Yet another doomed fantasy mod?

[Google_Frog]

You have a few artillery units but with little static defence and no energy what will artillery be for? Do you mean generally long ranged units like OTA Morty?

When I say artillery I generally mean long-ranged units with a high trajectory. You're right though, with out buildings they're not all that useful

Long ranged units are very useful if they can hit other units. Your unit list seemed to be lacking ranged units except the Assassin so I was wondering.

Sorry - didn't explain myself very well: I was always intending on doing something like the Cursed's stances, and Az has conveniently proved that it can be done However the AI never seem to build Necromancer/Lich units, only the ones that comes from stationary factories. I've done AI programming before and I'd rather not have to build my own custom AI for the mod - it's really hard
Then again I could always just forget AI and build it for PvP only.

I haven't seen any AIs that can play any Spring game well(as in beat real people). Also I think Lua is enabling AIs to use different economy models so either way I wouldn't worry about AI.

[1v0ry_k1ng]

I haven't seen any AIs that can play any Spring game well(as in beat real people).

KAI + EE

[wilbefast]

Long ranged units are very useful if they can hit other units. Your unit list seemed to be lacking ranged units except the Assassin so I was wondering.

Do you mean "long ranged" as opposed to m├¬l├®e? Because there are only two units that have a close combat attack (Granite Pawn/Knight) - the others are all ranged. If you mean "really long ranged" though, you may have a point - artillery by its very definition isn't good at hitting moving targets.
I'm going to rethink the roles of the last 3 Granite units - the Rook may become a deployable defence or something (which fits with it's castle-y nature).

The unit list was the result of a quick brainstorm where I made a list of the standard types of unit, then cut out the ones that were too specialised (dedicated anti-air and so on). When it comes to ground units I had:

• swarm (anti-assassin)
• riot (anti-swarm)
• tank (anti-riot)
• assassin (anti-tank)
• artillery (anti-defence)

Forgetting of course that there weren't any defences for it to "anti"... Anyway, when I say "assassin" I don't literally mean an assassin, I mean any unit that targets a single enemy for very high damage, but has a very slow reload (or in this case: a very slow charge-up).

One final thing: in coming up with these units I wanted each one's role to fit with their piece in chess - kings are vital, but vulnerable, pawns are basic soldiers, knights are agile shock troops, bishop are nimble and long-ranged, rooks are powerful but blundering and queens are obviously super-units. Any thoughts on this?


William

[wilbefast]

Hey guys,

Haven't posted for a while because double posting on your own thread is some serious bad karma. That said I do have a lot of stuff to share and a lot of progress to talk about, so I think it's justified.

Daemons => "Talos"
First up the Daemons are getting a less generic name: the Talos.
This fits with the Promethians quick nicely - it's another indirect reference to Greek mythology. The Talos army will be composed of possessed bronze/gold suits of armour (warm colours), with plenty of warped surfaces and spikes. These "bodies" will explode when they assume spirit-form, and have to be reforged (body -> spirit = fast, spirit -> body = slow).
Their "ultimate unit" is actually their commander (again - the only human: can anyone think of a better name than "commander"?) who can be possessed himself, turning into a massive, warped monstrosity The Talos Possessed Commander will be the most powerful unit in the game - you can only have one (for obvious reasons), it costs a bomb, takes forever to morph and if it dies, you lose. That said if somebody manages to perform the ritual on their commander you'd better start praying - it not only has some highly destructive magic (~mini-nukes) but can build and generates and stores resources (like the commander or more - not enough to be spamming nukes though, unless you have other generators), so is effectively a one unit army

Undead and Fae - brainstorm
The Undead need a cool name too - any ideas? So far the concept for them is to have their army made up one "corpse golems" rather than just animated corpses - sort of like Frankestein's monster: hideous creatures stitched together using body parts from all over the place.

Same story with the Fae - they are likely to supplement their "ents" with "fairies" which will look like humanoid insects. This is a choice not only to provide a distinctive look, but also because insect exo-skeletons are a lot easier to animate realistically than human flesh. Undead I can get away with because they're dead bodies, and the Daemons as you know, are now all metal. I'm saving the commanders (again - don't like that name) till last so that I'll have had the maximum amount of practice modelling when I try to make a human.
The Fae have ethereal units that can toggle between states rather than destroying their body: obviously this has advantages and disadvantages. So Undead spirits are always ethereal, the Talos can turn their units into spirits and certain Fae can toggle between ethereal and corporeal. The Prometheans meanwhile don't have any ethereal units.

