Radical metal spot suggestion. - Page 2

Radical metal spot suggestion.

A dynamic game undergoing constant development and refinement, that attempts to balance playability with fresh and innovative features.

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Pxtl
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Joined: 23 Oct 2004, 01:43

Re: Radical metal spot suggestion.

Post by Pxtl »

Maybe give the double-mex-spots a physically different F4 shape? A little metal star or triangle to show "this is a double or triple metal patch" instead of a round blur?
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Forboding Angel
Evolution RTS Developer
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Re: Radical metal spot suggestion.

Post by Forboding Angel »

Licho wrote:Imo its better if mex radius matches spot radius - we should have something like easy metal to restrict mexes only on metal spots.
Have a look at how evo does it. Granted, evo's mexes are actually cleverly disguised MMs, but really the same exact principle applies, more or less.

Here is a bit of a more radical idea for you. Restrict the radius to the size of the mex, meaning that a l1 mex would cover less area than a moho, so then you could use differently sized spots to an interesting effect (though this might cause econ balance chaos).
varikonniemi
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Re: Radical metal spot suggestion.

Post by varikonniemi »

Licho wrote:Tbh i think that radius larger than metal spot is OTA obsoletism..It was there just to allow moho+mex on same spot without rebuild..

Imo its better if mex radius matches spot radius - we should have something like easy metal to restrict mexes only on metal spots.
So you suggest the best feature of spring engine, no metal spots but evenly distrivuted metal according to area, should be abolished?

If i understood this correctly, this is a really bad proposition.
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Licho
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Re: Radical metal spot suggestion.

Post by Licho »

Yeah this feature is so "good" that no maps are using it anymore..
Its just unnecessary complication that has no room in the game anymore.
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Anarchid
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Re: Radical metal spot suggestion.

Post by Anarchid »

Yeah this feature is so "good" that no maps are using it anymore..
But all those speedmetal clones!
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smoth
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Re: Radical metal spot suggestion.

Post by smoth »

Anarchid wrote:
Yeah this feature is so "good" that no maps are using it anymore..
But all those speedmetal clones!
Hurr durr. Old maps based on OTA.

New maps do not use this for a reason anarchid.

Licho, if you want to go the route of snap to mex spot sort of thing. Why even bother having the map dev set metal vals? You could make it so that mex's are always a specific value and add support for a config file to be placed in a map should a mapper want a not standard metal value? IMO maps setting metal value based on some asinine image map and whimsical values is a terribly unreliable way to handle resources.
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Licho
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Re: Radical metal spot suggestion.

Post by Licho »

Yeah i would like something that you suggest instead with bigger control so we could normalize mex values if neeeded.
Saktoth
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Re: Radical metal spot suggestion.

Post by Saktoth »

Oh smoth I love you so much. Map devs cannot be expected to balance this kind of value, not for every game, this was the same decision we made with wind gens. But wind gens pissed so many map devs off...

But there are many maps where mexes are more or less abundant, and make more or less than 2.0. There are others, like many of hunterw's maps, where the high value metal spots play an important role in the game strategically. Most decent maps these days, DO have reasonable metal values, thankfully, which is one reason why we haven't gone ahead with this.

Long-term, though, I think it's probably worthwhile, just to make the game a bit simpler to understand (1 mex = 1 solar).
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Forboding Angel
Evolution RTS Developer
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Re: Radical metal spot suggestion.

Post by Forboding Angel »

Dunno how applicable this is, but what smoth suggested is essentially what evo does.

Before I said they were MM's, that's actually a lie. The metal is given by lua for each mex that exists per team (then it gets split for commie purposes, etc etc), but basically, I use easymetal to make sure mexes can't be built anywhere but on mex spots.

You guys could do this same thing (assuming I am reading the discussion correctly) pretty easily. Do you really want mexes outputting different values? On the surface it seems like a neat idea, but in practice, it's kinda bleh imo.
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smoth
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Re: Radical metal spot suggestion.

