Spring RTS Engine

Ahh, carry on then

Doesn't it look a bit goofy when the turret's turned then?

Well its not perfect, but its not bad either.

In the zip is a short .avi movie that shows how it looks when it turns, I might need to tweak the center pivot a bit to get it better.

http://www.mrd.str8-6.com/files/weasel_anim.zip

Does this use springs btw?

I hope so, but its up to Rattle to setup what he wants to use.

I'll definitely try to get some fake suspension done, shouldn't be too hard.

Win.

trepan mentioned a while ago that the best way to make suspensions is to use vertex shaders through LuaUI. That way, the suspension would be hardware accelerated and toggleable client-side. But that requires a level of leetness I dont have

Also, there is a "GetUnitTravel" Lua call-in that would be useful to make realistically turning wheels. I can setup the Lua required to make it available from COB, if someone wishes to use it and has trouble with Lua.

The model looks great BTW :) I'm even tempted to make the two fixed guns real, to satisfy the micro junkies.

All of it can be done through BOS.

Seriously, I did a test with 1000 units having a script which checks for the turning angle (and some more) and all of them together put like 3% load on the script side.

Are you guys cool with how the weasel is looking then?

Any other last minute changes that you guys think need be made?

Afterall, this model is as much if not more for you guys as it is for me.

( the side guns are staying btw :D )

Fine with me, what's the polycount? I guess about 100-150 for the body and ~400 for the wheels.

Its 677 triangles, I was thinking about doing a hackjob on the wheels though to get it down lower, Original ingame weasel is 476 triangles.

I was thinking about removing the 7 triangle caps for each side of the wheel and putting a square plane over it and using the Alpha channel to cut out the edges and make the squares round for the wheel caps..

Its just a thought, but it sure would save me some triangles when I can cut those wheel caps from 14 triangles down to 4 per wheel.

I think 677 tris is acceptable. You could probably get away with a 256*256 texture though.

677 triangles, needless to say, the current Krogoth is 520 triangles.

I can't argue, your model is sweet, but BA can never see it....

And with Spring's poor high-end compatibility, it may end up lagging in Weasel spam matches, sorry, I'm just like to point out flaws...

[I opened the 3do in upspring, saved as a 3ds, then imported to Wings3d, and tessellate triangulated it.]

I think that even if we multiplied by 10 the number of triangles in units, the performance in games would barely change. If it really becomes a problem, Spring supports LODs anyway.

If you made a 10k poly model, I would be a lot happier But it's a lot more work, I suppose.

Tbh, since the origional in-game weasel is 476 triangles, mine being 200 triangles more isn't going to hurt diddly squat.

Almost every game I've played in the last 3 months, you see weasels and jeffy used only in the very early game, and typically players will have about 6-10 each.

What this ammounts to is for every 7 Ota weasels that would be drawn on the game, 5 of My model would occupy the same Triangle count.

And I just lolled at the 520 triangle count on the Krogoth, that just tells me that I can make 3.05882 (ota)gators at 170 triangles for the triangle count of 1 krogoth, and that we need a more detailed Krogoth model then .

Ok, so how do we use the LOD's anyway, will they have to be completely seperate .s3o models? or can we package them all nicely into 1 model?

If the modeler doesn't make the different LOD's, we'd use a tool that does it for us. I think that any format for which there is a Lua parser is ok. There should be parsers for .obj and .3so, at least.

Then we'd feed it to unsynced Lua and it would take care of swapping the models, I think. I'm sure it's possible, I'm not entirely sure of how it's done exactly (yet). trepan was looking for a high res model to demonstrate LODs in Spring, iirc, so maybe he'd be eager to help.

Tbh, since the origional in-game weasel is 476 triangles

476*2, 3dos are rendered doublesided because of missing faces.

I thought they're just rendered without culling?

No because then everything would be double sided.

I haven't looked at the code myself but if I where to do it I'd draw each quad then draw it again in reverse order.