Sprite support + Fixed Camera

[Forboding Angel]

Could we have an option for sprites (animation supported) as units and forcing the camera to stay in a fixed position? (Like the OTA view)

I think this could be pretty neat for less serious games (a dark reign remake comes to mind), or for that matter even serious games could use them, but it might open up the engine a bit for wider use.

Thoughts?

[Argh]

The only thing that's really required for this, engine-side is... is a way to force the camera to stay at a given angle.

Doing the sprite animations, in terms of code, is really trivial.

All that said... meh, making sprites that don't look like crap at the given angle... is not trivial. It's at least as much work as making decent stuff in full 3D.

And the performance increases would be pretty much non-existent, as most of the load is CPU-side now, with the improvements in rendering speed in SVN Spring.

[jK]

Everything doable with lua, no need to clutter up the engine with it.

[Forboding Angel]

Just struck me as a decent idea and Argh idd, but it seems that some developers prefer that.

For example the ORTS guys.

[Argh]

Everything doable with lua, no need to clutter up the engine with it.

Can Lua kill attempts to change the camera distance / angle? Or would it have to reset that every frame?

[EDIT]Yes, definitely. See below.[/EDIT]

[Argh]

Well, here's a crude way to go about this:

Just run some stuff in DrawWorld() to continually reset the camera's state, with Spring.SetCameraState, after using Spring.GetCameraState to get the current positions, etc. Then just set the directions XYZ to the required angle, I guess. Simple. There's probably a cleaner way, but that should work.

[jK]

there is a lua camera controller, but it isn't finished yet.

also you want perhaps to reset the camera angle already in Update() to prevent small jitters.

[Argh]

Yeah, makes sense, that runs before DrawWorld calls, doesn't it?

I dunno how the handling of different directions would get handled, though. I could see doing this with gl.Unit, for simple tanks, but with infantry, where players would expect to see their backs and sides if they turn... meh, that'd be obnoxious to code, imo.

I'm still trying to figure out the appeal, Forb.

Have you ever made character animations for a game with an isometric engine before? I have, and it was, by far, the hardest animation work I've ever done, period... you have to render the characters doing the same crap from multiple angles (usually 8, but games like Escape Velocity used 32)- every action, mind ye, from walking to deaths. And you have to render them isometrically, too, from a very specific camera angle. And what about teamcolor support? The last time I had to mess with this, we blitted different sprite layers on top of the main animations to do that... which is more pain.

I just don't get the appeal of this, when you could have full-3D guys, but just keep the camera angles constant. Much, much easier to work with.

[AF]

Its easier to make an icon and use that than to take a modelling program and model and texture something.

Especially if premade sprites are available.

+1 to this request

But Im sure it can all be done in pure lua.

[Argh]

Especially if premade sprites are available.

Oh, I get it. This is really about "borrowing" older commercial games' content. Meh, sorry, I thought we were talking about legal projects here, like maybe somebody had developed all of the art assets for an isometric game and you guys just wanted to try porting it. I missed the implications of "Dark Reign" being mentioned, pretty much.

I'll just stay out of this conversation, then, sorry. I'm not willing to help with this sort of thing.

[AF]

Not all sprite based artwork is commercial

[Argh]

Meh. You're joking, right? That's not your artwork. And there are no animation sequences. That's not even slightly credible. Gimme a break.

While I had dinner, I figured out how to actually do the whole thing, and mimic an old-skool isometric game perfectly. Show me content that you can actually use, and intend to use, that is LEGAL to use, and maybe I will explain it.

Probably not, though, it would open up Spring to invasion by all sorts of retro content-stealing projects- guys wanting to redo Fallout: Tactics vs. StarCraft vs. the characters from the various 40K isometric games, or whatever (note: this wouldn't actually work, they all used different camera angles, so it would look like poo).

Opening up Spring to this is the kind of thing that could get Spring shut down, AF. Hardly anybody makes isometric, animated characters that look cool, other than commercial game houses, because it's actually REALLY HARD TO DO.

So I'm not willing to discuss this further unless I see actual evidence that somebody somewhere has the skills needed to actually do it. Not just make a pathetic "sprite wars" game, with characters that aren't animated, don't shade according to light angles, etc.

[yuritch]

Well, there actually are RTS sprites which I consider good and which aren't commercial. This, for example, is from FMRM mod for Sudden Strike 2 (a few of the units on screens are from original unmodded game though, and so are commercial, but most aren't):


That's just to prove the fact that quality non-commecrial sprites exist.
And no, I don't have those sprites outside of the game.

[aegis]

I doubt someone making a mod for Spring could get Spring shut down...

[Warlord Zsinj]

I'd rather see the work go into something that is likely to be used immediately...

Fixing the aircraft flight code/gunship/transport code?

[Forboding Angel]

sigh...

It's not about borrowing content from older games. I dunno where you come up with this shit.

