Spring RTS Engine

Ok, teamcolor is fixed up, short of some that need a redo (the smudged technique that works well for naturalistic teamcolor looks like crap with the black / glow in some cases, but fortunately that's a minority of the cases).

Dark colors aren't exactly visible but ~16.74 mio other colors can be actually seen now, so it's worth the trade.

It's a lot better now.

(the smudged technique that works well for naturalistic teamcolor looks like crap with the black / glow in some cases, but fortunately that's a minority of the cases).

Merging the original background texture and team color into one on black can help... I usually combine + desaturate them, copy the mask from either the R, G or B channel (RGB combined break flat colors), then undo stuff and paste it in the alpha channel.

It's going to take more than that. The darker blues are where it verged on black- the teamcolors varied considerably in intensity, and in some cases just aren't suitable. Again, it's just a small number of problem cases, so, meh, it's easy enough to solve. Should have that done soon, then I'll smoth the buildpics, and take a look at KAIK and see what it can do on Comet vs. AAI...

It would be cool if there was a glow shader which works on the team color only and not the combined texture, or a team-color glow shader which ignores the diffuse color and only takes alpha vars for intensity. Anyway good job.

It would be cool if there was a glow shader which works on the team color only and not the combined texture, or a team-color glow shader which ignores the diffuse color and only takes alpha vars for intensity.

All of that is theoretically possible via LUA now. The problem being that:

A. I am completely not the right person to attempt that kind of OpenGL stuff. Maybe the CA guys could do that, but not me.

B. Trepan has pointedly ignored me every time I've said, "meh, write something so that we can assign shaders directly to the ARGB channels of texture1 & texture2 via LUA". He's shown us multiple demos of bumpmaps, normalmaps, etc., which I would love to use, and so would the SWS team and S44 guys, among others... but as of yet, there's no reasonably-easy workflow for this. Writing up a shader that did what you're describing is probably not terribly difficult, it's that there's no way to plug it into Spring right now, short of rendering the unit using LUA, which I am not going to do.

very nice arg. your effort really show in this mod, its very eye tastey

Argh wrote:

Ok, teamcolor is fixed up, short of some that need a redo (the smudged technique that works well for naturalistic teamcolor looks like crap with the black / glow in some cases, but fortunately that's a minority of the cases).

That picture should be on the screenshots page in my opinion, shows a good non-ta mod, shows what spring can be with a good modder, well done argh!

The Xray shader actually does a very good job of making teamcolors easily seen, but not too obtrusive (but it still could be toned down a little).

The point being that your team glow shader would use a glow map that was identical to your team colour map. Not an amazing solution but it would work.

Argh I'm sceptical of your NTai bgu reports, mainly because I have experienced something similar when running debug builds of spring and all the evidence points to NTai not blocking at all. The game continued on for 2 hours with numerous unit events which couldnt possibly of happened if NTai ran into a never ending loop.

After all if it ran into a never ending loop how did it build the slashers? How did those slashers cross comet catcher to meet the krogoths I spawned? All evidence indicated spring ran but would not render. Peet had the same problem not long after I put out the config. No crash was detected by the Visual studio debugger either, in fact the game went on so long I had to end it manually so I could go to sleep.

I have 4 hours of NTai logs from that one game despite the fact spring stopped rendering after 20 minutes, 4 hours of my time, and much longer in game time since it was running at 3x speed. Peet claimed when running at 20x he got other issues and much sooner.

I'd do that if the shader stuff wasn't so confusing... could be done with Lua I think. You could use the blue channel for team color glow.

clericvash wrote: That picture should be on the screenshots page in my opinion, shows a good non-ta mod, shows what spring can be with a good modder, well done argh!

yup, this mod has 'come from nowhere' to be one of the best things to do with Spring, imho. :)

i played pure on the svn id say i enjoyed it but theres a few things mainly to do with balance that bothered me..

the assault shell as mentions has crazy dps and it just turned into assault shell spam nuthing could get close to it and it had crazy regen and the highest single dmg i saw in game..

the destroyer of worlds didnt seem to do much dmg for its pretty shooting animation (10 percent off a mex) i just used it as a meatshield for assault shell

apart from that fps jumping was common id go from 140 to 10 percent in a big assault shell battle and then cpu's would spike accross the board during heated batttles to..

imo the whole mod needs a rebalance (not slamming it but its my opinion :p)

but i love the look and feel its awesome :D

also new sounds plx

apart from that fps jumping was common id go from 140 to 10 percent in a big assault shell battle and then cpu's would spike accross the board during heated batttles to..

Cutting down particles helps a lot. Use Settings.exe. If your system is near the low end of the System Requirements in terms of CPU, you're just going to have to expect getting hammered on CPU usage on occasion.

This is a great looking mod, but the model and animation for the command unit is, to put it nicely, out of place. In frank terms it looks like a retarded monkey IMO.

Keep up the good work overall, this is looking to be the most promising non-TA mod in a while.

Edit:

0.52 animation looks better, but still....

eh, so few people can do teamcolor right. :\. Anyway, I think the new colors look better but the things still look very generic from above. The lack of preshading really shows on the models.

Release 0.53 is now available. 0.52 has been consigned to digital Oblivion, along with the old AAI config.

Changelog:
No change in gameplay. After repeated testing, my conclusion is that if you are getting owned by Assault Shells, it's because you're just plain playing it wrong. Heavies and even Soldiers eat them, for better than their costs. Let alone Tanks on Hold Position, used defensively. Unless the map features extremely spiky terrain, Assaults are really not imba at this point, imo.

New model is much much better.

I thought it was good for a kitbash:

does the new com have animated tracks? if so, its much better than the old turtle/elephant thing

clumsy_culhane wrote:does the new com have animated tracks?

It does