Considering Spring for a future project, need answers.

[Google_Frog]

Units will have three layers of health etc...

Yep you can do arbitrary logic to decide how a unit is damaged and when it dies. This stuff is all fine.

As for planets

Our main concern with things like planets and solar systems is what scale do you want the game to be on? The core of this question is are your planets and stars on a completly different scale? That takes a bit of work.

Basically it is far easier to make planets and solar systems all active on the map at once, as in the entire game is played out within an area. Maps can be pretty big and units can be pretty small so going for an epic scale with large distances between solar systems shouldn't be too hard.

As for multiple weapons,

Multiple weapons (I think it is 32 now, would need to check) can all have arbitrary target priorities, target restrictions and fire arcs. They are separate weapons although unless you do anything special with the UI a force attack order would cause all the weapons that are allowed to attack the target to attack the target.

hardpoints

I think for your hardpoints you would need to create mini units and stick them onto your base unit with lua move control. It will take a bit of nifty designing to fiddle the hitspheres around such that the hardpoints are easy to manually attack.

(zwsg shouldn't you use UnitPreDamaged )

[Ardis]

Warp lanes won't be instant and I don't plan to have ships path through wormholes and jump gates, that would be a pain to set up, also because I plan to have wormholes degrade as mass passes through them, probably through hitpoints. You will have to order your units to path through a wormhole/jump gate. I have to do some studying on the science behind wormholes to come up with specifics on the topic.

I will probably have to change a lot of things to get some space combat physics going, but I don't want to make anything too complex or CPU intensive either. I will probably have to script/code in something that automatically generates waypoints through multiple sites.

I don't plan to go into a full 3D environment (with up and down) because of how complex that would get. I also don't plan to include orbit physics for planets and structures either because that's another thing that seems overly complicated (especially for pathing).

And, yes, I'm going for a pretty big scale of combat.

[SinbadEV]

here's something fun and not entirely off topic

There are three "layers" in spring as far as collision is concerned... though in some cases this can be affected in interesting ways by collision boxes. Water can be "voided" out, which means that you can make a map with that is not rendered by putting the whole thing underwater (I think that T.H.I.S. does that)

You have "Water" "Land" and "Air"

"Buildings" can be build "on water" or "on the land under water"... this means you could have your "planets" be "buildings under water" and then have all of your big stuff (satalites, warp gates, capital ships) be buildings on the water or "boats" (or hovercraft)... you can make all of your "fighters" acctually be planes and they will fly around in 3d space and look all cool... I forget if planes can land ON water or just under-water, but you'd indicated that they would be stored in carriers so it doesn't really matter

I don't know why I made this post.

[Pxtl]

@Ardis

Here's my concern with the lanes: in Spring, air units can reach anywhere on the map. There is no X,Y point they cannot reach. As such, they have *no* pathfinder. If you tell them to fly from point A to B, the engine has no built-in concept of a barrier between A and B for aircraft. You'll have to code up some way to stop them from exiting your no-fly-zones.

Let me just take a guess at your topology: you have circular "zones" that contain one or more planets. Each "zone" is connected to one or more hyperspace lanes. So the map looks something like this:



where the black areas are impasses, and the grey areas are playable area.

The problem is that for Spring, there is no built-in capability for keeping air units out of the black area. You'll have to hand-code a collision model that physically prevents them from flying through it, and a pathfinder that lets them figure out how to get from A to B.

However, if you represent your ships as ground units, you will get the pathfinder on your side and they *will* behave intelligently and be physically blocked from entering the black zones... but then your ships will behave like land units. They won't drift, or do strafing runs, or bank as they turn, or whatever.

This, imho, is the only part of your proposal that is not an "already been solved by other people" challenge. No matter what, your project is very ambitious and will be using the Spring engine in ways it was not designed for, but other developers have implemented solutions for 99% of the stuff you describe.

This, imho, is the big one.

[Johannes]

However, if you represent your ships as ground units, you will get the pathfinder on your side and they *will* behave intelligently and be physically blocked from entering the black zones... but then your ships will behave like land units. They won't drift, or do strafing runs, or bank as they turn, or whatever.

Which isn't really much of a problem since the behaviour in Spring for planes is pretty shitty, player can't control them very well at least with values of any game I remember trying (gunships are good though).

[Pxtl]

Consider everywhere I said "planes" to say "planes/gunships".

All the same pathing/navigation-obstacle issues exist.

[FLOZi]

Couple more points:

Yes, max number of weapons per unit is now 32 not 16.

A modder (very familiar with Spring, and conferring with me as to the practicality of doing certain things via lua) here by the name of SpikedHelmet wrote up some design docs for a space RTS, first based around the Star Wars universe and then later on recycling many of the ideas based around EVE.

Design docs are attached if you want to read and get an idea of what was planned. (N.B. these might not be the final ones, just the most up to date ones I could dig up)

[Johannes]

Consider everywhere I said "planes" to say "planes/gunships".

All the same pathing/navigation-obstacle issues exist.

Yes, just wanted to say that using "ground" units compared to air has merits outside pathing too.

