - were you put coloured pictures in and a game (no wait - theire, one true game ) falls out.

Coders want a construction site, were only spectacular stuff is waiting to be done, and no maintainance hardship docks.

Best to lock them all into a room and give them knifes and sticks.

But the one truth is- that spring has quite some working tools (contrary to other engines which have none) - and if you stick to it- you get results pretty fast and pretty good, without the fear that one day some company janitor will unplug your masterpieces-server so he can vacoomclean his dick.

Will someone forge that tool of your dreams? No. Because it allready is- somewhere out there in blender.
What we need is some way to convert collada animations.
Thats all.

Also SpringRTS is around since when? Tell me off a game-company that has stick to its turf and has been around this long? And we dev-liver every single time.

Oh wait, is not a spring rant thread.

jK wrote:still making a RTS with a non-RTS engine is a bad idea, cause such engines aren't build for such unit counts, or did ever saw >>1k units in non-RTS engines. Yes even most RTS engines aren't meant for such counts.

AI War does about 2k-3k units in regular engagements.

KDR_11k wrote:

jK wrote:still making a RTS with a non-RTS engine is a bad idea, cause such engines aren't build for such unit counts, or did ever saw >>1k units in non-RTS engines. Yes even most RTS engines aren't meant for such counts.

AI War does about 2k-3k units in regular engagements.

Liquid Wars has even more!

i think what he meant is all the performance issues that entail with the added unit count, like pathfinding, render issues, levels of detail etc. Its not just the unit count, i mean im prety sure even in unity if we go count the polygons there are extremly complex scenes.

And ofc i think you guys know all this (captain obvious here).

Its not just a polygon count issue.

However with that said im waiting for a voxel RTS to come out that would be awesome ->i know this isnt an RTS but EverquestNext(<3).

oh wait http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/330858688/dysis

AI War runs on Unity.

Anyway, I think that while Spring does all those RTS things it does them pretty badly so if you want it to be good you have to reimplement it anyway.

knorke wrote:

KDR_11k wrote:

jK wrote:still making a RTS with a non-RTS engine is a bad idea, cause such engines aren't build for such unit counts, or did ever saw >>1k units in non-RTS engines. Yes even most RTS engines aren't meant for such counts.

AI War does about 2k-3k units in regular engagements.

Liquid Wars has even more!

None of them are RTS. Both are doing like 1% of the math spring needs to do.

In what world is AI War not an RTS? And yes, AIW needs less math per unit but that's because it's designed for huge battles and CPU usage is a constant concern for the devs. Spring isn't exactly slim when it comes to unit handling but a lot of that CPU usage is for things you might not even want (like physics).

Does AIW even have pathfinding?
And units in liquid wars seem as much as a unit as nano particles are in Spring.

It has pathfinding across the galaxy map but not within the space of each planet. Then again THIS doesn't have pathfinding either

if spring was redone on unity..... ;)

if unity was redone one spring..

I still say that Spring lacks critical mass and polishment. «Lesser» games that have enough critical mass and enough polishment are bound to capture more content creation.


What still is the problem with melee? Last I knew, from quite a few years back, the problem was that units would push each other around. Is it still the problem?

Is it not possible to work around by keeping the units' foorprints small but increasing the models' size? Or are the actual models the boundary to push, instead of the footprints pushing the other footprints?

Mr Picasso already explained the reasons if you will read the thread. Spring uses scripting to animate nodes on models. Most engines support keyframe and skeleton animation where you (to the best of my limited knowledge) animate inside the 3D software, using even motion sensors to sync humanoid movement.

Cheesecan wrote:Mr Picasso already explained the reasons if you will read the thread. Spring uses scripting to animate nodes on models. Most engines support keyframe and skeleton animation where you (to the best of my limited knowledge) animate inside the 3D software, using even motion sensors to sync humanoid movement.

that isn't the whole truth. People are just buttmad that they cannot use their favorite pirated copy of max or whatever. It would be nice to have mesh deformation but skeletons are little more that the whole hierarchical system we have here. It is like asking a CLIENT to draft up specs. When I worked in ogre before, just having support for the animations and having a rudimentary one setup is just the beginning. I am soo tired of hearing this same rubbish over the past few years. Zpock found a way to export blender animations. If you want to keep arguing that line zpocks stuff makes it all pointless chatter. So get over it, animation works fine.

The melee stuff has some functionality as far as I know there are some in zk that do a decent job but just have shitty animation. I don't know why I am even writing this post but I don't buy into that garbage about how we cannot have have GOOD ANIMATION without skeletals. We can have good animation. we just don't have mesh deformation which is what you need for organics to look correct.

So get over it, animation works fine.

For giant robots, barely. Compared to a commercial engine, we are stuck in 1997. It is always the first thing on the 'Thanks for your interest in Spring, but...' list.

Client's inform developers of their requirements, and get paid to meet them. As a hobby project we (meaning game devs - the real end users and seldom recognised as it) don't have the luxury of demanding how others use their free time.

Quibbling over the precise technical meaning of peoples statements is futile and a smokescreen for an issue the vast majority accept as a given.

Is beautiful, please provide replicable work flow.

FLOZi wrote:Is beautiful, please provide replicable work flow.

I asked zpock about it years ago, he told me he took the animations and exported them from blender, did some conversion and BAM done. I have never gotten much more beyond that

my assumption is that it isnt purley handcrafted- the movement is- but the intertia swinging is done via blender physix?