Spring RTS Engine

Questions:

What are some features other RTS games have but spring does not yet support?
Food count: A unit takes up X food item and populations are limited by food count.
Bunkers: Units can fire out of a safe building that shields them
Unit upgrades/research items: Research constraints and/or unit upgrades to better stats.
Unit metamorphosis: a unit at a cost can upgrade and transform into another unit.
Selling a buildng: currently the only way to recover cost on a building already built is to RECLAIM it.
Melee weapons: There are some hackish(read not worth doing) ways of having this but they are not in the game.
Transparencies/translucencies: it is complicated, just know that you cannot have them... yet.

All of this can be done in LUA, and to my knowledge. Bunker can be done in most mods, with walls and artillery, and transparency isn't possible from the model standpoint to my knowledge.

needs link to the freebies updating.

rcdraco wrote:

Questions:

What are some features other RTS games have but spring does not yet support?
Food count: A unit takes up X food item and populations are limited by food count.
Bunkers: Units can fire out of a safe building that shields them
Unit upgrades/research items: Research constraints and/or unit upgrades to better stats.
Unit metamorphosis: a unit at a cost can upgrade and transform into another unit.
Selling a buildng: currently the only way to recover cost on a building already built is to RECLAIM it.
Melee weapons: There are some hackish(read not worth doing) ways of having this but they are not in the game.
Transparencies/translucencies: it is complicated, just know that you cannot have them... yet.

All of this can be done in LUA, and to my knowledge. Bunker can be done in most mods, with walls and artillery, and transparency isn't possible from the model standpoint to my knowledge.

uhh supcom allowed u to track projectiles liek nukes or arty shells, and it was cool. also, u were capable of upgrading individiual parts onn all the coms. l liked how the uef com carryed nukes. u can actually do that in one of the mods for spring-- i forgot, but they put the nukes in place of the d gun i would liek a nuke butten. if this stuff cant be done just tell me, im a taco. i cant think

Im working on starting a mod because of you

I don't know when I will start

Protip: say nothing until you at least have a few units in game otherwise you are working on nothing. Don't give people false hope/excitement.

smoth wrote:Protip: say nothing until you at least have a few units in game otherwise you are working on nothing. Don't give people false hope/excitement.

the above should be posted in all caps in 300 pt bold text on top of the games and mods forum.

not in my realm of control but there is a similar expression "don't count your chickens before they are hatched" I prefer the older one "call no man happy until he is dead"

For more brownie points, build a mod based on a popular flash game, take 5 years to devolop it, release screenies and information about the mod, throw a hissy fit and never release it LOL that will show them.

USER WAS WARNED FOR THIS POST

smoth wrote:translucencies: it is complicated, just know that you cannot have them... yet.

This post was made in 2006, do we have translucency yet?

Might want to add 'mesh deformation and bone animation' to 'stuff Spring does not yet support'. Pretty sure that can't be LUA'd (yet) and it's a pretty big 'thing Spring does not support' issue.

Thank you for this!

This page needs updating. I'm going to unstick it pretty soon unless smoth want's to rework it. Let me know ASAP.

Smoth has enough to do atm.

It and the rest of the stickies, and other lost threads e.g. the dev statement on GPL, should all be put in a Resources & Tutorials subforum like mapping and Art & Modelling have, so it doesn't get lost, and then can be updated when Smoth or anyone else has the time to do so.

See? That is why this is fail and why i reported all the stickies which text on why they suck.
Too much offtopic blabla in stickies. This discussion here is OT too. Stickys should only be things like "Forum Rules" or really important annoucement stuff like "New engine version coming up - Read this to make your game work with it"

The list of programs etc. in OP is in the wiki.
The rest is ranting.
Who actually wants to see that every time you open the forum?

and then can be updated when Smoth or anyone else has the time to do so.

That would be like never.

I would maintain this but people feel it is superflous. Feel free to unsticky it and pluck what you can into that steaming pile of shit that is the wiki.

What I think is bad about the sticky post is that there is too much talk about design, ideas and how a dev team could be organized.
The title is:
Want to start a project? Here is where you need to start.

In such thread I would expect to find:
-links to all needed tools
-guides to different thing: uvmapping, Upspring, Lua animation etc.
-A quick overview how modding works: Do I need to learn programming? Are there templates? How long does it take to put a unit ingame NOT counting the time spend making a model really nice and stuff.
Just the barebones stuff.

Instead there is alot of ranting about rl issues stopping Spring projects. Well, that can happen to any kind of project not just Spring. You do not read that stuff on a programming/photostop/car repair guide.