Some people prefer to use sprites for their games. It makes sense to open up the engine to those people as well so that way you have an all around cake.

[AF]

• Firstly - Your entire point is mooted by the TA content and the assumption that all sprites used you don't make yourself are illegal sprites. The RPGToolkit/GameMaker and other free legal 2D game making communities must be paying millions in legal fees every week in your world.
• Secondly - I linked to a blog post I did not tell foreboding or anybody to use any sprites in particular. My point was to show that not all sprites are ripped from commercial games. Thank you for making yourself look silly
• Thirdly - Those sprites are low resolution jpeg copies of higher resolution artwork produced but not distributed. The author has said this on these very forums in posts you have directly replied to as far as I am aware. He has expressed an interest in producing more work since that blog post and has in fact created more artwork including a storyboard.
• Fourthly - All your points based on legality are not unique to sprites, and they apply just as much to the forms of content you yourself use. If your points are valid then the eventual outcome is that all content is illegal.

Now that we have those assumptions out the way lets set about debunking the narrow minded view Argh has.

Argh while you want full 3D shiny graphics for your games, sometimes that is inappropriate. Sometimes the visual complexity of these games is insufficient for representing the necessary data. Example of this are the strategic full map view in spring and supreme commander as well as the sensor view of home world 1 and 2.

Graphics also take processing power to render. How better than to use nothing but sprites. There's a reason units in 3d RTS games were mostly sprites prior to TA. Populous 3 despite its 'sphere worlds' had animated sprites for units, and reserved geometry for terrain, transport vehicles, and map features such as trees. This point does not apply to all contexts however and it is easy to dismiss this by waving a geforce 8 around and saying "modern hardware this, modern hardware that", but not everybody has a geforce 8 class gpu, or even a Geforce 4 class gpu, some people even have GeForce 1 and 2 cards! Infact IIRC someone tried to run it on a GeForce 256 once!.

Then what if I tried to make a primitive RTS with basic sprites with icons and no animation no 3D geometry top down? What if I do not know how to model and animate or even the names of modelling programs? I'd rather see instant results from any concept sketches I have than spend the time learning to model and then finally get there, ro maybe I got demotivated and gave up?

At the end of the day we want spring to be as flexible as possible. It was originally intended as an RTS engine but who knows it could be used in a different context.

But blanket denouncement of features because your personal tastes do not agree with it is dangerous, almost as insulting as labeling an entire category of art and content illegal by default.

[Pxtl]

Also, if you're doing something from a low angle, there's the FreeDoom sprite set.

But really, Spring would have enough 3D content to build a whole game out of open-source stuff if we supported standard formats. If per-vertex animation was available and we had a converter for Quake 3 MD3s, you could filch the "Open Arena" stuff, for example.

[Forboding Angel]

I Might point out that besides CC and TA, Dark Reign is the only other RTS I've ever played and the first thing that came to mind when I thought of sprites.

Tho to my credit, I did play the demo of metal fatigue.

[Argh]

1. The CPU gains would be pretty smallish.

Pathfinder and other costs would remain as-is. Your main savings would be on one-time costs, such as the particle system... if you went really old-skool, and used blitted series of images to do explosions, etc. But it would still be slow, compared to the old-skool engines, which used drawing routines frequently tweaked in assembler for speed and memory efficiency, 8-bit palettes, etc., which are not things you can do with Spring, short of a major engine rewrite.

2. There are no obstacles to building an icon-wars game, if somebody wants to do that! Just make your icons, make S3Os that are just one point and a hitsphere, and voila, problem solved. All you have to do is edit the icon's draw-distance, which is in the icon's parameters. Or, just tell Lua to draw a nice colored picture of the Unit every frame, and skip icons all together. Or use both, and have the icon be your method of doing teamcolor. Not hard at all.

So... there are no serious obstacles, if you want to do something legitimate. What I came up with, though, would require animated isometric characters, and some other things that I probably shouldn't even hint about, because they'd give you ideas about how to solve this.



HOWEVER...

I probably shouldn't share this, because it'll just give people ideas, but meh, here's a scoop for ya:

Jagged Alliance 2 appears to have been Open Sourced.

Now you "just" have to demonstrate that you can actually use that data, and I'll discuss how to implement it as a practical game design. I've already found the applications to extract their data format, etc., so this is more or less a test.




And before I read yet more ignorance from people who have no experience doing isometric character animations, and wonder why I keep telling you it's really hard... please... for the love of God, read through this:

Discussion of the practical problems of implementing isometric character animations.

It's actually an excellent primer on the issues behind what you're talking so blithely about implementing, on the graphics end, and why I accurately described this stuff as the hardest animation work I've ever done

So, you could grab the images from JA2, but if you're talking about doing new ones... meh, I'd talk to these people, after you have JA2 characters running around in a gameworld first, you might suddenly find a lot of help.