OMG! where have you been all my life!

[ArchaicWarrior]

I've been looking for a wargaming engine for some time now, without much success (currently playing around with V3D) but looks like my prayers might have been answered!

I want to build a empire building / wargame like Rome Total War, yeah ok, it's been asked a million times before. I did a search in this forum but didn't find much, is it possible to produce a game in Spring that could compete with the Total War engine?

I'm new to this forum, so please be kind! <:)

Archaic Warrior.

[zwzsg]

Not sure. The unit count is typically ten times lower. There is no campaign map, only individual battles (there goes half the gameplay). There's no morals, formations, and stuff like that. Also, Spring is uglier.

I did a search in this forum but didn't find much

Did you find http://springrts.com/phpbb/viewtopic.php?f=14&t=20923 ?

[Das Bruce]

Total war is really two seperate game engines, the strategic and the tactical. Neither of which could be implimented without a large amount of effort.

[ArchaicWarrior]

ok, after a bit more reading, maybe not what i'm looking for. sad. Although my game will be more Age Of Empires than TW so that is big plus for Spring but i will require hand-2-hand combat, formations, moral, physic engine, high res skins and terrain (1024) etc

I've done a bit of programming (C mostly) so I suppose i could do changes but in this day and age I thought programming would be all modular, drop in object for intro, drop in object for multiplayer, drop in object for etc etc etc. I've retired from programming, I was hoping for higher level development tool.

Ah .. I thought I was in love but it was only lust! LOL!

[Beherith]

but i will require
hand-2-hand combat, no engine support
formations, good support, easily codeable
moral, s44 has a similar system of suppression
physic engine, check
high res skins and terrain (1024) etc and check

[ArchaicWarrior]

but i will require
hand-2-hand combat, no engine support
formations, good support, easily codeable
moral, s44 has a similar system of suppression
physic engine, check
high res skins and terrain (1024) etc and check

Thanks, could you recommend a game in Spring to try, containing most of your suggestions, to get a feel for Spring's potential.

[Regret]

could you recommend a game in Spring to try, containing most of your suggestions, to get a feel for Spring's potential.

Balanced Annihilation.

[zwzsg]

Not at all. Balanced Annihilation is the most played, but also the least innovative Spring game/mod. It's jus a bunch of 10 years old units stolen from TA and thrown into the Spring engine.

Try The Cursed (it has melee, auras,...), GundamRTS (it has squads, research, weird base construction method), and Spring 1944 (it has infantry being pinned by suppressing fire and supply management).

If there'd be one Total Annihilation derived mod to be checked for features, it would be Complete Annihilation which is always full of neat tricks (antigrav, terraforms, fire, morph buyable with XP, etc...), but otherwise *A mods can be ignored if you want to see what kind of features Spring can offer.

[ArchaicWarrior]

could you recommend a game in Spring to try, containing most of your suggestions, to get a feel for Spring's potential.

Balanced Annihilation.

Is that stand along or do i need to download Spring?

sorry for being a pain :)

[zwzsg]

S44, Kernel Panic and P.U.R.E. are the only Spring games with what you could call "stand-alone" installers. I also made a standalone installer for Gundam but it's not "official".

For every other game/mod, seeing the number of topic from newcomers who get errors when trying to play against AI, good luck!

[ArchaicWarrior]

S44, Kernel Panic and P.U.R.E. are the only Spring games with what you could call "stand-alone" installers. I also made a standalone installer for Gundam but it's not "official".

For every other game/mod, seeing the number of topic from newcomers who get errors when trying to play against AI, good luck!

I went to the Gundam link and downloaded the latest version 1.21 but ti only seems to have maps and a mod in it, where's the installer??

Not a good start

[zwzsg]

There: http://zwzsg.hosted.luckz.de/stuff/Gund ... ller04.exe

[Google_Frog]

Of course total war is possible, see planet wars.

Unit count shouldn't be a problem, I think there is some limit of 1500 units arbitrarily assigned in CA per team. Anyway last total war game I played didn't even have 1000 units per team.

[zwzsg]

Of course total war is possible, see planet wars.

Oh right. But Planet War is not really Spring, it's another project, interfacing with Spring, that would need tons of work and maintenance to be changed into something like TW campaign.

Unit count shouldn't be a problem, I think there is some limit of 1500 units arbitrarily assigned in CA per team. Anyway last total war game I played didn't even have 1000 units per team.

Yes, you can set the unit count high in Spring. But when I start having a thousand units moving around, my CPU can't cope with the simulation anymore, and also the pathfinding shows it wasn't made for high unit count.

Although my game will be more Age Of Empires than TW so that is big plus for Spring

Yes, an Ages of Empire -like is totally doable in Spring.

I've done a bit of programming (C mostly) so I suppose i could do changes but in this day and age I thought programming would be all modular, drop in object for intro, drop in object for multiplayer, drop in object for etc etc etc. I've retired from programming, I was hoping for higher level development tool.

There is no object to drop in for intro (in fact there is no intro). There is no object to drop in for multiplayer (in fact multiplayer is all there is). I don't even know what would be those object you want to drop. There's just model files, stat sheet files, animation code files, texture files, and Lua files that replace or alter everything.

You don't need to change the C++ source code to mod Spring. The modding is done is done in a high level language called Lua. I've turned Spring into a Shoot'n'Run game, a Tetris game, a Pacman game with just Lua, without a line of C, without touching the source. You can add new resources, code new unit behavior, new gameplay mechanics with Lua. It's still programming, but alot easier and faster than modifying the engine source.

