Spring RTS Engine

WIP 7 is old, you can get newer versions made by King Raptor from Rapid.

The thread is pretty old, you can play it on regular Spring these days.

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I've decided on a whim to make a space mod. I'm using a few SVN-only features so releasing it soon won't make sense anyway.

The current state of it is that the economy and construction Lua is mostly done (you can't remove things from the buildqueue yet) but only two units are implemented (the carrier which acts as a mobile factory and a crappy fighter). It's meant to be played on a completely empty voidwater map.

The economy consists of those planets in the screenshot, they're owned by the alliance that has at least one unit in their circle (if more than one alliance has then it's considered contested and belongs to noone) and produce money for all members of the alliance. Construction is done on board of the carrier for small ships and off-map for large ones, the large ships have to be placed near friendly carriers or planets once they are complete.

The solid colored circles are just the LOS, voidwater maps won't show the LOS view so I lua'd a display for it. When lots of units condense in an area the circles get way too solid, I'm trying to think of a way to prevent that (tried making it use the depthbuffer but couldn't get that to work).

The skybox on the map is taken from hrmpf's DeepSpaceConflict, I haven't asked him for permission yet.

Pure awesome.

pom, personally I wish you'd take your great skills and dedicate it to one of the bigger mods so that we can actually get one of them out as a flagship mod for Spring (*cough* *cough* SW:IW ), rather then doing lots of these little teaser mods that show off your talent, but don't really give us more then a taste of what you could potentially achieve when working unison with a team...

That being said, it does look cool :)

Ignore Zsinj! I want space mod!

I like... So the map would be a straight flat void water map with planets placed on the ground underwater by a map LUA or something?

That's like 4 to 9 kinds of awesome depending on how well it's implemented.

My biggest request at this point is that those planets NEED to show up on the minimap in some obvious "THESE ARE PLANETS" way because when I was making voidwater maps with floating planets (I was making a bumpy map so that the planet/asteroid geometry "shaped" around the terrain geometry) it was really hard to navigate the map without distinct features to navigate by. Be really cool if you could have the planets in the minimap be nice big circles that change to the players team colors when they were captured.

Yay this idea!!!

He works with smoth on Gundam, Zsinj, I've told you this before

I know the terrible secret of Fibre

Gnome wrote:I know the terrible secret of Fibre

It helps you poo?

Mod looks snazzy KDR

Gnome wrote:He works with smoth on Gundam, Zsinj, I've told you this before

I know the terrible secret of Fibre

Not only that, KDR is one one of the few who're actually bringing creativity to the Spring engine. I mean, mods like Gundam, EE and Star Wars are gorgeous works with very creative gameplay - but they're also rather tightly tied to TA conventions. KDR makes projects that you can't tell are at all related to TA.

Pxtl wrote: Not only that, KDR is one one of the few who're actually bringing creativity to the Spring engine. I mean, mods like Gundam, EE and Star Wars are gorgeous works with very creative gameplay - but they're also rather tightly tied to TA conventions. KDR makes projects that you can't tell are at all related to TA.

Part of this is because creating totally different designs requires a lot of Lua work, the time/skill for which the major projects are generally lacking. But I don't want to derail this anymore.

Nice work KDR. Seems odd that LoS isn't shown on voidwater maps - engine bug?

More like the LOS thing doesn't have anything to draw itself on (if it drew itself onto the skybox, people would think it was a bug, wouldn't they?)

Nemo, I agree with your point - but provide Dozerz and KP as counterexamples of KDR projects that required little Lua (at least initially) and didn't feel like TA.

Pxtl wrote:

Gnome wrote:He works with smoth on Gundam, Zsinj, I've told you this before

I know the terrible secret of Fibre

Not only that, KDR is one one of the few who're actually bringing creativity to the Spring engine. I mean, mods like Gundam, EE and Star Wars are gorgeous works with very creative gameplay - but they're also rather tightly tied to TA conventions. KDR makes projects that you can't tell are at all related to TA.

You haven't seen what SW:IW does yet then, nor what Smoth is working on for Gundam. EE left the TA conventions when Fang started on the aliens

Planets on the minimap will come later, once I look into how drawing on the minimap works .

What annoys me more than the LOs thing is that the skybox disappears if you zoom out too far, is that the result of a bad setting?

KDR_11k wrote:What annoys me more than the LOs thing is that the skybox disappears if you zoom out too far, is that the result of a bad setting?

I've noticed that too, really irritating

Guessmyname wrote:More like the LOS thing doesn't have anything to draw itself on (if it drew itself onto the skybox, people would think it was a bug, wouldn't they?)

is dead on the money.

Skybox disappearing as in becoming black? I noticed this too after copying over kloots shaders, but it could've been one of the other tons changes I missed of course.

it does it when you zoom out too high.

for a practical example, pick a water map, turn on reflective water and zoom out (tab prolly does it too). Look at where the water is supposed to be

Yeah, that's something that really ruins all the nice space maps.

Btw KDR, I worship thee.

I like this idea

Needs a lot more thought about how to make the actual conflict interesting and dynamic, at a first glance. I like the basic idea, but that part is the heart of what will or won't make it work.

Capturing mechanics need a lot of thought- it probably needs some sort of timer mechanism, tied to the number of ships in orbit, so that players can get a planet quickly, with a big fleet, or risk everything by splitting their fleets up a lot, risking defeat in detail and long capture times for a chance to win large numbers of planets by achieving strategic surprise. Sensors are a giant mechanic here- maybe you should do a ECM / ECCM system, as where other people's fleets are is probably the central question during play, since terrain isn't as big of a deal.

Speaking of terrain, though, it'd be really easy to have "asteroid fields" that might or might not destroy your ships- giving players the equivalent of walls, and also giving them a risk mechanic they could use to achieve surprise. Surprise is the main thing that could make this an interesting game design, aside from the combat mechanics.

Ship movement and combat mechanics should probably get worked on heavily, if you don't want combat to feel like the current crop of "tanks in disguise".

It'd be really cool if ships could use some code to move on a "burn", using up resources in LUA that would then shut the "burn" off, leaving the ships back at normal speeds, for strategic positioning. That'd be a piece of cake, and it'd be interesting, giving users a reason to micro their fleets, but simple- one button action. Tactical stuff needs considering, too, though- if it's just about shoving some fleets around, it'll be meh after a short period of play, imo.