Spring RTS Engine

After near a year in waiting Gundam 1.26 is here! As always there has been a large amount internal code work and improvements but none of that is really interesting to most of you. What is important is that there are MANY MANY new models, a few new maps massive improvements to the visuals over all and in general the same evolving and growing gameplay that you guys have come to expect as I continue towards are more complete reflection of the Universal century world!

A lot of the note here will be on visual improvements as those are ones readily visible and observable but I do not want those of you new to gundam rts to think I am only focused on visuals. It is important to note that this project will be reaching the 6 year mark this December and much of the work has been gameplay.

Some of you may also wonder why it feels very sandbox, this is because I have large sweeping plans for research trees but before I add the research trees, I need enough units to make branches viable. So forgive the giant pile of available units as this is merely a growing pain.

Additions to the game system:
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armor and weapon classes!

UC Gundam has a very large amount of mechs and determining what one mech does well versus another is a hard thing to tell at a glance. In order to add some consistency to the weapon damages and armor soak I sat down and put together a weapon and armor class system. This is both color coded and uses names to tell you what is good at damaging what.

New spawner AI!
I have added a new spawner so you can now merely choose your desired difficulty and it's faction is the faction to play against, it will auto start as federation if you just run gundam via spring.exe and it now has very different waves than before! I recommend starting on easy.

New unit abilities!

When a magella tank dies, it's top will spawn as a new unit!
The juagg has a new ability called barrage which will fire all missile tubes at once!



Visuals
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teamplatters + health bars are colored your chosen team color!

Eventually I wish to remove all team color from units leaving only buildings with team color. This is because I wish to reflect the canon colors of suits. To this end I have added the team colored "platters" and health bars. I got the idea playing a lot of battleforge. Buildings all have square ground platters where units have round ones.

New thrust effects(will not show up on some older video cards

Using the LUPS(Lua particle system) I have added ribbons and thrust/heat distortion to the aircraft thrust effects. This system will probably see heavier usage in the future but for now is just utilized on flying units.

New UI using the chilli framework

This is a work in progress but works at the basic functional level. In the future I intend on refining it but first I want to get it all working out.

New unit info boxes

You can now see color coded, the resources required by the unit, it's armor class, it's hp, a small pic of it AND it's weapon with color coding for damage type!
Note the cost is not here because this not the build menu entry and I felt that it should only show in the build menu




New models


- Zaku2 j type(all)
- Zaku2 r2 Robert Gillaim
- Zaku2 r2 Johnny Ridden
- Zaku2 r2 Babby Hazard
- Zaku Tank
- Zaku Recon
- Juagg


- Guncannon (and sml variant)
- EZ-8
- RX79 (all)
- Rgm 79 [G] (all)
- Rgm 79 [G]s (gm sniper)
- Reed Wolf Gmcannon
- hover truck
- Toriares
- don escargot
- saberfish
- dish
- core booster

Remastered the following models:
dom
dom (anavel gato)
gelgoog
gelgoog cannon
Rx78
GM

Audio
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The game now supports music!

Default music Provided by: Denny Schneidemesser!

(the over-ride music feature is unstable and may cause Gundam RTS to freeze, more work will be done on it in the future)
You can over-ride the music with your own .Ogg files!
in your spring directory create the following directories
gundamsettings/musicoverride/war/
gundamsettings/musicoverride/peace/
then place the desired oggs here!
(the over-ride music feature is unstable and may cause Gundam RTS to freeze, more work will be done on it in the future)

Added a few sound effects and tweaked several others.

Maps
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The maps have all been reworked to use the now available SSMF which gives me the ability to detail splatting! What does this mean in gamer terms? The maps are more detailed when you are at ground level. It gives me finer control of the game visuals with regards to textural data on the maps. This extra detail is only visible for those of you with shadows on, if you already have shadows enabled the performance hit is very very little.

I have tried to take in all of the feedback you guys have given me over the past year and hope that I have made maps that you guys will enjoy. However, I want you to continue giving feedback and asking for things as I will always be pushing to make gundam better and better. This includes the official maps

New features courtesy of the 0AD team.





GET IT FROM MODDB(File is awaiting auth)

GET IT FROM MY SITE(PROBABLY SLOW)

faster mirror







Special thanks:
CarRepairer: base code for: Chat box, minimap, infoboxes
TheFatController: Improved chickens lua spawner.
Zero K team: Chilli UI and several base Chilli widgets, LUPS
Zwzsg: New menu, mission system, help with the team platter shapes
There are no doubt others I am forgetting but I am tired this release it taking a lot to get out. If I have missed you, I am sorry.
P.S. Gundam is 500+ megs because of the maps included with it. DEAL WITH IT!

