Spring RTS Engine

So, I have redownloaded Spring after a very long hiatus. And I am not surprised to see that BOTA has died some time ago.
I tried getting into XTA but I keep finding myself wishing for the old smashy-squishy BOTA gameplay.

I've read through the forums to see what I've missed the last two years. And it seems some pretty awesome features have been added to the engine and everyone seems to still be trucking along.

I also come to understand that BOTA is pretty well broken by the newest engine (since quite a few updates back?)

If I were to make the effort to bring it back up to speed, would there even bee any interest in the community to see it again? Or is it an old dinosaur that should be left to rest in peace?

Opinions?

If there is interest to see its return, would anyone be willing to point out what I should tackle first?

By the way,
I've missed you guys. ;_;

Quanto042, may be you searched for NOTA. I think its successor of BOTA.

Yes & no wrt successor. Parts are similar, others aren't.

Welcome back Quanto! Always good to see an old face coming back.

Hi
Here is collection of some links how to update old mods:
http://springrts.com/wiki/EngineChangelogForContentDevs

If it is worth the effort..depends on you I guess. If you have fun doing it, of course do it.
Imo from players perspective there already are enough TA-based games: BA, zero-K, NOTA, XTA.
So that is 4 games plus some more "obscure" ones, I think that niche is saturated.

Welcome back Quanto. I would be interested in making BOTA work again. I've been doing some stuff to xta during the last years, so I know a bit what has changed and broken some mods.

Yes, XTA is quite similar to OTA, but still not. Biggest difference IMO is the xta has flat tech tree (in the sense that t1 kbots can make t2 veh lab etc).

My Game is not obscure, its quite the other way around.Welcome back Quanto

PicassoCT wrote:My Game is not obscure, its quite the other way around.Welcome back Quanto

By that do you mean "Explicit"? :D

Excatemon my dear Sinbado

knorke wrote:Hi
Here is collection of some links how to update old mods:
http://springrts.com/wiki/EngineChangelogForContentDevs

If it is worth the effort..depends on you I guess. If you have fun doing it, of course do it.
Imo from players perspective there already are enough TA-based games: BA, zero-K, NOTA, XTA.
So that is 4 games plus some more "obscure" ones, I think that niche is saturated.

I totally understand that the niche is saturated, it was like that pretty much since the beginning. But at the same time, the other *A mods (even back then) were always highly divergent from the original material, and always tried to confuse the core gameplay with additional units, or crazy super tech of some sort. BOTA's charm back then was that it was the only *A mod that didn't add new units create new gameplay.

Jools wrote:Welcome back Quanto. I would be interested in making BOTA work again. I've been doing some stuff to xta during the last years, so I know a bit what has changed and broken some mods.

Yes, XTA is quite similar to OTA, but still not. Biggest difference IMO is the xta has flat tech tree (in the sense that t1 kbots can make t2 veh lab etc).

I'd be happy to have your help Jools, and yes, XTA has it right in some ways, but the flat tech tree is troublesome.

And thanks to the rest of you for the warm welcome. I'd like to get back into mapping as well at some point. Not sure when, but it'll happen.

As far as *A mods are concerned, there's also this new one that i'm maintaining

http://springfiles.com/spring/games/ta-factions

some units have stats closer to OTA than in other mods (unit speeds, artillery, sea), but there are other major differences (namely 2 new factions, armor sytem, respawnable commanders without the big blasts and dgun).

knorke wrote: Imo from players perspective there already are enough TA-based games: BA, zero-K, NOTA, XTA.

one of these things is not like the others - zero-K I would not exactly say is TA-based. It has a few (like less than 10) OTA models in the game, but the gameplay is very changed from TA.

I love BOTA, but I'm tired of seeing *A.

Maybe ask beherith if you can make a BOTA mutator of BA Reloaded (mutator relying on BAR as a base of course)?

BOTA is so different from BA that he might be ok with it.

I created a svn page at https://code.google.com/p/basically-ota

I think quanto should be the owner, it's his mod. Also, I'm sure Nettogrof worked a bit on this mod. I just made the svn bc I think that's needed for organisation.

The latest version I found: BOTA 1.7 beta10 is not terribly broken. It has some lua errors and buildings can't be built because the buildrange is too small. Was there some kind of engine change that starts building from building midpoint instead of from the closest edge?

Jools wrote:Yes, XTA is quite similar to OTA, but still not. Biggest difference IMO is the xta has flat tech tree (in the sense that t1 kbots can make t2 veh lab etc).

I almost feel like you're trolling, Jools, after spending so much time in this thread discussing the widely used ZK term flat balance which is not the same as XTA.

Your description of XTA's tech tree is a narrow tree, as opposed to ZK's shallow tree, Why are you adding confusion after all the effort to reduce it in that thread?

You're quoting something I wrote before the concept of 'flat tree' was minted. More specifically, about 1.5 years before.

I apologize, I didn't notice the date. Damn rez threads. Wait, you rezzed it!

But still to be clear, ZK/CA has been using the term for at least 4 years.

Yes, I did. I'm sorry

Oh, those negRomancers - they always get the dead things going and the juices flowing..

Imagine a walking dead episode with a necrophil.. that one guy whose dreams have come true

I made Bota 1.7 Beta 10.1 and submitted to springfiles but I think it got lost, not sure. Also was doing Beta 10.2 but never got ready with it and by then Spring had "broken" it even more. Below are the changes, and one open TODO, that I did and why:

Anyways I gave BOTA17Beta10_1.sd7 and BOTA17Beta10_2.sd7 to Jools. But indeed to get it working properly with current Spring probably requires quite a some more effort than below 10.1 and 10.2 small patches.

---BOTA 1.7 (Beta 10.2)
- increased waterline by 10 because submarines were too visible
- added energystorage=1050 and metalstorage=1050 parameters to arm and core commander fbi files
as defaults values were too high
- TODO: add Dynamic Collision Volume gadget from XTA and edit its config file because collision volumes are too big currently.

---BOTA 1.7 (Beta 10.1)
- builddistances of less than 128 have now been changed to 128 for commander, T2 farc, constructors, and mine layer (as Spring core clamping of build distance to 128 at minimum has been removed in the newest version). Thus commander & construction helpers assisting labs were "blocking construction", that is "walking inside factories"/"blocking their paths".

P.S. Beta 10.1 is not as much developed compared to Beta 10 as DirectX 10.1 was compared to DirectX 10 :D