All the things like

Style
Look around at military weapons, movies, anime, comic books or even your local wargame store. Inspiration can be drawn from everything, many elements of real life and fiction. [...]

would be fitted into a thread
Gamedesign - Ideas and why they die

I do no think people care what inspired unit XY they just want to know how to get their crap and a hello world.

knorke wrote:What I think is bad about the sticky post is that there is too much talk about design, ideas and how a dev team could be organized.
The title is:
Want to start a project? Here is where you need to start.

In such thread I would expect to find:
-links to all needed tools
-guides to different thing: uvmapping, Upspring, Lua animation etc.
-A quick overview how modding works: Do I need to learn programming? Are there templates? How long does it take to put a unit ingame NOT counting the time spend making a model really nice and stuff.
Just the barebones stuff.

Instead there is alot of ranting about rl issues stopping Spring projects. Well, that can happen to any kind of project not just Spring. You do not read that stuff on a programming/photostop/car repair guide.

All the things like

Style
Look around at military weapons, movies, anime, comic books or even your local wargame store. Inspiration can be drawn from everything, many elements of real life and fiction. [...]

would be fitted into a thread
Gamedesign - Ideas and why they die

I do no think people care what inspired unit XY they just want to know how to get their crap and a hello world.

I disagree. "start a project" is different than "learn development skills". I mean, most of us when we were shambling together crappy units and learning scripting and stuff probably called what we were working on a "project", but in a larger scope, none of that stuff is ever really put in the public eye. A real project has to tackle issues of game design, team organization, workflow. If you haven't tackled issues like that you're probably not working on a real game, you're just playing with development skills.

Smoth: seems like someone wanted to reorganize the forums a little, I'll still sticky this here if you're willing to willing to update the more technical stuff. There's alot of valuable info here I'd rather not let get eaten by the forum system just because a few technical details went out of date, but I'd really rather tutorial writers take a bit of responsibility for maintaining their work. I mean, a little edit here and there pales in comparison to the work a thread like this took to put together in the first place.

I disagree. "start a project" requires "learn development skills".

Fixed :)
ie see the "gundam minimod" thread where people discuss how a capture the flag / area controll game would be done. You can plan what you want but in the end, whoever scripts it decides how it actually plays.

knorke wrote:

I disagree. "start a project" requires "learn development skills".

Fixed :)
ie see the "gundam minimod" thread where people discuss how a capture the flag / area controll game would be done. You can plan what you want but in the end, whoever scripts it decides how it actually plays.

Regardless. In my mind it's still like having a 4XX calculus thread, and someone comes in expecting to be ready for the content involved with math 12. There is alot of development stuff that already has it's own threads. This one is about something different, and that's fine. It has a good explanation about how those things react.

whoever scripts it decides how it actually plays.

I know first hand that's not how the large scale game industry works. You have a design specification that in detail describes the gameplay, and whoever codes it simply makes the code match that as closely as possible. Some projects may allow that, but I'd argue it's a bad policy. You end up with this "too many cooks" situation where different game mechanics destroy each other in interaction because they are incoherent and effectively not designed, just implemented. I'm sure many projects have done it, CA was a worst offender at the time this thread was written. It certainly isn't good practice though.

knorke wrote:

I disagree. "start a project" requires "learn development skills".

Fixed :)
ie see the "gundam minimod" thread where people discuss how a capture the flag / area controll game would be done. You can plan what you want but in the end, whoever scripts it decides how it actually plays.

here is where it fell apart:

They are not the gundam TEAM. (which doesn't exist right now)
They are not volunteering to do it.
They are not actually presenting a solid reason to do so.

You need development skills in a team situation. that thread is more of a suggestion thread. Many spring people think they have a great solution and it falls apart at implementation because with a new solution brings new problems. Which they seem to believe their idea will go over without a hitch and that is why I rejected it. There is no discussion of ways it can be abused only OMG I HAS A BRILLIANT IDEA! The idea might be neat and they seem to have a great amount of pride in it but without detailed discussion the planning doesn't exist and frankly they are not looking at it completely.

It would be different if it was a team. There would be a design document that would require discussion, dismantle and reconstruction. I would insist on phases for lage concepts so the largeness of a thing does not make it seem insurmountable. I wrote this thread like in 2007 with a college understanding of development. My perspectives have changed and I would like to share what I know NOW because I feel it is more solid than what I understood THEN. Problem is that you have a community of amateurs making some of the most unorganized and short-sighted decisions all completely confident that they have the next greatest idea. I watch it constantly and all I can think is that the pie is half baked.