Spring RTS Engine

zwzsg wrote:Because health bar obviously must be health colored! Besides it would be better (but tons of work) to remove health bar, and replace them by smoke, fire, scorch marks, and broken limbs.

Lua anims should make this pretty easy for similarly-structured mechs. Make one script that reacts based on current hp with a lot of random factors, then just append it to the individual unit scripts, adding emitter points to each unit so that the smoke emits properly.

zwzsg wrote:Because health bar obviously must be health colored! Besides it would be better (but tons of work) to remove health bar, and replace them by smoke, fire, scorch marks, and broken limbs.

I thought about moving away from a health bar and doing health on the platter but that wouldn't work in mobs. I even though about maybe going from green to red the closer a unit is to dying but found health bars to be less intrusive.

I do eventually plan on doing a sparking/smoking type deal via lua.

Broken limbs, no.

scorch marks, no.

smoke and fire will probably happen more on buildings in the future.


As far as paint on mobile suits, sure, Char has colors, he should not have any team colors on him. We have to have them if I use team colors. Also no, in canon only aces get custom colors. The mobile suits have a set color, outside of certain suits that have a canon color scheme for certain environments, they have no alternate colors. Sure certain areas have different schemes, like gm cannons are white in the north america continent. Char is one example but it is one of the chief reasons I got to thinking about team colors.

I think battleforge goes overboard with the teamplaters etc that isn't exactly how I am going to do it. I am going to make it a bit more subtle. my current idea is that the health bars would be teamcolored with a teamcolor outline on unit select with a subtle glow. Not anything really overwhelming.

circles around everything destroy the athmosphere of the game and are no fun to play.

So does team colour, though.

easyfluff. "the teamcolour on units is drawn by your command interface to enable you to quickly and easily identify who commands what units." or sth like that.

I like the healthbars, they work in DoW2 which tries to preserve canon colors too.

Dow2 has a lot less units a far closer camera than Gundam. The health bars are gonna have to be a good size in order to make both current health and controlling player obvious which means in large groups, units are gonna be hidden under health bars.

Honestly i'd go with team platters if you really want no team color. It would be preferable if the more units are together the more transparent the individual platters become that way you aren't guiding a blob of red or blue with robots on top around the map. But meh I have't played spring online in months so how much is my opinion really worth.

Leave the teamcolors. I don't like working with them either, but I've been on the other side of the coin before, and it isn't a happy place.

Only people that play gundamn can submit vote fools.

Problem with coloured healthbars is it isnt always immediately evident which unit they belong to in a scrum.

It really depends on the size and intensity of the health bars.

Why is it still not possible to vote no? Alternatives to teamcolour are harder to see when units are grouped. Teamplatter will be blocked by other units, also it is ugly.

^ this

remove it if you want to sacrifice player visibility for aesthetics, but don't kid yourself that the other methods of showing faction are anything but fugly

Teamplatter in PURE isn't ugly.

well, the infantry platters are waist high and look like hoola hoops at anything but an isometric viewpoint.

I agree the vehicle ones are asthetic considered alone, but I am much more concious that I am playing a game with the platters all over the screen than I am from just teamcoloured textures.

Team colour is fugly, there is no way to win.