[AF]

You dont need to turn the whole map into a water world to hide the terrain, you can have whatever heightmap you want, and just tell the engine not to render water/ground via lua quite easily

[SinbadEV]

You dont need to turn the whole map into a water world to hide the terrain, you can have whatever heightmap you want, and just tell the engine not to render water/ground via lua quite easily

I was also implicitly suggesting that making use of the two collision layers inherent in this setup could be beneficial. (AKA the "ships and space stations" would look like they were "orbiting" above the underwater "planets")

I guess it would have been a good idea to mention the whole "turning of rendering in LUA" thing too...

[Pxtl]

Consider everywhere I said "planes" to say "planes/gunships".

All the same pathing/navigation-obstacle issues exist.

Yes, just wanted to say that using "ground" units compared to air has merits outside pathing too.

Absolutely - the Spring engine just plain works better with land units. But then you lose the nice, fluidic motion-model that would look so much better for spaceships.

Then again, I suppose Zero-K/CA kind of proved that, using some Lua like the AutoSwarm widget you can have land-units dancing around and having cooler motion than simply "Go to X, stop, shoot gun".

@Sinbad

Doing underwater/air/land stuff for space woudln't really make sense unless you want to have a separate blocking-map... and iirc, there is now means to have buildings that block construction from each other and have a circular collision sphere but don't block land-units. So if you used land-units, having all units on land and simply offsetting the models as you need them would probably go just as well. Just offset the planets such that they're "underground".... or if that causes occlusion issues, offset all land-units so they're on an invisible stilt and disable all impulse. Then give the planets an open yard-map, a spherical hitsphere, and use the non-blocking yardmap lua function. Bingo, passable planets that are visually below the gameplay plane.

[MidKnight]

Oh hey. Just wondering, do you have a lobby account? Many of us are also on the Spring chat lobby, and you could probably get some answers more quickly if you were to chat with us.

Be sure to join #moddev (and #ca, if you want to talk specifically to the CA devs)Shameless plug? What are you talking about?

EDIT: I meant #moddev, thanks, Floz! My brain's a little broken right now.

[FLOZi]

Oh hey. Just wondering, do you have a lobby account? Many of us are also on the Spring chat lobby, and you could probably get some answers more quickly if you were to chat with us.

Be sure to join #modding (and #ca, if you want to talk specifically to the CA devs)Shameless plug? What are you talking about?

That ought to be #moddev #lua is also a good place to stop by, though it's inhabited by and large by the same group of people.

[Pxtl]

does the IRC bridge still work?

http://springrts.com/wiki/IrcBridge

edit: speaking of which, if it does a qwebirc page on the Springrts site would be really cool.

[Ardis]

Okay, for pathfinding, I've already considered a few things on that. I understand the layers concept, though the closest I've gotten to a game with a water layer was Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness.

I could probably try to set up something similar to what I did in my Starcraft mod to make them behave as air units while still having them on the "land" layer, meaning they will have to pathfind their way around. If everything is on the land layer, all I need to do is make the terrain have a special texture so you see the space backdrop and make it so the flyable space is the base layer and no-flying zones higher terrain so they can't get onto it, but you can see the flyable zones in a map editor.

I could probably make warp lanes -1 ground level, water level or some kind of special terrain that units have to activate a "warp" ability to enter and have to disable the warp ability to exit into another system. What I will most likely find a way to do is turn one of the unused layers (space combat only needs one layer unless you're getting into really weird Science Fiction stuff) into a "warp layer"

If you're talking about what I think you are, I'm 90% sure I have an account for that. I'll check now. (I think I have an old version or something, Spring Lobby is telling me there is a new version and asks me to update, but the updater errors out when I try to update. Going to have to reinstall Spring.)

Most likely, I will need to do more than just Gadgets and slight changes to make this work, though.

[Pxtl]

Okay, you don't even have to use landscape for warp-lanes and impasse - Spring supports having "ground types" that alter the speed of units or mark areas as impassable voids (for land only) so you could have a perfectly flat invisible landscape and the "lanes" actually speed up your units (and pathfinder is aware of this speedup). But this means your space units will behave as land units.

[Hobo Joe]

It would be in your best interest to play a few different spring mods to get a feel for its capabilities. It sounds like from your posts that you haven't tried any yet.

[Ardis]

Would it be possible to have land units animate as if they were in space while having them on the land layer? Or would it be easier to set up a system where air/under water units would have to pathfind their way around the impassable zones through the warp lanes?

I will probably try out a few of the games available for Spring later today and/or tomorrow.

[FLOZi]

With the exception of Final Frontier, space mods for OTA used ground vehicles (usually hovercraft) for larger ships and aircraft for fighters, so it could well be an effective approach. You can animate them however you please really.

[zwzsg]

No, Spring doesn't have layers concept like Warcraft II. There's just a heightmap, and an horizontal water plane at zero. Then each unit has a MovementClass, and each MovementClass has tags like MaxWaterDepth, MaxSlope, MinWaterDepth.

From these tags, and a few others, the engine also determine what type of unit it is, amongst plane/hover/kbot/ship/veh, which affects speed modifier (and probably a few other things, like hover wobble (or was that in TA? I forgot!)).

With the "voidwater" tag you can disable the rendering of everything below and including the water level (making the skybox show through), to give a map a space-like feeling, but it's purely graphical.

Writing a pathfinder, and forcing planes to abid to it, would be more way more difficult than anything else. Just forget about it. Making land units behave like planes isn't very possible either, but it's still ten times easier to achieve.