Spring RTS Engine

Cool screens of the moment. Click to enlarge.





What I am hoping is the last major beta is getting nearly done. I have half a mind to delay for a bit, because I've figured out how to do something pretty amazing recently, that has really changed my perception of what can be done with Spring graphics-wise, but probably not.

Argh wrote: I've figured out how to do something pretty amazing recently, that has really changed my perception of what can be done with Spring graphics-wise.

tell me the secret! cool screenshots btw!

funky anime-style explosion.

I really like that weird sphere drone thing, it's got a nice feel about it. Very little distortion on the sphere itself, which is impressive, they're a bugger to map.

Feels like those heavy troopers ought to have a lower cruisealt though?

Yeah, that's the AM Laser Blimp. AM, as in, "anti-matter", as in, "when it fires, everything goes boom". Which doesn't make any sense, but let's pretend it does

It's basically a concept piece from an old Popular Mechanics plus some crazy Gibson idea from one of his early novels plus me and DRB's speculative ideas about what blimps will get used for in future wars.

It's the only nuke-class thing in the game, and it's really intended to deal with swarms of UltraAssaults in late-game. Thankfully it needs to stay near AA, or it dies.

The sphere is distorted, it's just that it's been cleverly hidden. And there's a seam that's ever-so-slightly off, but in practical terms it's invisible. Yay for mipmaps.

And yeah, I have always wanted to see an Akira-style bubble explosion in realtime, it's one of those things that's impossible with CEGs. I have everything but the clouds / rubble around the edges, and I think I know how to make them, too That's really just the tip of the iceberg, though. I've discovered how to do something pretty cool recently, and it has a lot of applications.

Oh... and something else I figured out recently allows for AA flak that actually acts like AA flak, in all ways that matter (aside from a ballistic arc). As in, probabilistic hit ratios and area-saturation, instead of direct hits being the only possible way to damage a target (with corresponding problems against raids in waves). Dunno whether that's going into this beta or not, but it's interesting, and if it doesn't lag too much, could be very useful.

And the HeavyTroopers have to fly high enough to clear buildings, because the cuboid collision tests aren't used to detect aircraft / ground-object collisions at this time. And even if they did, I think it would look really lame for them to constantly do face-plants on the sides of the skyscrapers, since they don't path in air mode, because they're actual planes in that state. So they do the Superman thing and go over them.

Looking awesome as always, the new mech trooper thing looks awesome from the shot, as does the little blimp haha.

Great work as always!!

The troopers could do with wider trails. Other than that, cool!

What I'm fairly sure is the last major beta has been released to testers. I think after this, it's down to MP playtesting to get balance right, and I will probably open up the beta to whoever feels like trying things out at that point, although it's going to be hard to MP until we have a test-server or whatever.

I'm going on vacation this week, so this thread will probably be pretty quiet. I plan to get some drawings done and think about what I want to do in terms of SP campaigns when I get back.

I hope your final version will be spammy.. iwanna see alot of these pretty units...

God damn this looks so awesome.

Argh wrote:And yeah, I have always wanted to see an Akira-style bubble explosion in realtime, it's one of those things that's impossible with CEGs. I have everything but the clouds / rubble around the edges, and I think I know how to make them, too

I take it you have never used a missile silo or doomsday mk2 in Fibre?

Argh wrote:And yeah, I have always wanted to see an Akira-style bubble explosion in realtime, it's one of those things that's impossible with CEGs. I have everything but the clouds / rubble around the edges, and I think I know how to make them, too That's really just the tip of the iceberg, though. I've discovered how to do something pretty cool recently, and it has a lot of applications.

Is CSpherePartSpawner not what you're looking for? Example:

http://foto.arcor-online.net/palb/alben ... 613031.jpg

Argh wrote:Oh... and something else I figured out recently allows for AA flak that actually acts like AA flak, in all ways that matter (aside from a ballistic arc). As in, probabilistic hit ratios and area-saturation, instead of direct hits being the only possible way to damage a target (with corresponding problems against raids in waves). Dunno whether that's going into this beta or not, but it's interesting, and if it doesn't lag too much, could be very useful.

I thought flak already did this? (Cannon weapontype + areaofeffect + burnblow)

Is CSpherePartSpawner not what you're looking for?

Nope. It makes an inverted sphere. Meh, what you see with this is a giant glowing bubble of furious light, columns of light radiating out and moving, and huge dust boiling from the edges, with a fade at the end. It's a very complex set of effects all tied together, but you simply can't do it with CSpherePartSpawner, it doesn't use the equivalent drawing method, and it has other limitations.

I thought flak already did this? (Cannon weapontype + areaofeffect + burnblow)

Nope. That's not a true flak weapon, imo. True flak would have a burst that spawns a deterministic distance XYZ from the aimpoint, for true area-saturation without using giant areas or inaccurate fire. IOW, a really proper flak would end up with lots of discrete explosions in a fairly wide pattern of distribution, avoiding the notorious problems of 10 guns all annihilating the first bomber in a rush, and then missing the entire rest of the wave during reload. I guess I'll just have to make it so that people can see what I mean, it's not just some FX thing (spawning a CEG offset and faking flak is easy, this would be a game-design element).

I take it you have never used a missile silo or doomsday mk2 in Fibre?

Nope. I dunno if I played any of the Fibre versions past the early builds, though, and I quit messing with it fairly quickly, as there wasn't any way to play it in a meaningful way SP, so tbh, I probably just missed it out of sheer laziness. I'll take a look at it, see if there's anything worth learning from.

Messing with various things this evening. Kicked out another World Builder demo map, using Altored's heightmap as the basis:







I need to build another map to show off something else I've been working on, but I also need to get initial work done on a campaign this week. More later on, when I have a clue

Reminds me of one of those psychoanalyst splatter slides...

I think this could look really nice with a very low lying mist - nothing too strong, just a light whisp that sits arond the legs of the units...

The grey of the skybox sets off the terrain nicely, but it does look like bit of a non-specific mush?

The skybox is just a temp, the map's not really "done-done" yet. I'm working on some World Builder stuff to give the world a denser, more fully-fledged set of flora automatically, more when I've had a chance to figure this out.

Increadible as always, i look forward to playing it :D

The flora on that blow away any spring map I've seen. Texturing is great too. Most importantly, the map looks like it'd be really fun to play - I look forward to it being released!

Reminds me of one of those psychoanalyst splatter slides...

Hahaha yeah

The map looks pretty nice but I generally like swamp greens and browns.

I'm back now by the way

Pix or it didn't happen.

I like the mod, Argh. Needs a bit of fine-tuning, but it's fairly impressive overall. Now we just have to work on getting people to like you, and you may just have yourself a successful project.