10 Noob questions

[wilbefast]

Hi guys, I'm new here so please go easy on me

Couple of questions that may or may not be insultingly easy to answer - see how many you can fire through in 5 minutes
edit: yes, I have looked for answer to these questions before posting!

• How do I make the camera zoom in when I scroll the mouse forwards rather than out? There's no "invert zoom", only "zoom speed". I'm way too used to other RTSs and Google Maps...
• Does Spring play music? None of the mods I've tried seem to have any, not even the TA-based ones (eg - Complete Annihilation).
• There are no unit-response sounds playing for Complete Annihilation, although there are explosion sounds. Is this normal? I'm an old fan of TA and I miss the "bajoing-donk" sounds.
• A pop-up keeps telling me that "LuaUI is not loaded" - how to I make it stop/load "LuaUI"? What is "LuaUI" anyway? A user-interface in lua clearly, but what is it and why do I need it?
• "Customisable GUI"? That'd be "LuaUI" I suppose...
• Fog of war can be turned on with 'l' and ';' in game but turns off again when I start a new game. Is there any way I can have it turned on by default.
• I can jump to a location on the map by right-clicking on the mini-map: is there any way of changing this so that I can jump with left-click and issue orders with right-click? Old habits die hard...
• Why has nobody ever made a fantasy-mod-game for this (Cursed excepted)? Is it a coincidence or is the engine unsuited for such mods (close combat, etcetera)? Someone was porting TA:K but that went under ages ago...
• Failing this, I'd link to have a go at modding myself: I was great with Gamemaker's "GML", and I'm now almost-sortof-okay with C and SDL (I cloned Sokoban the other day) - am I too much of a noob to mod Spring? I know a couple of other languages though not as well as C - what are the various layers of the engine written in?
• Failing that, what's the best mod? Just want your opinions - so far mine has got to be Kernel panic

I'm using Ubuntu 9.04 on a Dell Vostro 1510 with an Nvidia 8400M-GS. Spring is version "0.78.1.1-0ubuntu1~9.04~ppa1 (jaunty)" (Synaptic).

Thanks

William

[Auswaschbar]

• set a negatvie value for zoom speed
• I know KernelPanic, Evo and PURE play music
• BA has bajong-dong wush-wush sounds
• say "/luaui reload" ingame
• true
• no
• I thought the default for minimap jumping would be middle-click?
• well, mostly because nobody was yet motivated enought to do so, its definitely possible
• C++ and Lua
• THIS (when it worked)

[BrainDamage]

• Fog of war can be turned on with 'l' and ';' in game but turns off again when I start a new game. Is there any way I can have it turned on by default.

save the attachment below in ~/.spring/LuaUI/Widgets/ then press F11 ingame and turn on "autolos" in the list, if the list is too long you may have to scroll using the mousewheel

[maackey]

• How do I make the camera zoom in when I scroll the mouse forwards rather than out? There's no "invert zoom", only "zoom speed". I'm way too used to other RTSs and Google Maps...
• Does Spring play music? None of the mods I've tried seem to have any, not even the TA-based ones (eg - Complete Annihilation).
• There are no unit-response sounds playing for Complete Annihilation, although there are explosion sounds. Is this normal? I'm an old fan of TA and I miss the "bajoing-donk" sounds.
• A pop-up keeps telling me that "LuaUI is not loaded" - how to I make it stop/load "LuaUI"? What is "LuaUI" anyway? A user-interface in lua clearly, but what is it and why do I need it?
• "Customisable GUI"? That'd be "LuaUI" I suppose...
• Fog of war can be turned on with 'l' and ';' in game but turns off again when I start a new game. Is there any way I can have it turned on by default.
• I can jump to a location on the map by right-clicking on the mini-map: is there any way of changing this so that I can jump with left-click and issue orders with right-click? Old habits die hard...
• Why has nobody ever made a fantasy-mod-game for this (Cursed excepted)? Is it a coincidence or is the engine unsuited for such mods (close combat, etcetera)? Someone was porting TA:K but that went under ages ago...
• Failing this, I'd link to have a go at modding myself: I was great with Gamemaker's "GML", and I'm now almost-sortof-okay with C and SDL (I cloned Sokoban the other day) - am I too much of a noob to mod Spring? I know a couple of other languages though not as well as C - what are the various layers of the engine written in?
• Failing that, what's the best mod? Just want your opinions - so far mine has got to be Kernel panic

- in the springsettings, make the scroll speed negative

- There is a music player widget that should work with all the mods. I know that Evo RTS has a working version.

- enable "noises" in the f11 menu

- "/luaui reload" ingame should turn it back on. I'm not sure exactly what is popping up for you though...

- IceUI is the most robust and customizeable. LOLUI is much more light, in features and in resources. Chili is the custom ui for CA which is still under heavy development

- you can make a widget that automatically turns it on at the start of the game pretty easily EDIT: which bd kindly provided

- last I checked right click gave orders and middle click zoomed to spot on minimap. Not exactly sure what settings are different though

- It is very hard to animate anything organic with the current animation system in spring. Also, pieces cannot deform and change like you would expect anything living to do. S44, Blood and Steel, the Cursed, and others have people in them, but they are not exactly high quality. (compared to statics and machines)

- I haven't done too much with the engine, but iirc it is mostly done in C++

- While I like Kernel Panic, I much prefer CA for a more in depth and action-oriented play style. There are a *lot* of good games aside from BA, try them all

P.S. curse my sluggish verbosity!

Also, i just noticed: Your spring version is way out of date. The current version is 0.80.4

[MidKnight]

CA has both voices and bajonkity doong doong noises. Try pressing f11 (widgets menu) and enabling noises/disabling voices.