Progress with Fugly
I've now done my armour and movement definitions, unit definition and scripting for the test unit (Fugly Tank). Fugly can now:

• Move around the map, pathing correctly and turning his wheels.
• Rotate his turret to fire, track enemies, return to a neutral position.
• Recoil turret, fire laser and reset head afterwards.
• Rotate turret to build (himself), repair and reclaim.
• Explode in a cloud of fugly glory, or rather body parts.

Some things are still proving problematic however:

• Nano particules spawn at base rather than at the flare, despite the:
  function script.QueryNanopiece1 (heading, pitch) return flare end
• whenever any function script is called, function script.StopBuilding( ) is called too. I have absolutely no idea why, but it means I can't use this function, so I can't reset the turret after building is complete.
• Fugly is apparently a pacifist, as he only ever fires at the ground, and will never attack the enemy tank unless manually aimed: both tanks just wander around eachother aimlessly.

Progress with Prometheans
Things are progressing in concentrated bursts of activity - I've started work on the "Granite Knight" (or "Trojan") model. This will be a heavy close-combat shock unit:



Meanwhile I've realised that the "ethereal" state can be done really easily using armour definitions (make physical attacks do no damage, magical ones do extra damage, etc).
Units with multiple attacks will only be able to use one at a time as you can't case multiple spells simultaneously (because I said so). Instead you'll be able to toggle/switch between weapons, meaning that you can alter a unit's function slightly: there'll be fewer units but many will be multi-role.

For example, the obsidian Bishop's Main attack is a split-second heat-ray that does very high damage to a single target, with very good armour penetration (eg - works well again all armour types). However he can switch to a thinner beam that does lighter damage with less penetration, but has no reload time (it's "sprayed" constantly at the target).

The Bishops are generally going to fall into a "wizard" class that tends to have multiple support spells: the Granite Bishop will have a meteor spell that works like artillery but is also effective against slow-moving units, and may also be able to turn enemies to stone.

All feedback, ideas, advice, criticism and abuse is very much welcome


William

[Google_Frog]

As the commander will presumably be summoning armies you could call it something wizardy; Mage, Summoner, Wizard etc... You could even personalise each wizard to the race that they control. The obvious two are Necromancer for undead and Druid for Fey/Ents. Talos would want to be named after something demonic as well as alchemy(as they're spirits bound into animated metal statues). There's probably a word for someone that makes golems but I don't know any.

Meanwhile I've realised that the "ethereal" state can be done really easily using armour definitions (make physical attacks do no damage, magical ones do extra damage, etc).
Units with multiple attacks will only be able to use one at a time as you can't case multiple spells simultaneously (because I said so). Instead you'll be able to toggle/switch between weapons, meaning that you can alter a unit's function slightly: there'll be fewer units but many will be multi-role.

The ethereal units system could work very well, it would add another area to the game. Ethereal units could even interact with your mana steams idea in interesting ways. How much interaction with the corporeal world and other ethereal units are you thinking that they would have? There are a lot of options; the 2 planes could have little interaction with each other apart for magic uses firing on ethereal units, ethereals could or could not fight other ethereal units, ethereal units could fight physical units so all armies would.

Make sure that you don't end up with a hardcounter system such as Physical > Magic User > Ethereal > Physical. The Prometheans non-ethereality might be a problem in the long run as magic user will at least be some kind of counter to ethereals so you would need to make less mages when against prometheans. You could counteract that with magic vulnerability but it is very easy to use armour types to turn your game into an unintuitive mess.

With toggle weapons make sure that you don't end up with annoying toggles like Blood and Steel has (as well as RA3). It really depends on the ability, make sure that the toggle is an important choice instead of something the AI should handle. For example if you have an AA spell and an anti-ground spell just script/gadget in a shared reload bar so that the AI does the smart thing in any given situation. TAK has toggle weapons for spell which work in most cases as only a few expensive units have them although Mage Archer constant paralysis toggle is quite annoying.

Do you mean "long ranged" as opposed to m├¬l├®e? Because there are only two units that have a close combat attack (Granite Pawn/Knight) - the others are all ranged. If you mean "really long ranged" though, you may have a point - artillery by its very definition isn't good at hitting moving targets.

You can have long ranged accurate units, even inaccurate ones have uses in forcing the opponent's army to move. I was asking more about general ranged units as opposed to melee though.

