Fix the flattened ground cheat thing

Maelstrom · Post by **Maelstrom** » 31 Jan 2006, 05:49

If anyone doesnt know what this is, its where you look around the map for flattened areas, created when buildings are placed. You can find your enemy's base this way. Just look for land with lots of flat squares in it.

I know its not a big issue or anything, but I just thought up a way that could possibly fix this. Better yet, it probably isnt to hard to implement. What I suggest is this:

Store the height map twice. One for what the terrain actually looks like, with flat bits from buildings and holes from explosions, and one for what you can see. When land is deformed, the deformation is stored on the first height map thing. When land comes into LOS, the height data for that area is updated from the first height map. The second height map is then used for rendering. This way, you only see deformations when you have LOS on them.

Dunno if this would work at all, but it might be worth thinking about. I have no idea how the source handles height data, so this might be totally impossible. But then again it might not be. I dunno.

Das Bruce · Post by **Das Bruce** » 31 Jan 2006, 05:57

Sounds fair enough, but what sort of effect will it have on memory usage devs?

Kuroneko · Post by **Kuroneko** » 31 Jan 2006, 07:46

I just tell my builders to restore the ground after building...problem solved. On top of that, the people that rely on that are totaly taken offguard.

Das Bruce · Post by **Das Bruce** » 31 Jan 2006, 08:41

That would consume alot of buildtime.

Doomweaver · Post by **Doomweaver** » 31 Jan 2006, 12:13

I hate the way you can look for wreckages to see if the enemy has died (or the explosion). This is in my opinion is far more important, because it hugely affects gameplay. It's better if your rely on your radar to see if a dot has dissappeared. Plus i'm sure it would be easier to fix.

On another note, units chasing other units indefinately is not a major bug, and doesn't need to be fixed imo.

Kelson · Post by **Kelson** » 31 Jan 2006, 12:29

What the hell? Why did it post? I wanted to pm! These boards are going crazy on me lately...

Guessmyname · Post by **Guessmyname** » 31 Jan 2006, 12:49

Little tip/bug/cheat thing. You have a building on rough terrain. Don't want to wait for ground to flatten out? tell the unit to repair the building (as it is there, it just doesn't gain health until the ground is flat). Then the building is actually being built (because the unit is asisting construction) while the ground isn't being flattened

electricitylikesme · Post by **electricitylikesme** » 02 Feb 2006, 11:35

I like the idea as proposed in the first post though it does sound like memory usage could be a problem. Still, it does seem like the only workable solution to the problem, and at high levels of play it really could be a problem.

Caydr · Post by **Caydr** » 02 Feb 2006, 19:02

I doubt that memory usage would be an issue. According to one of Zaphod's posts... or... a thread he posted in... something to that effect anyway... Spring generally only utilizes a fraction of the average computers RAM. Like, 70 MB. Most every computer that is capable of playing spring has more than 70 MB to spare.

SwiftSpear · Post by **SwiftSpear** » 02 Feb 2006, 20:03

The heightmap doesn't take up an exorbitantly massive ammount of ram anyways.

Zenka · Post by **Zenka** » 02 Feb 2006, 20:06

The solution sounds simple. Let's see what Zaphod has to say about it.
And is the heighmap really that meory consuming. I doubt it. (ins what Caydr said, ofcourse)

patmo98 · Post by **patmo98** » 02 Feb 2006, 21:09

Caydr wrote:I doubt that memory usage would be an issue. According to one of Zaphod's posts... or... a thread he posted in... something to that effect anyway... Spring generally only utilizes a fraction of the average computers RAM. Like, 70 MB. Most every computer that is capable of playing spring has more than 70 MB to spare.

Is it unusual that my copy of spring uses about 250-350MB or RAM while I'm playing?

Warlord Zsinj · Post by **Warlord Zsinj** » 03 Feb 2006, 01:44

IIRC,you can tell where the enemy mines are by seeing which metal patches are mined by looking at the metal HUD.

Post by **jcnossen** » 03 Feb 2006, 01:58

Ok I will try to take LOS into account when I plug my terrain renderer into spring. The new terrain renderer keeps a seperate copy of the heightmap anyway, so it wouldn't use more memory.

However spring uses a lot more than than 70 mb AFAIK, I think patmo98 is right about that... Your opinions about memory use is as good as mine though, I'm just using the task manager too

AF · Post by AF » 03 Feb 2006, 20:17

process explorer during the memory leak problem shows spring.exe as havign an average of around 251MB to 270MB playing an average game offline on XTA testing the AI's, but it peaked at 1.6GB due to a problem I was havign at the time with NTAI which was since fixed.

Nemo · Post by **Nemo** » 03 Feb 2006, 21:21

Warlord Zsinj wrote:IIRC,you can tell where the enemy mines are by seeing which metal patches are mined by looking at the metal HUD.

Only if you have LOS on them.

IMSabbel · Post by **IMSabbel** » 03 Feb 2006, 22:10

Not exactly.

It also shows if you have los to the metal... even if the spot of the extractor is still not visible.
A small, but with large extractor radii often significant difference

gheeber · Post by **gheeber** » 06 Feb 2006, 18:58

One thing i found in my limmited ammount of time playing spring (just stumbled upon it last night and i have to say im impressed) is that you can see all terrain right off the bat. i personnaly like fog of war and the blackness of the unknown, i think it would be cool to have like in the original an option to have map previously explored

My idea was to maybe color the terrain 100% black untill its explored and grey out a bit and not update with fog of war. This sort of goes along with the second terrain map idea... but not really.

doh! there goes my rule of not posting on a forum untill spectating for a few days

IMSabbel · Post by **IMSabbel** » 06 Feb 2006, 19:49

Well, what use would it have to black the map?

This is not single player where you discover a hidden enemy land...
Its multiplayer, where everybody just 5 minutes ago could look at the complete minimap, including the default start positions...
Forcing it to be discovered would just help people who already know the map by hearth and know where to expand/find metal.

AF · Post by AF » 06 Feb 2006, 21:03

Knowing the new map format it could well be possible to generate random maps based on a general terrain style, say random grass/mountain maps that look the same texture wise...

In such an event as that being done, the fog of war sorta blackness would idneed be useful....

Spring RTS Engine

Fix the flattened ground cheat thing

Fix the flattened ground cheat thing

Re: Fix the flattened ground cheat thing