Spring RTS Engine

zwzsg wrote:I would use the orientable view, if the keyboard arrow would do like in FPS mode and the mouse scroll at edge keep working like in TA view.

You'd be talking about the Rotatable Overhead then.

RO is the ONLY camera view I use. I only wish that it would be of more use when tracking, like keeping the tracked unit is the center of the screen when rotating, ala Ground Control/Homeworld. That would be t3h r0x0r.

Gnome wrote:Yes, the 3D replayer was seperate and didn't allow you to play, but it was proof enough that TA operated in a totally 3D environment.

A locked camera doesn't make a game 2D...

The map was still 2d. There was no perspective. It was a FLAT 2D TEXTURE with no bumps, the bumps were only used in code, to make units go 'up hill', and projectiles collide with the 'higher' bits. That is why the OTA maps cant be directly translated to TA:Spring. The hills would look REALLY stupid and be totally out of alignment.

If you look at the textures of the OTA maps, (goto FU and find some tilesets), you will notice that the textures had the perspecive and '3Dness' drawn in, but the hills in TA:Spring actually have no perspective or '3Dness' at all, and are draw top down.

Copied from one of Cris Taylors interviews.

GameSpy: One of the best parts of TA was the ability to feel as if you were in a 3D environment while playing in a top-down 2D game. I assume you plan to go full 3D this time around. Will you be building a new engine from the ground up or will there be things you can cannibalize from the Dungeon Siege engine?

Chris Taylor: We'll take a lot of lessons that we learned while creating the Dungeon Siege engine, but for this game a new engine will be required. The interesting thing to note about the TA engine is that it was 3D, but you couldn't adjust the camera, which meant we got a lot of performance optimizations by pre-rendering the terrain, and not having to sort all the units and objects, which takes up a lot of CPU time.

If you read Taylors response carefully he corrects the interviewer by pointing out that TA is a 3d game, with a pre rendered ; fixed perspective terrain image. Yours is a common misconception that TA was a game that was 2d, made to look 3d`ìsh.

You need to remember that what we call 3D games ie spring, quake, UT are all actually pseudo 3D, unless you are wearing red/blue glasses or lcd shutter style glasses and with specifically rendered graphics to take advantage of the former 3d glasses, otherwise you are looking at a 2D image on screen.

Woot Red-Blue Anaglyphic Spring!

(I've got a glasses version of quake and it is teh awsome!)

Well the units are 3D. I never denied that. But there is no perspective, and the terrain is flat. Units do not get bigger as they get closer. ONLY THE UNITS ARE 3D. That hardly classifies it as a 3D game. Spring is fully (pseudo-)3d, and OTA just has 3d units, while everything else was 2D.

Maelstrom, you are completely missing the point.

The game plays in 3D. It has proper physics calculations, and the terrain, though a 2D image, has a heightmap, and therefore works in 3D. Guns have to aim up and down. Their weapons are calculated in 3D space, along x, y and z axes, not just x and y.

A bertha shot, flying through the air, at the right alititude, can hit a peeper flying through the same space. A bertha shot, flying at slightly lower altitude, will miss that peeper, even though to the player it would seem as if they are both following the exact same trajectory.

This is what I was trying to say: The game plays in 3D, but it only renders in 2D (although it does a pretty good imitation of 3D). Maelstrom is right in pointing out that there is no perspective. As aircraft go up and down, they do not come closer and farther from you, they just go up and down on the screen. In TA, no matter how high you set the "cruisealt=X;" tag, aircraft will only rise higher on your screen, they will not get bigger.

Ta view has the following problem: units can get hidden behind terrain, it can be hard to build behind mountains since you can't change the angle.

Rotatable view is the best for me up to now, but it has the following problem: scrolling is awfully slow (I don't want to hold shift all the time, and even then it's not that fast; we need a setting somewhere), and is not very intuitive. Still this view is the most usable one. It would be nice to have the wasd keys move the camera like in first-person mode, in addition to having the arrow keys scroll the view. Scrolling with the mouse should probably work like in TA view as zwzsg was saying.

I agree that the scrolling is a bit slow with Rotatable Overhead, but if the scroll keys were changed to WASD, then that would screw up the key commands!

I always use the FPS style camera.

FizWizz wrote:I agree that the scrolling is a bit slow with Rotatable Overhead, but if the scroll keys were changed to WASD, then that would screw up the key commands!

At least you should be able to customize them to work that way. My point is, in every view mode, it would be useful to have one set of (configurable) keys to scroll parallel to the terrain, and another to move the camera as an fps. This is better than having to change the camera view and getting all disoriented.

http://taspring.clan-sy.com/wiki/FAQ#I_ ... anymore.3F

The more you know...

Kixxe wrote:http://taspring.clan-sy.com/wiki/FAQ#I_ ... anymore.3F

The more you know...

Try to understand what people are saying before you post. Yes you can assign WASD to do the same as the arrow keys. No you can't assign arrow keys and WASD to two different manners of navigating the map without changing views.