Possibly blasphemous but... turn-based strategy project?

[D3monic]

I'm looking for an engine to build off of for a very small turn-based strategy game project. How viable is Spring for this purpose? Your insight is greatly appreciated.

[Pendrokar]

You can check this thread - http://springrts.com/phpbb/viewtopic.ph ... turn+based

[D3monic]

Interesting, though I wish the script attachment were available. How hard would it be to make a game grid-based too?

[SinbadEV]

It already is grid based... just on a very very small scale and units are allowed to stop when not centred on the grid

[Master-Athmos]

You really should think about what you exactly want to do though (both gameplay wise as technically). While this is certainly very possible with Spring it might be much more easy and fast to do in another engine which also usually are way more powerful and flexible in many ways especially on the graphics part...

The biggest advantage probably is that you have multiplayer and lobby functionality "out of the box" with Spring. You're going to have to "fight the engine" a bit though when actually doing the game dynamics most certainly being way more work than doing it in a general engine. You'll also need Lua in order to make things work here (as doing it at the engine's source level would be quite a waste)...

[CarRepairer]

It already is grid based... just on a very very small scale and units are allowed to stop when not centred on the grid

We have a comedian in our midst.

[D3monic]

Lua is actually a positive but, overall, it sounds like using Spring will complicate things more than it will make them easier. I think I'll focus on other engines. Thanks for the advice!

[Argh]

Uh... doing a TBS with spring is easy. Why are people implying it's complex? A TBS is just a RTS where time is an arbitrary concept, and the game engine side just isn't allowed to update until players say to go, with animations that occur when they say go (although it's obviously not a requirement).

Simply use MoveCtrl to move Units around, and have their attacks be utterly emulated in the TBS system, not standard Spring weapons. To deal with them, animation-wise, just send them some animation parameters via Lua- they don't need to use standard Unit control cycles at all, because they're obviously just going to ignore them anyhow. Then just let the animations run x seconds, whilst refusing to take new commands. Then reset back to UI. Voila, a TBS. If you want to get fancy, you follow each Unit through the sequence, or you can have "simultaneous" play where each side plans moves, then the engine determines what actually happens... and then, and only then, animates the results.

This isn't terribly complicated, in terms of basic mechanics, nor would it be that difficult to produce a nice TBS with this engine (assuming you have the content know-how as well as the programming skills).

As for graphics... other than the lack of an IK-based model format, which is a major obstacle to newbies, Spring is quite capable of doing just about anything graphically you want these days. We have full shader support on models, you can program quite freely in terms of graphics... it's mainly a question of whether or not you have the skills to do it, not whether it's possible. And while I am not done, I am fairly confident that we will not be stuck with SMF as the sole viable choice in terms of map presentation a lot longer.

[Saktoth]

Would be much, much easier, argh, to use springs standard weapons and movement, have everything holdfire/holdground/commandfire and to simply restrict when orders can be given. Something like what TFC did.

Still dont think Spring is the right engine though.