Post by smoth »

Saktoth wrote:There are others, like many of hunterw's maps, where the high value metal spots play an important role in the game strategically.
yeah, that is the only problem. Perhaps the mex code could check relative values and mark these as "high yield" and you guys also have a high yield spot set of settings.

I'd volunteer to help with it but for the past 2 weeks I have gotten 5 hours total to work on grts. Mostly I do work, sleep, work.
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Licho
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Re: Radical metal spot suggestion.

Post by Licho »

I thin kits ok to have some supermex ... but it should be "normalized" in some way.. like base mex "+2" and super mexe "+4, +6 +8" etc ..
and it should be bigger too or more visible on map somehow.
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knorke
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Re: Radical metal spot suggestion.

Post by knorke »

Since the metalmap texture gets filtered into some lua coordinates table by easymetal and the like anyway, it would only be consequent to do away with placing resources by painting pixels and include a resource coordinate file in the map. Then one could even have different mex layouts selectable by mapoptions or even auto-adjust to player numbers. Nobody plants trees by pixels anymore because it is cumbersome and the same is possible with metalspots.
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smoth
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Re: Radical metal spot suggestion.

Post by smoth »

we can lua metal spots ?!?!

ha ha ha next featureplacer version then.
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Forboding Angel
Evolution RTS Developer
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Re: Radical metal spot suggestion.

Post by Forboding Angel »

Licho wrote:I thin kits ok to have some supermex ... but it should be "normalized" in some way.. like base mex "+2" and super mexe "+4, +6 +8" etc ..
and it should be bigger too or more visible on map somehow.
Now this is a suggestion I like quite a bit. Would probably fit with zk gameplay a bit better than the "Evo method" too.

If metalspots were lua, it would solve a lot of issues. *looks at smoth*
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knorke
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Re: Radical metal spot suggestion.

Post by knorke »

technically nothing stops metalspots from being lua and i do not mean using Spring.SetMetalAmount to paint onto the f4 map.
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1v0ry_k1ng
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Re: Radical metal spot suggestion.

Post by 1v0ry_k1ng »

it almost seems like the existing system needs no changes 8)
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Johannes
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Re: Radical metal spot suggestion.

Post by Johannes »

knorke wrote:Since the metalmap texture gets filtered into some lua coordinates table by easymetal and the like anyway, it would only be consequent to do away with placing resources by painting pixels and include a resource coordinate file in the map. Then one could even have different mex layouts selectable by mapoptions or even auto-adjust to player numbers. Nobody plants trees by pixels anymore because it is cumbersome and the same is possible with metalspots.
Making a metalmap isn't really cumbersome though? Trees are nice to place ingame since you can alter the visuals on the fly, and it's not so critical where the trees are exactly. But mexes you know where they'll go already when designing the map, same effort to plop the spots down in that phase than to do it with an ingame editor and then worry about how to get them symmetric etc.
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knorke
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Re: Radical metal spot suggestion.

Post by knorke »

Some gadgets/widgets need the metalspots in some coordinates form, so they scan the metalmap into numbers. That is somewhat backwards. Like writing textdocuments with photoshop and using picture-to-text-recognition software to load documents.
Cutting out the middleman (metalspot scanning) seems like the obvious thing to do.
worry about how to get them symmetric etc.
would actually be easier \o/
You could use simple math to get the spots perfectly symmetric, same distance to startpos etc.

Well it is not really urgent, the current system works "good enough." Though I think it is only used because it grew one part at a time, not because it is the best.
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Johannes
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Re: Radical metal spot suggestion.

Post by Johannes »

I think it's just a matter of not fixing what's not broken.

If something is easier than doing a metalmap in Gimp/Photoshop, it doesn't really matter since it's such a trivial issue to do in them anyway. Symmetry is easily achieved too in a few seconds, just take 1 half of the metalmap, mirror/rotate it, and plop it on the other half of map, done.
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knorke
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Re: Radical metal spot suggestion.

Post by knorke »

well sometimes it is broken, when the detection fails. Adjusting number of spots to playercount etc seems cool too. Or (semi)random placement.
But actually I just wanted to post something more radical than the original idea.
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