EDIT: Curse my ogg vorbisity also!

Also: CA will have built in music soon...

[zwzsg]

• How do I make the camera zoom in when I scroll the mouse forwards rather than out? There's no "invert zoom", only "zoom speed". I'm way too used to other RTSs and Google Maps...

Use a negative scrollwheel speed (in springsettings.exe). This is the default in Kernel Panic installer.

• Does Spring play music? None of the mods I've tried seem to have any, not even the TA-based ones (eg - Complete Annihilation).

Kernel Panic plays music, when installed with the complete installer.

• A pop-up keeps telling me that "LuaUI is not loaded" - how to I make it stop/load "LuaUI"? What is "LuaUI" anyway? A user-interface in lua clearly, but what is it and why do I need it?

The Kernel Panic mod use some ugly hack to enable LuaUI when you run it for the first time and click yes to the popup about it. The Kernel Panic comes with a set of Spring settigns where LuaUI is enabled.

You want LuaUI because the engine interface has stopped evolving years ago and now all the cool thing are done in Lua, so much that mods have become so reliant on LuaUI they'll appear half broken without LuaUI

• Failing that, what's the best mod? Just want your opinions - so far mine has got to be Kernel panic

Woot! Wait what how comes you had the above issues of which I just said KP was the cure for then?

• I'm using Ubuntu.

Oh I see. I don't have Linux, so the music, the installer, and preset setting are only for the window version. I'll need to get in touch with Linux repo-things maintainer some time to fix that. I guess the popup about LuaUI was mine then. But how comes it keeps poping up? There should be that button to tell it to never ask again when you answer no, and when you answer yes, it should be happy to see LuaUI enabled and stop popping.

• It is very hard to animate anything organic with the current animation system in spring.

[/list]

Since you can't use my KP installer on linux to get the music, here's how to set up the music thing part of it manually:

1) Enable LuaUI

2) Download this music.lua into the /LuaUI/Widgets/ folder of Spring. (Note: that widget is flawed, but should work at least for 80.4 versions.)

3) Create a /music/ folder in Spring and fill it with .ogg

4) Ingame, press F11 to display the widget list and check that the music widget is enabled (green).

[wilbefast]

Wow! It's like a whole new world with the UI working properly
Trouble is that it turns itself back off again each time I start a new game, and the customs luas from Zwzsg and Brain Damage don't seem to be being detected

I feel really stupid not thinking to enter a negative value for the zoom thanks for the help! As for the organics - Maackey may have a point - they looks a little bit iffy... still, TA:K's units look like robots too, never mind.

I think I'll install the latest version - I went for the .deb because that's all nice and pre-packaged and easy to install, but they're often slow to update: I've ended up compiling certain things myself because the Linux build was so far behind

Thanks for all the help guys! I'll be right back when I've installed a newer version!

edit: in actual fact, I'm not entirely sure how to go about getting a newer version now that I look at it again - I followed the install instructions on the site and they led me to the deb...
Does anybody else here use Ubuntu?

[Blue_Falcon]

Wow! It's like a whole new world with the UI working properly
Trouble is that it turns itself back off again each time I start a new game, and the customs luas from Zwzsg and Brain Damage don't seem to be being detected

I feel really stupid not thinking to enter a negative value for the zoom thanks for the help! As for the organics - Maackey may have a point - they looks a little bit iffy... still, TA:K's units look like robots too, never mind.

I think I'll install the latest version - I went for the .deb because that's all nice and pre-packaged and easy to install, but they're often slow to update: I've ended up compiling certain things myself because the Linux build was so far behind

Thanks for all the help guys! I'll be right back when I've installed a newer version!

edit: in actual fact, I'm not entirely sure how to go about getting a newer version now that I look at it again - I followed the install instructions on the site and they led me to the deb...
Does anybody else here use Ubuntu?

Me.

About the LuaUI problem, I had it for a while too, and at some point it magically fixed itself... Sorry, don't have a clue why.

[wilbefast]

I reinstalled the whole thing from scratch and it seems to be working okay now. Also there's been an update, or rather the update has been uploaded as a .deb

I also managed to get autolos working, although not all mods seem happy to use it - oh well...

[xawl]

I use Ubuntu Karmic. I had the "LuaUI is not loaded" problem. I was perplexed. I looked around for answers but only found an unsolved issue in the forms (http://springrts.com/phpbb/viewtopic.php?f=20&t=19355). I traced the issue to its source in widgets.lua. It seemed that one of the files in my .spring/LuaUI/Widgets directory wasn't properly loading. I deleted the .spring/LuaUI directory entirely, then ran BA 7.04. The LuaUI loaded, and I was able to play without the problems noted in the forum posting I linked to above. The directory was rebuilt automagically when I ran spring BA.

I think I messed the configuration up at some point. I'm really not sure how or why it happened. At one point I attempted to install some widgets in the .spring/LuaUI/Widgets directory. Perhaps these were failing. In any case this worked. I don't have any clue why other Linux users are having this issue. Perhaps the paths resolution works differently on Windows and Linux.

Another thing which I had to deal with was texture compression. Maps were flat white or grey. Boring. Under Karmic, compression wasn't enabled for my graphics card (an integrated intel GM965/GL960). I tried to install libtxc_dxtn. This seemed to generate bugs in many mesa-dependent applications. Simply forcing compression via driconf solved all my woes.

[wilbefast]

Karmic messed everything up for me, it was like the difference between XP and Vista, and Vista was one of the reasons I left Windose in the first place. I've gone back to Jaunty now - what worked for me was to purge the lot and reinstall it