[maackey]

From the CA NewNames page:
Exousia. Greek for Control. Alternatly could be translated as "Commander" or "Power" or even "Power of Choice". Complete definition http://www.studylight.org/lex/grk/view.cgi?number=1849

[wilbefast]

You can have long ranged accurate units, even inaccurate ones have uses in forcing the opponent's army to move. I was asking more about general ranged units as opposed to melee though.

Yeah, well the aim is to severely limit the number of m├¬l├®e-only weapons: it's going to be mostly beam/balls of magical death

Make sure that you don't end up with a hardcounter system such as Physical > Magic User > Ethereal > Physical. The Prometheans non-ethereality might be a problem in the long run as magic user will at least be some kind of counter to ethereals so you would need to make less mages when against prometheans. You could counteract that with magic vulnerability but it is very easy to use armour types to turn your game into an unintuitive mess.

The idea at the moment is as follows:

• Armour types:
  • Light
  • Medium
  • Heavy
  • Ethereal
  • Flammable
• Attack types:
  • Magical
  • Non-magical
  • either of the above can be Flaming
• Rules:
  • All Ethereal units' m├¬l├®e attacks are Magical.
  • All other m├¬l├®e attacks are Non-Magical.
  • All Magical ranged magical attacks (spells) must be charged and cost mana to use.
  • Magical attacks do extra damage to Ethereal units.
  • Non-Magical attacks don't cost mana and reload rather than being charged.
  • Non-Magical attacks do little/no damage to Ethereal units.

The idea is that your low-level units will use mostly Non-Magical weapons and have very low upkeep, so won't stress your economy all that much. Magical attacks work against everything but cost mana to use - also they may be overkill in certain circumstances.

With toggle weapons make sure that you don't end up with annoying toggles like Blood and Steel has (as well as RA3). It really depends on the ability, make sure that the toggle is an important choice instead of something the AI should handle. For example if you have an AA spell and an anti-ground spell just script/gadget in a shared reload bar so that the AI does the smart thing in any given situation. TAK has toggle weapons for spell which work in most cases as only a few expensive units have them although Mage Archer constant paralysis toggle is quite annoying.

Good point - Generally the spell changes won't be no-brainers like "AA or not" - often it'll be switching between something like a shield and a combat spell, so very much changing the function of the unit.

From the CA NewNames page:
Exousia. Greek for Control. Alternatly could be translated as "Commander" or "Power" or even "Power of Choice". Complete definition http://www.studylight.org/lex/grk/view.cgi?number=1849

Nice one - not sure which side it would work best with though... I'll think about it. I reckon "Necromancer" and "Summoner" may be a bit generic since every "builder" for the Talos side is a summoner. "Alchemist" might be good though for somebody though... maackey: Where is this NewNames page you speak of?


William

[zwzsg]

can anyone think of a better name than "commander"?

Monarch

[Google_Frog]

The idea at the moment is as follows:

• Armour types:
  • Light
  • Medium
  • Heavy
  • Ethereal
  • Flammable
• Attack types:
  • Magical
  • Non-magical
  • either of the above can be Flaming
• Rules:
  • All Ethereal units' m├¬l├®e attacks are Magical.
  • All other m├¬l├®e attacks are Non-Magical.
  • All Magical ranged magical attacks (spells) must be charged and cost mana to use.
  • Magical attacks do extra damage to Ethereal units.
  • Non-Magical attacks don't cost mana and reload rather than being charged.
  • Non-Magical attacks do little/no damage to Ethereal units.

What do you think you'll achieve with light, medium and heavy armour that you can't just do with HP? Flammable as well as another attack type would get needlessly complex. I think you could work with a flammable attack type as another whole kind of physical attack and let magic flames always be magic. If you delve too far into magic the consistency breaks down, eg shouldn't a meteor spell be physical because magic is only causing a rock to hit something.

[smoth]

Monarch

YEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEES

[wilbefast]

What do you think you'll achieve with light, medium and heavy armour that you can't just do with HP? Flammable as well as another attack type would get needlessly complex. I think you could work with a flammable attack type as another whole kind of physical attack and let magic flames always be magic. If you delve too far into magic the consistency breaks down, eg shouldn't a meteor spell be physical because magic is only causing a rock to hit something.

You may have a point there... first of all though, when it comes to armour types I was thinking more of the Pandora Cube thing, which takes more damage when it's open, sort of like a Dragon's Egg in CA. In this case the Max Damage wouldn't change but the amount of damage taken would. I think. Maybe I should look at how the CA people did it for theirs...