Is this why your site was down the other day?

Also, congrats on the long-awaited release... my computer probably can't handle it right now but if it could I would totally try it out.

Ooooh, can't wait to try it. The new effects look sexy, and the tank thing is neato.

The "no-teamcolour" thing is a good admission to make. Better to just accept "I'm going to put the TC in the gui" rather than shrink the team-colour down to a miniscule size and make it inscrutable for the sake of "immersion".

I think you're too worried about cluttering the info popup. The whole point of that is to feed as much info as possible to the user... although the coloured text is way too dark to read. Colour-coding is good, but not at the price of legibility.

So any plans on switching to a more incremental release cycle, or will you stick to "I'm working on this in private, I'll release when I'm ready to do that".

Any change to the reclaiming-part of the eco? The builders?

looks nice.

Might give it another try or wait till the tech trees are done.

Some skill shots or extra unit abilities would be nice. And I like the addition of armour classes.

Pxtl wrote:I think you're too worried about cluttering the info popup. The whole point of that is to feed as much info as possible to the user... although the coloured text is way too dark to read. Colour-coding is good, but not at the price of legibility.

Eventually I am going to do a new unit info display but right now using a very heavily modified version of car's info stuff is my stopgap.

Pxtl wrote:So any plans on switching to a more incremental release cycle, or will you stick to "I'm working on this in private, I'll release when I'm ready to do that".

Well it is incremental. I just released mid phase. .3 was the next incremental phase. However, there were a lot of requests for specific features so I took a side track into other shit for 1.26. When I get back to work I will resume my .plan. Really 1.3 isn't that terribly much to do but it would be a few more months esp with the jumpjets stuff that I still have to do.

Pxtl wrote:Any change to the reclaiming-part of the eco? The builders?

The builders, I do have a plan for that.
Here is what I have planned:
- The conyards and command buildings will have squared build ranges instead of round. There will be an invisible floating commander that can only be selected via ui buttons. His build que will be buildable anywhere within the range of the command buildings or conyards.

So the command building and conyards will cease to be construction units.

- There has been a great deal of bitching about "no expansion motivation" so I am thinking of stuff to address that complaint. I will not make those plans known until I feel they are hammered out better.

- I intend on changing the rate of resource income to be so much every 5-10 seconds(depending on what feels right, it might be even longer)

- I intend on increasing construction times for structures along with adding a deploy mode which will have a sped up build rate for 20-30 seconds. So you will be able to get your base built faster in the beginning but building losses are more problematic.

:O




:D

Yayy!

(And I helped too, a tiny tiny bit! )

Random idea I had I might've mentioned earlier for "expansion motiviation":

A game-mode that uses the metal-map for victory-points. The metal map is Gundamanium (sorry). Plonk metal extractors on the metal map. Use soem method so that a portion of the metal remains in the extractors, and is lost when said extractor is destroyed... so that there's an encouragement to destroy them to actualy *reduce* the target's Gundamanium, rather than simply halting his intake. Perhaps a CA-style overdrive system, but all non-overdriven income remains sequestered in the extractors.

First player to 5000 Gundamanium wins.

Add the GAW and the White Base as a mobile super-defense that is restricted to living in the construction-area, so players will focus on claiming and controlling turf instead of eliminating the enemy.

Would work well for FFA. Post every player's current Gundamanium storage on the playerlist so everybody knows to rush the leader.

edit: Annoying feature-idea micronized so it will not annoy the micronians in the thread.

well, I would rather not flood the thread with future feature discussion. Kinda hope you guys will look at the current new stuff, there is a lot of it, this release was stupid amounts of work and not just mine, Z's mission stuff is really neat and honestly I would like to see that people try it a bit before the suggestions inevitably flood in.

Smoth clearly forgets where he is.

I intend on spending some time with this. A ton of effort was clearly put into this release.

could you upload the game on springfiles (only the game so people can just join the gundam battles using the integrated dler)

I would but the site is clogged and will take no more uploads.

wow, looking realy promising

hey can I suggest hosting weekly games similar to S44 or Evolution? its hard to find players amongst the all the 8v8 BA DSD

also move thread to community news

What? Already? I thought you had gone the IW way!

UnitShapes > TeamPlatters > Nothing

Yay!

(dling)

Yay!

Any significant balance changes to be aware of?

This Unit-Circles are Kickass - no more teamcolouring ruining designwise colourdecision

Uh-oh.
No teamcolors AND chiliUI?
Otherwise looks nice :)
+1 for game only .sdz download