Spring RTS Engine

XE8 is here!!!

Nanoblobz 0.4, Spring SP, XE8, 5 GroupAI's

A source package and vanilla version will be available tomorrow sometime

edit:

whoops, I thought this was the NTAI thread.

carry on.

Release! Have fun with the MegaSheep and the Striders folks, and the "slow-time" variant, which I think that people will dig. The 0.2 Gameplay variant shows just how far things have come, frankly.

This is the last release for NanoBlobs for awhile. I think it's achieved its design goals, and shows how perfect balance can be achieved within an RTS. I can really see two humans duking it out for hours, seeking the final advantage, before one of them makes a fatal mistake. The slow-time variant is much more tactical, and allows for much more micro, so I'd love to hear some feedback on how it feels vs. the normal version.

AF's NTAI rules. He's been very supportive of NanoBlobs, and I think that NTAI is the best AI out there for modders to work with, period, because of his work. Most people are going to be blown away by how much you can customize this AI's behavior- it's really something. And it plays a very nice game of Blobs, too

I love the way it works right now, but there's one small thing: the collision Sphere on the Holder is Gi-Normous!

Yay! Finally! Too bad I'm not unbanned yet...

Mecha Sonic wrote:Yay! Finally! Too bad I'm not unbanned yet...

Good for you, you can play single player withou getting into the lobby.
Use springSP, to set up a single player game.
Spring SP comes with NTAI.

...or I can play it on the test server(compstomp thingy). BTW, if anyone wants to play with me, I'm sometimes there.

@Fizz: I'll take a look at the collision sphere and see if there's an easy workaround. Really, what I need is a collision box, not a sphere.

Just so you know:


It should be easy to manually edit the values for the Model Center and Radius in UpSpring, no?

Doh! That's really not right lol! Ok, I'll fix that and release another version to address that.

I donno if it's just me, but i've noticed a couple probs with Single Player:
AA doesn't show up in the mod list.
The OTA mod doesn't work.

And some probs with the AI:
NTai causes the game to kinda skip like lag or something, and sometimes the game will lock up completely.
NTai won't work on maps that have no metal, it just crashes and says there was an unhandled exception.

Mecha Sonic wrote:I donno if it's just me, but i've noticed a couple probs with Single Player:
AA doesn't show up in the mod list.
The OTA mod doesn't work.

And some probs with the AI:
NTai causes the game to kinda skip like lag or something, and sometimes the game will lock up completely.
NTai won't work on maps that have no metal, it just crashes and says there was an unhandled exception.

I got all of those as well.

I see not those bugs in the NTai thread. However:

Ntai has been tested extensively, and an unhandled exception could not occur like that because NTai has inbuilt exception handling.

However point me to the maps you got the crashes on and I'll test myself.

Also every test with nanoblobz I've done has had similar lag, however debug shows that sim handling time is usually 100x larger than globalAI handling time and thus the AI's are not the cause but an unoptimised spring engine

Be sure you've got more than the AA content files in there. S stands for Standard, B is barebones (OTA variant) and the other is the techforge variant. If you only have the content file it will not work.

The maps were Green Fields, Simple Chess, and Mosaic.

Actually, all my AA files are inside a folder inside the /mods directory. For some reason, when I take all the files out and put them in the mods directory without being inside a folder, they will appear in the list, but won't launch. I just get an error. Same happens in the lobby.

Simulation time is definately a major issue with performance. There are a number of things borked with S3O, that have zero to with polycount or other things I can control directly. I've done numerous tests, and it's not the polycounts or the texture space used- lowering both doesn't make a huge impact.

In short, Spring's implementation of S3O is still very un-optimized, and I've already talked about this a lot, because it kind've undercuts all of the significant performance advantages presented by the model format at the moment. I expect that that will get sorted out as the engine matures.

Also, I was just wondering, after i installed XE8, a 7za.exe appeared in my Spring directory and I double clicked it out of curiousity and a black window appeared for a split second. I didn't screw anything up, did I?

NanoBlobs 0.41 has been released, addressing the collision-sphere problems with the Holder. Please let me know if there are any remaining problems with this build of the mod.

Here's a download link.

Mecha Sonic wrote:Also, I was just wondering, after i installed XE8, a 7za.exe appeared in my Spring directory and I double clicked it out of curiousity and a black window appeared for a split second. I didn't screw anything up, did I?

That is just the 7Zip program SpringSP uses so no harm done.

Ok, goodie.

Argh, one thing I've noticed is that the Archer sometimes fires a rocket out of it's body instead of the launcher. Doesn't affect anything, it just looks weird. I think the Demon does the same thing with it's rockets.

I learned how to edit mods! Look what I did to your Archer!



As you can see, rockets are firing from it's body.