Spring RTS Engine

ingame shots?

Also looks homeworld everlasting sexy by style..

thx PicassoCT :)

In-game shots will follow when i finish the texture and the reflective texture.

still not finished but close to it, the Assault-frigate.



I´m quite satisfied with the way it looks, just the details on the team-colored front part seem to be too random.

Muffe, these look fantastic! When you add normalmaps they will look like total sex in a can in spring!

@Forboding Angel: Thanks :) personally I´m not so sure if I will add Normalmaps, since they tend to decrease the sharpness of the texture. But that might be just my error when creating the maps. If I´m not mistaken, there was a discussion about which format to use for the nm-texture since that could be the reason, so I might still look into this. But thats far in the future considering the workload that lies ahead until then (1 1/2 month between two model textures.. extrapolating that... well 2016 might work ) .

So here is the nearly finished flak frigate. Just want t put it out since I worked 9 hours on it... mapping and texturing. Still trying out some small details which I can use to break up the monotony of larger surfaces. Might have to rework the other ship(s) if I should find something thats strike me as fitting to keep it a bit unified.

Nearly forgot the EMP-Frigate in the process of modeling all units for the Isari... the shame... the horror...

Its looking a bit cluttered, but I hope that will make the silhouette easily distinguishable from the other frigates.


http://www.bilder-hochladen.net/files/b ... q-757b.jpg

"Finished" the texture for the long range frigate



http://www.bilder-hochladen.net/files/b ... r-854d.jpg

"Finished" the texture for the EMP frigate.



http://www.bilder-hochladen.net/files/b ... x-091d.jpg

I wonder if its possible to use 1024*1024 textures for the larger ships or if thats too much for the engine to handle. If anyone has experience with larger textures and performance, I would be interested to hear your opinion.

For an engine like spring you need to add a bit of shadow at least. Without it, there are many times where your model will look very badly.

LordMuffe wrote: I wonder if its possible to use 1024*1024 textures for the larger ships or if thats too much for the engine to handle. If anyone has experience with larger textures and performance, I would be interested to hear your opinion.

Dont worry about texture size. Just make sure all your textures will fit into your vram target. I would target about 512MB of total textures for your game.
BAR has a wonderful 4k by 4k atlas and it works just dandy.
Really nice ships btw. I would add bump and AO.

but BAR has one (two?) atlas for all units? I would have 1024er textures for roughly 20 units in the end, each unit one unique tex.
I remember, that my first unit with a 1024 tex made spring freeze (1-2sec) when it was spawned the first time. Not that unbearable but still not nice.

I will keep the vram in mind, thx for the tip :)

Bump will probably be added once I add them into the game, but does AO make sense in space (not one light-source, etc)? Haven't done any AO stuff to this day, but I might look into it once I have all units ingame.

Depends on how "big" they are

I remember, that my first unit with a 1024 tex made spring freeze (1-2sec) when it was spawned the first time. Not that unbearable but still not nice.

We use a workaround for this: http://imolarpg.dyndns.org/trac/balates ... loader.lua, but that won't work for large numbers of textures.

Silentwings wrote:

I remember, that my first unit with a 1024 tex made spring freeze (1-2sec) when it was spawned the first time. Not that unbearable but still not nice.

We use a workaround for this: http://imolarpg.dyndns.org/trac/balates ... loader.lua, but that won't work for large numbers of textures.

that right there is spring in a nutshell :)

"Finished the texture for the shield frigate:


http://www.bilder-hochladen.net/files/b ... y-b1d1.jpg

all frigates finished ( yay ).. now on to the dreadnoughts

smoth wrote:Depends on how "big" they are

do you mean that in regard of the textures or the ao-baking (unitsize)?
AO seems not quite possible now that I looked into it: I have many cloned parts on the opposite site. that might lead to rather strange shadows.

never was one to play with frigids - more the dreaded noughty one.. so go on.. im all eyes

LordMuffe wrote:

smoth wrote:Depends on how "big" they are

do you mean that in regard of the textures or the ao-baking (unitsize)?

I mean in relation to others. In grts I had the white base and gaw command ships.

I am not really sure about why those models require such a huge UV but am unwilling to look at resolving the issue. Even with some parts clipping there are ways to make the model at least look more interesting such as having a panelline meeting where the part clips on one side, the other will simply look all the more detailed. As far as shadow issues, yes when you over using mirroring you will get that.

If your frigates are the units that you are already worried about the detail level of a 1024 I would think you have missed something along the way. If you are worried about handling old computers from 10 years ago, I would say you are being silly. By the time your game is done the will likely be 15 years old.

if the fighters are 1/10th the size of the frigate or lower, you need to ask yourself why are they not a 256 or 128? Why does the frigate need a 1024 or a 2048? are there ways to try and squeeze in more detail? I would be willing to bet you have more than a few areas of loose uvs and stuff that probably only needs 4 pixels of space. Either way, it doesn't really matter because you are going to have some really flat looking stuff until you stop and take the time to evaluate your shading approach(or in this case entire lack there-of)

well its been a while but i worked a bit on the first dreadnought model since i thought it was to bland.

new:


old:


hopefully i will be able to texture it soon

@smoth: I don't disagree with any of your points. The fighters are already on one 256 tex, the frigates are on 512. Scale wise, it will probably change a bit once its ingame, but for now id´ like to have the dreadnoughts be roughly 2-3 times the size of frigates, destroyers about 4-6 times the size. So it seems to me that it will be ok to make the uvmaps of destroyers and dreadnoughts 1024er textures. Main reason for me is, that lines wont blur like they do on my old ES models. The frigates look ok with 512, but if a destroyer (512) is on the same screen as a mothership (1024 / dreadnought) it looks horrible in comparison.

About the shading: i don't get it. I understand that it makes land units look much more vivid (?) but i don't see it as a necessity for space units. It would slow me down even more without being worth it visually for me. If I would start working on ESLO again I would try to add it but for ES I will just save the time since its something that eats up a lot of time on something (uvmapping/texturing) I dont liek to spend much time on in the first place.
My Uvmaps aren't perfect, especially since i don't rework them if I realise I don't need that much space for a piece than I gave to it before. But again: time I don't have / want to spend on perfecting something which is a very casual hobby.

tlde: will use 1024 maps for the dreads and destroyer class ships

And the first Dreadnought texture is (nearly) finished. As always, the big red areas will later be the team-color areas.

It's gorgeous. You're doing good work.