Flammable was an afterthought - I was thinking tree-men and corpses could take more damage/be set on fire whereas stone- and metal-men couldn't. In retrospect it does get a little complicated though: you've got guys that breath non-magical flames, and magical fireballs, and really what's the difference between the two types of fire?
I think we'll fall back on rule number one of game design, which is that reasonable solutions should work: punching a ghost in the face doesn't seem like the sort of thing that would be effective. On the other hand setting fire to it, even with your standard, "run-of-the-mill fire" might irk it a little more. Likewise exploding it with a meteor might banish it at least for a little while.

So we'll say that anything elemental is "Magical" and therefore hurts ethereal units. Meanwhile things like:
- extend-o-fists
- boiling lead spray
- claws
- teeth
- "spineties"
- head butts
- acidic vomit
- flak (metal splitter death!)
- etc
Will also be non-magical.

Also ethereal units will cost more upkeep (= constant mana drain just to be alive) than other units because they have no physical "scaffold": they're *made* of magic.

I'm still undecided when it comes to names - possibly because I haven't explain much about the setting. It's like, I was thinking "Emperor" for the Promethean commander, because who else orders kings and queens around, but the individual "commander" isn't so much a monarch or sovereign as a general - maybe the general of an empire that no longer exists, but a general none-the-less. Here's a brief rundown of the back story - you'll remember that a single-player campaign is one of my priorities. Tell me what you think/whether you can think of any names that fit.

• Once upon a time there were some wizards who kept being burned at the state by superstitious peasants, so they all came together into a sort of council type thing, because strength is in numbers...
  
  That worked out pretty well only everyone found the necromancers a little creepy, because they were always ****ing around with dead people. The necromancers got sick of being found creepy so decided to take over the council...
  
  That worked out pretty well because anyone who fought them just got killed and raised into their army. Then this magical-toymaker dude who everyone had previously taken for granted made some really big toys with extend-o-fists and crazy **** like that and used them against the necromancers' army...
  
  That worked out pretty well because the necromancers couldn't use the destroyed golems, and the few that survived were forced to go into hiding. But the toymaker let victory go to his head (toymaker to hero is a bit of a leap) and used his newfound power to turn the council into the "Promethean Empire", becoming increasingly paranoid and tyrannical...
  
  That worked out pretty well for him until a bunch of young wizards started screwing around with the fabric of space and time and bringing these spirit type things into the world which they used as servants. Our toymaker-emperor got nervous because he didn't want anyone else being able to build an army like his golem one, so he tried to have them arrested, at which point they summoned a big ****ing daemon to protect them, but it went ape**** and started killing everyone. The summoners managed to contain their mistake inside a shiny bauble of some sort, but instead of thanking them Toymaker-emperor-dude signed their death warrants, at which point they escaped through a portal to some blasted island and plotted their revenge. The emperor then got so paranoid that he put his soul into the biggest ****ing golem around, so he could live forever...
  
  That worked out pretty well only he was even more paranoid than before, because this time there actually *were* people out to get him, and because he was so disrespectful of the natural world the Druid type people split off from the Empire and went to live in some big forest type place instead, because they were all filthy hippies...
  
  That worked out pretty well until: our story begins...
  

I want the story to switch between factions like in TA:K, and the big deamon and golem were going to be "bosses", only why shouldn't they be used in multiplayer too? Hence the possessed commander, but I was thinking it might be unfair if the Talos got a super-super-unit and everyone else just got super-units. So I had another quick brainstorm:

- The Undead commander could progress along the "path of necromancerishness", morphing first from a living dude with a beard to a corpse with a beard and finally a spirit with a beard. Each time he would generate and store slightly more resources, build faster, do more damage and gain new abilities.
- The Talos commander can be possessed as mentioned before.
- The Promethean Commander can choose between 3 "ultimate" bodies (again: Granite, Obsidian, Marble) each with different abilities (defence, attack, mobility). edit: Alternatively he could put his soul into any golem unit, making that unit "it" instead (his old body would die).
- Not sure about the Fae... maybe he could be so zen that he turns into a tree, though why you'd want to turn into a tree I'm not sure...

Commanders should be special I think, as they're the player's avatar, but in most TA-based mods they tend to become obsolete/ordinance late in the game


Thoughts?

[MidKnight]

Perhaps a magical tree that can provide beneficial auras to allied units in a radius and root enemies, etc?

[Saktoth]

There is nothing intrinsically wrong with armour classes but they need to be considered with game design. A lot of people have light, medium, heavy armour and all weapons simply do less to the medium armour and least to the heavy.

You need weapons that do less to heavy, more to light, or it just works as extra HP.

