Spring RTS Engine

looks cool!
I'd make every column one single colour, though. Now the yellow top diminishes the column effect.
Are the columns featuremodels by the way?

super cool.

thesleepless wrote:

Wolf-In-Exile wrote:Warrior IFV texture im working on, unlit diffuse.

wow wolf, that looks amazing! how much of that is texture and how much is model? can we see wireframe?

Lol thanks, still got alot of work to do on it so will post those later.

Tex is 1024, model isn't by me and its quite unoptimised, almost 15k tris.

*edit* finished:







Wires:

FireStorm_ wrote:I'd make every column one single colour, though. Now the yellow top diminishes the column effect.

I actually have been thinking about making the towers team colored:

This looks really fun. I like the team color idea.

Wow Wolf. What game is that for?


Z: Are you using a fog to fade out the bottoms of the towers and can units fall?

wolf is it some kind of S2000 (<--> S44)

15k tri model for an RTS? I hope not.

Zwzsg, I'd suggest adding teamcoloured borders to the tops of those pillars, if you can. Makes the colours stand out more, makes the map less dark and would also clearly show the divide between playing area and column wall.

Guessmyname wrote:Zwzsg, I'd suggest adding teamcoloured borders to the tops of those pillars, if you can. Makes the colours stand out more, makes the map less dark and would also clearly show the divide between playing area and column wall.

could work...

How did you make those pillars?

Another slight problem is the black. If someone uses a very dark (or actually black) teamcolour, those pillars are going to disappear entirely. Look at how hard it is to make out the dark blue pillars compared to the others. I don't suppose there's a way to take the brightness of the teamcolour, invert that and use it as the base colour for that pillar? Or some other method to make sure there's always a contrast...

If you use such a busy texture it won't work. Try something that is easier on the eye so you can still see the units.

FireStorm_ wrote:Are the columns featuremodels by the way?

No. The map graphic is a Lua Open GL display list.

SirArtturi wrote:How did you make those pillars?

With a gadget. What you don't see in still pictures is that they are procedurally generated, from configurable (and randomisable!) parameters. The goal is to have one map to replace all speed balls, and more. The downside is that setting the whole map heightmap makes the loading takes quite long.

bobthedinosaur wrote:Are you using a fog to fade out the bottoms of the towers

No. First, I have had bad experiences with fog's gadget. Then there is a much simpler way, just set the bottom vertice color to (0,0,0,1).

bobthedinosaur wrote:and can units fall?

They can fall, but not as deep as it looks. As you guessed there is two pit depths. The "visual" one and the "heightmap" one. There's both just number in the script, I could make the "heightmap" pit depth as deep as, or even many times deeper, than the "visual" pit depth. However, the camera (at least the useable cameras) hover at a fixed height above ground. Well, to make it short, scrolling with TA camera is insufferable when the map is filled with deep pit / high tower alternance. So here's what the heightmap currently is really like: A cone so that the tower side cliffs are roughly all the same height despite towers being of different tallness, with some funky offset to take into account that only bridges and not plateaux are sloping, plus a layer of high frequency tiny peaks to make sure the bottom is impassable and unbuildable. This way you can scroll without the camera jumping too much.

Hoi wrote:I don't suppose there's a way to take the brightness of the teamcolour, invert that and use it as the base colour for that pillar?

There is, I coded HSV<->RGB functions already for some other widget. However, even then we'd still have the problem of unit blending in the tower camouflage. Ideally, I'd want to have two textures per towers, one team colored, one not, though I'm not sure I'll bother. Anyway, teamcolored pillars is a cool concept, but it makes you able to see where enemies expand through the fog of war, which is kinda cheating.

Hoi wrote:If you use such a busy texture it won't work. Try something that is easier on the eye so you can still see the units.

Very true. I noticed too we can't see the units over such a busy texture (even when not team colored). Also, I took the time to UV-map, but I didn't use it to make the drawings on the texture fit the polygons. The texture was just a filler, I need to make a real texture now.

Proper texture and start position is what I need to do before I can release.

I'd be willing to model you a bridge piece and hexagonal tower top if you'd like. Sounds fun (though I won't be able to actually start until after Friday; need to get a few assignments done)

But they're not models, they're a piece of code and a texture.

but they could be 'crowned' with models.

Also Models with a ground plate, or models showing team colour.
Not saying it should, but it could allow for (some part of) the towers changing team colour without all player being able to see it.

zwzsg wrote:But they're not models, they're a piece of code and a texture.

...oh. Fair enough then. Good luck, anyway!

or you could write code that renders models