Spring RTS Engine

It is!
It's not!
It is!
It's not!



Anyway, I think the players need to decide if they like to play a big map or not.
If that's a 100x100 map so be it, the engine just needs to (try to) render it. (idealy)

84% said they wanted it. Thats quite a majority.

Im not getting what people have against mini-spring. most of the post go along the line's of "I dont like smaller units, and its shieat and i hate you and i cant spell". But Mini-spring dosent make the unit smaller! It make's the map's BIGGER! Suddenly the medium maps become large maps, and the large maps become epic in size. More units, more explosions and more stuff getting killed! The maps still look good (in fact, some look BETTER!) and the only map that dosent look as good is Azure Rampant, and thats a matter of opinion.

A good example would be when i tested Mini-spring on Mar's, and suddenly the map wasent big... it was HUGE! Suddenly the metal extracters where dwarfed by the massive mountans that loomed in the distance. Your comander clambers up soring mountan tops and sets up radar towers and other defence's, and you can marvel at how cool they look next to the mountans and vallys and epic senery.

I dont see a single con...I├óÔé¼Ôäóm not getting what people have against mini-spring. Most of the post go along the line's of "I don├óÔé¼Ôäót like smaller units, and its shieat and I hate you and I cant spell". But Mini-spring doesn├óÔé¼Ôäót make the unit smaller! It make's the map's BIGGER! Suddenly the medium maps become large maps, and the large maps become epic in size. More units, more explosions and more stuff getting killed! The maps still look good (in fact, some look BETTER!) and the only map that doesn├óÔé¼Ôäót look as good is Azure Rampant, and that├óÔé¼Ôäós a matter of opinion.

A good example would be when i tested Mini-spring on Mar's, and suddenly the map wasn├óÔé¼Ôäót big... it was HUGE! Suddenly the metal extractors where dwarfed by the massive mountains that loomed in the distance. Your commander clambers up soaring mountain tops and sets up radar towers and other defenses, and you can marvel at how cool they look next to the mountains and valleys and epic scenery.

I don├óÔé¼Ôäót see a single con...

Also is it the end of the world if we don├óÔé¼Ôäót have mini-spring? NO! Is it the end of the world if the dead come to life to feast on the flesh of the living? YES! So lets keep everything in perspective.

If you want smaller maps, make them smaller, its easier to make a medium sized map for minispring than a large map for megaspring.

A few points, that might not count for all but so be it.

- Pathfinding gets screwed a bit (see SJ's post)
- maps get less detailed (1 pixel insted of 4)
- I want over Epik maps, so let's quarter the size... (bigger map is a relative argument)
- It only changes the map, nothing about trees ect.

If you think a bit about the future, some will always want bigger maps,
so soner or later you will have to make maps put of more then one .bmp.
And becouse of the byte size of maps, people without DSL or alike won't be able to play Epic maps online, so they don't have to download them that often.
And maybe it is possible to make less deteild maps or use tiles so that the file size is reduced, and once again in future you will alwayes have better and better internet conections.

No I didn't play minispring.
And you can make OTASpring minispring, or SWTA or whatever mod, I wouldn't have any problem with this. And that 2 Versions would kill the comunity or map makers, I don't think so, the comunity can play what they like, as long as they are tolerant and map makers can make maps for there prefered game style and anounce this.

Well, technically, with an extraction radius, there still will only be but one mex per patch and the moho ex would comver it completely. So by that sense, all maps are directly intercompatible with both Spring versions. The only eventual mismatch would be the balance bit...

And hey, I had a game long ago called "Moto Racer". They only had what... 8 maps? But the smart thing they did was to enable track reversing, so en factum, they suddenly got 16. Then, after completing a championship they opened up the minibikes... smaller, faster and completely different handling than ordinary bikes. Then they opened minibikes reverse-tracking. You get the point? From silly 8 tracks they suddenly got 32.

The point I'm trying to relay is that it would be healthy indeed to co-bind minispring into Spring and handle it as a subgame. Suddenly, we've doubled the amount of usable maps. Many of those, like Gods of War, would be utterly and completely different and interesting map.

Brother Storm has spoken well! Consider his words, for I stand with him in these good comments.

I could have the size of the extracter radius for the next MiniSpring release.

I'd be happy to take comments regarding other tweaks (nothing related to pathfinding )

-Buggi

Brilliantly put Storm and MetalTrash. Twas what I wanted to say but lacked the patience.

Storm wrote:... after completing a championship they opened up the minibikes... smaller, faster and completely different handling than ordinary bikes. Then they opened minibikes reverse-tracking. You get the point? From silly 8 tracks they suddenly got 32.

...
Many of those, like Gods of War, would be utterly and completely different and interesting map.

That could be interesting...
Anyway, i have the feeling that if something does not work well with the engine (like a broken pathfinding), the SYs will simply not use it in they're standard distributions of Spring.

That's the problem, Paulo. The problem atm with Spring is that there are so many different modifications (some with very minor alterations like OTA/EvOTA). These divide the community (each of these modifications play very differently, and often involve very different skills and strategies), as well as causing incompatibility issues online.

While the skill issue is not such a problem with minispring, incompatibility issues are made worse, given that minispring is not a simple HPI swap.

Therefore, the fact that the SY's do not support minispring in any way is almost a deathblow to the mod.

SJ gave 3 reasons, but the 1st one is the most important. If minispring breaks pathfinding, I don't want it.

Look, minispring as we want it does one thing. It makes maps and map features (like trees) bigger. So if it will break pathfinding to make units smaller, fine. Custom features are already coming, so larger trees and grass can be implemented easily. And Buggi has already allowed the development of epic class maps (like destination Mars). Yes they break my poor weak duron 950, but that just means people like me need vaguely modern computers if they want to play...

We can still get what we want (at least what 84% of us want), which is larger features and maps. Tall terrain bugs can be fixed also, so even if buggi's minispring patch doesn't happen, it's ok.

An explanation of what exactly the issue with pathfinding is would be nice. Does it completely wreck it or does it just make it less accurate?

Imagine being told how to go somewhere if the onyl routes you could take where those big enough to fit a giant?

Alantai, if that were the only problem, then pathfinding would be no better or worse than it is currently. And 10053r, there are a number of other benefits from Spring, but I don't care to expound on them now, as they have been mentioned far too many times.