Nothing wrong with fire/magical/whatever damage, this can help create good counter mechanics (though they arent always as interesting as physically derived ones, like accuracy and range vs speed).

CA dragons egg uses damagemod, like a pop-up tower.

[wilbefast]

Perhaps a magical tree that can provide beneficial auras to allied units in a radius and root enemies, etc?

Yeah, I was thinking maybe it could give you an economic boom and some handy effects. Still, the Fae commander has invisibility and (possibly) ethereal mode so is already relatively powerful...

There is nothing intrinsically wrong with armour classes but they need to be considered with game design. A lot of people have light, medium, heavy armour and all weapons simply do less to the medium armour and least to the heavy.

You need weapons that do less to heavy, more to light, or it just works as extra HP.

Nothing wrong with fire/magical/whatever damage, this can help create good counter mechanics (though they arent always as interesting as physically derived ones, like accuracy and range vs speed).

CA dragons egg uses damagemod, like a pop-up tower.

Agreed - we have this great physics simulation: it'd be a shame to waste it.
The only reason I wanted to use armour classes was to allow units to be more or less vulnerable depending on whether or not they are "deployed" - if this is done via "damagemod" (?) then I'll just hike up the hp of heavy units and save myself the trouble

I had an idea for a Talos riot-m├¬l├®e unit for example: it's covered in these sharpened metal plates the hang down from neck and waist level, and attacks by spinning around, causing them to stick out and chop up anything nearby (hence riot): they'd be far more vulnerable when spinning than when moving normally.

The reason I'm doing metal-men rather than my original concept is that I'm a little more familliar with the animation system and I reckon if I work *with* it rather than *against* it the results will be far better.
Also the idea of evil daemonic possessed metal things seems like a something rather new and original to me


That's Spellforce BTW - it came with my Nvidia6200 YEARS ago

[wilbefast]

I added some extra elements to the paradox cube (for structural integrity + team colour) but unfortunately this meant redoing the skin which, frankly, I was quite proud of...
Then again I'm doing metallic creatures so the boxiest of them all needs to be, well, more of a box. I wanted do a warped gold sort of thing.


Can't remember who (KaiserJ I think) suggested I do more highlighting, so I gave it a try: first basic outlines of light and shadows, then the whole thing blurred as a base coat.


Went made with the spraycan and finally added details. I'm not particularly pleased with the result because it unwrapped badly and there are a lot of artefacts and asymetricalities. Also it doesn't really look like what I was aiming for (Tutankhamen) can anybody give me any advice about making shiny metallics?

At least it looks good in game - here scripted up, stationary and mobile.



I've also finished the model for the Granite Knight:



BTW I think I'm doing to do this under Creative Commons BY-NC-SA

That means I get credit but it can be used all you like, if you don't sell it and if you release your stuff too. Thoughts?


edit: another brainstorm-ey idea: you can "Queen" pawns in chess, so maybe you could morph veteran pawns into Queens - since the survival rate of a pawn is going to be very lol, this wouldn't happen very frequently


William

[Pxtl]

That stuff looks pretty darned good, and is actually one of the best showings I've ever seen by somebody that newbish.

The cube looks rather bright for something so horrific, but brightness does provide better gameplay sometimes.

Your CC license choice is good - sharing is caring. The NC clause will have a small drawback: it is not permissive enough to allow your mod (or re-uses of your content in other mods) to be distributed within the Debian/Ubuntu core.... but that's only a problem if you want your mod to be distributed as a stand-alone game within those Linux distros - players will still be able to download it and run on the base Spring engine.

[knorke]

the cube looks scary

can anybody give me any advice about making shiny metallics?

Do you know about http://springrts.com/wiki/Units:Textures#Reflections this?

For scripting, did you use lua? If so, what example unit/mod/tutorial did you use, because I can not find something that is easy enough for me

[FLOZi]

the cube looks scary

can anybody give me any advice about making shiny metallics?

Do you know about http://springrts.com/wiki/Units:Textures#Reflections this?

For scripting, did you use lua? If so, what example unit/mod/tutorial did you use, because I can not find something that is easy enough for me

he's using lua unit scripts yes, mainly from my stumpy example and tobi's S44 examples, and working through stuff with me on msn. afaik, they are the only lua unitscript examples currently available.

[CarRepairer]

I converted a chicken script to lua, as well as azaremoth's piggy. I'll have it up on the web soon (waiting for det).

[maackey]

I have a few in the CA repo and also I've exclusively used lua anims in my game.

http://code.google.com/p/maackey/source ... an/scripts

Most are still works in progress but they are workable.