There's mostly two kinds of Lua in Spring:

• The widgets, that are client side, can be toggled at will, can be outside the mod, can be used with any mod, and freely mixed. They don't directly change the simulation, but change the interface, and automate orders.
• The gadgets, that must be identical between each client, and that can change the rules of the simulation.

I will require hand-2-hand combat, formations, moral, physic engine, high res skins and terrain (1024) etc

• Hand-2-hand combat: It's been done in a couple mods: Cursed's Skeleton, C.A.'s Can. There is probably still some issues when you try to attack large building, as it will want to attack the center. There were engine fix for that, but I'm not sure they work that well.
• Formations:
  • You have some Lua gadget that make a squad of unit act like one unit, used on some Gundam's small unit, or in Cuberor's finest it makes it so you can only select one unit, the one with a star over it, and the other unit are unselectable, and follow the leader. I noticed it causes some issues, when the followers get blocked and you can't unblock them cause you can't control them directly. But maybe it could be fixed or recoded in a better way.
  • When you do a long right click, you can draw a formation line when the bouton is down. Then when you release the mouse button, the units move into the shape you drew. I recommend to get Niobium's custom formation widget to improve this feature. but despite the name, these aren't really formation, but merely a convienent way to spread your unit move order destinations.
• Morals: there is no moral hard coded into the engine, but it would be easy to script it in Lua.
• Physic engine: You've got deformable ground, simulated shots (in the sense that an artillery shell could hit a plane that happened to cross it by accident), units that can be blow away, .... However, most mods disable these feature because they're hard to control to give good result gameplay-wise. For instance, any unit thrown into the air will probably die from the impact of falling back, ground deformation makes map so messy only planes can travel through after a bit, oddities in pushing code made some unit gain so much momentum they get thrown out of map, etc...
• High res skins: only limit is your GPU and artist worktime. Spring doesn't support bump mapping and those fancy kind of stuff (though some are working on Lua shader to do so). Do not take BA as exemple, instead look at the models of Spring44 or GRTS.
• High res terrain: Spring map are a giant texture, a heightmap, a metal concentration map, a terrain type map (terrain hardeness and speeds modifiers), and a bunch of static model we call "features". A noisy texture is overlayed on the texture to make it less pixelly at short range. Look at maps such as this new one, see if it's good enough for you.

Some more limitations:

• No skeletal animation. Units are made of solid blocks. Not good for organic units.
• No fancy DX11 effects and such. Game looks dated. Could be partially fixed if you spent enough time writing custom effects I guess.
• No single player. You've got C++ AI as .dll, that are often buggy and can't play anything else than BA. You've got Lua gadgets acting as AI, but you'd have to write them yourself. And that's just for skirmishes. There was a mission editor, but it doesn't work with the newy Spring version and no one can be bothered to fix it. There's my pseudo-mission Lua gadget thing, but it's not really missions, it's merely a list of units and order queues to spawn when game starts. There's "chickens", which is a Lua gadget creating and controlling aliens attacking you. You could also of course write all your mission scripts in Lua manually, but that wouldn't be time-efficient nor flexible.
• No matter how awesome your game will be, the playerbase will stay on BA. So I hope you don't care about playercount.

[ArchaicWarrior]

I just download Spring, installed it and tried to run Gundam, here's my initial thoughts;

(1) SpringLobby seems easy to use, just load map and mod.
(2) once running, Gundam jumped into the intro screen (very low res) and showed details of loading stuff.
(3) Once in the game, it also seemed low res. Desert terrain looked chuncky close up. Plus i asked to play in windowed mode - 1120 * 960, i got full screen!?

This engine seems old .. how old is it?

thanks

[zwzsg]

Five years old.

[CarRepairer]

Archaic: I highly recommend you join the multiplayer lobby and join the channels #lua #moddev #ca where people who are mod developers often discuss making mods for Spring (mods = games). Direct interaction is much better than back and forth here. Since you're a programmer I assure you that you'll be able to pick up the basics of modding and you could be very helpful in projects like Planetwars - an ongoing campaign where two sides fight for control of the galaxy and each Spring battle is over a planet. The project lasted about 4 rounds and then went under, but if anyone showed enthusiasm it could be brought to life again.

[oksnoop2]

I've playing a bit of rome total war lately and i LOVE age of empires 2. I would like to hear more about your plans.

[ArchaicWarrior]

Ok, i've had a closer look at spring and it's projects, overall i find it too low level and dated. i'm retired and my game project is large so i'll need a higher level tool to take away the work load, not add to it! :) The amount of work to turn Spring into a Ancient warfare engine seems far too much.

Plus the engine seems dated, I couldn't get a highres, windowed game running. plus I had bugs that crashed my computer. I like the simplicity of the lobby though.

Thanks anyway.

[AF]

If you could detail the bugs to us so we can fix them?

Also what do you mean by a high res windowed game? I can run spring in a window fine, maximized at 1920x1080, and there are people on these forums who've done much larger than that. There's a youtube video of spring running on a wall of screens 19x19 with a ridiculous resolution in excess of 8kx8k (probably larger )

Also what kind of higher tools are you talking about? I think you'll find as soon as you mention them, the author of said tool might pop up and declare it actually exists!