Spring RTS Engine

KaiserJ wrote:so how big are those robots? human sized? larger?

The heroes are towering. About skyscraper height.

It's sean's idea. his game. he actually wants them bigger.

...Just paraphrasing the design doc.

I had the greatest idea for a Mod option for this... you could have what I call "Strategic Evacuation Vehicles" or SEVs that are ejected from your hero when it dies (with the option of ejecting early), then you have at your base a platform that builds you hero mech bodies over time and your SEV can go into this body and take it over... the glitch would be that you might want to abandon a nearly dead body that's in the wrong place in order to get a fresh one, but then other player's SEV's would be able to take control of them... you would only be able to abandon your mech when you are a certain distance from your base to prevent people from stockpiling them... your SEV would be very fast and hard to target/hit, but if it is killed you get an experience hit and take longer to respawn... and abandoned mech body would also have lower armor so would be at risk of easy destruction and would slowly degrade over time if unmanned, also to prevent stockpiling.

the inspiration is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metal_Warriors

funny i mentioned that to sean. was one of the ideas at first but i think was abandoned due to the work involved.

I have a few random, unused WIP mech models lying around if you want to use those:







(God the textures on those things are so OLD...)

Damn, I/we need to fix up that Game outline ...
As big as skyscrapers - no. Towering - in my mind yes :). But as Bob pointed out, they're not that big at the moment - for a number of reasons.

IK - On upgradeable "creeps/pawns", look towards the bottom of said (messy and unupdated) game outline - there's some indirect base management touched upon there, where that might fit in (but this would be a further off/for later feature...similiar to items at the moment).

Guessmyname - Those first 3 look quite interesting, thanks! I'll check back with Bob on that, and then get in touch with you directly.

Edit: minor change.

GMN those looks awesome!

I'll PM you for details.

PM'd back. Collecting all the models together now.

i accidentally the whole map -

wow picasso i love it!

also... GMNs models there look like they will match very nicely with bobs :D

I have done roadways that way.. It will result in issues with los(units disapearing on the side of the road) and pathing(because of the slopes on the sides of the roads).

gmns modells will fit perfectly -
@smoth: what if i typemap the roadsides so they are disadvantaged at pathing, would that be better?

not sure. There is also the stuff with movetypes and slopes that allows a unit to take no speed decrease from a slope :3

Looks quite promising Picasso! Seeing that IK doesn't seem to be pumping one out after all (I guess I didn't exactly jump at the opportunity...), will be good to have a map to mess round with soon. (Kaiser and I were thinking it'll prob be better for him to go at the high qual texture if things are pretty settled).

Even better to have something to test given there are bound to be more problems cropping up such as the one Smoths described - thanks for the heads up on that, by the way!

Would setting the edge - road to lowerlying level - as "void" (if that is still in use in maps, I'm thinking from TA here), help? Or perhaps an equivalent manner of blocking them in lua? I guess all that doesn't change the prepathing processes though (I have no idea to be honest).

Line of sight I guess is a more difficult to address problem... :/. Though to be honest, I was kindof expecting units from below not to see those on the "highway". The other way round would be a problem though... (and disapeering from los from the top, while still on the top, would be the worse of course...)

it is no problem sean, you can counter it and actually remove a good bit of spring's bullshit with slopes.
http://springrts.com/wiki/Units:MoveTypes

read up on slopemod.

What that does is allows you to set how much a slope will slow a unit. This is assumption but I am pretty sure if you set it to zero, your units will not slow down on slopes and will pretty much treat them like flat land for pathing.

Give it a whirl, I hope this info helps.

so should the carrier be a gia unit or a feature?

Just a question of what works best performance wise, in my opinion. From hearsay, Units (so Gaia unit) are better in that regard than features (thus Worldbuilder uses only units for its buildings). But dunno to be honest.
Depending on what we use it for, it won't be moving in either case.

Edit: on an unrelated note, I just checked out Code-Geass and remembered we totally have to have Cicada's chirping in the background . Didn't look very far yet, but seems in a similiar vein to what I'm thinking, yeah.

SeanHeron wrote:(I guess I didn't exactly jump at the opportunity...)

theres nothing wrong with the colour brown!

SeanHeron wrote:Just a question of what works best performance wise, in my opinion. From hearsay, Units (so Gaia unit) are better in that regard than features (thus Worldbuilder uses only units for its buildings). But dunno to be honest.

features are more efficient than units.