Spring RTS Engine

Anarchid wrote:

Better to just use blender and export to obj or dae, surely?

FTFY.

(prooflink, downloadable example in last post)

Also, Blender s3o exporter plugin is for 2.4, which is obsolete by a couple of years now, and had bugs like broken normals even when it worked.

Also2, "upspring in wine" is not a solution because it gets geborkt to a sad extent. If one really wants to run that legacy tool coded for an unreleased cul-de-sack beta version of a forgotten windowing toolkit, it's either virtualization or doubleboot.

How is that FTFY when you then go on to say you can't export to s3o anyway?

I heard you can use blender files directly. I think Anarchid claimed to have done this.

Hi and thanks again.

I have attached files from my first test unit.


From what people are saying it seems that I could perhaps be able to import my .3ds from wings into blender then animate in blender and then export straight from there to spring?

But no one is quite sure how?





I thought I read this about being able to bypass upsring by using blender somewhere on the forums as well.

I have downloaded blender and will start playing around and trying to work out how to import and then animate things.

The graphic style that I am going for is going to be nostalgically referencing early 3d wireframe graphics.

I have a fairly good idea on what I am going for however I need to become more familiar with wings3d before I can pull it off in an efficient and low poly way.

I also need practice in texturing.

The current texture file on the model is just a super quick placeholder and does not indicate the graphics style I wish to pursue.



Graphics styles that I want to reference include:

1 the original Tron movie.
http://youtu.be/PQwKV7lCzEI?t=1m58s

The 1990s Battletech animated series with its "advanced imagery" where battle scenes were all displayed is green 3d wireframe.

http://youtu.be/C3SYOvoPOEY?t=15m1s

And I also really like the pixelated feel of Sword and Sworcery.

http://www.swordandsworcery.com/storage ... 8488531357

http://vimeo.com/sworcery/spoiler-alert


Particularly I am wanting to make all my units look pixelated in 3d, so that there are no smooth diagonal lines but every thing is made up of small boxes.



I really love the art in Kernel Panic. however I was origionally influenced by the above examples.

I think that given the popularity of games like minecraft there is a growing market for retro nostalgic lo fi graphics.

And I believe they are easier to create on low budget / with a small team.


How this graphic style fits in the game universe.

In the game universe battles are fought by remote control from star systems away and the Spring interface will be the interface used by commanders to control their forces.

In the game universe there is also a huge control of technology and information and so while being thousands of years in the future, many aspects of technology and very undeveloped or have regressed from current day through wars and control of freedom of information by governments. So for the majority of the galaxy have access to 3d graphics technology of the early 1990s.


Video cutscenes for game and use of spring engine for battle scenes in movie

I am planing to have video cutscenes in the game. And as I already am a film maker and have a lot of actors available to me this will be easy.

In thinking about this yesterday I had a very exciting idea.

I have been planning to make this universe into a transmedia project. With games, films and potentially novels / graphic novels.

However I was thinking that I would probably have to wait about 10 years to start making the films because of the budget required to do big 3d cg battle sequences. Aka starwars.


However my idea yesterday was that I could do what that battle tech series did and show all battle scenes in the 3d wireframes simulated environment. As this is how all the commanders would actually see the battles because they are not actually there but are on different planets.

So I thought that it could actually be possible then to film the battle sequences in spring.

Id have to check out the qualities possible in the video export.

But given the free moving camera, framing shots would be easy.

And given that the graphics are intentionally a low quality simulated reality, springs graphic quality should be far far above what would be required.

What all this means to me is that I could potentially begin shooting a indi sci fi space battle movie a year or two from now.

What would be awesome about this is that in the movie the commanders would actually be playing spring to control their armies on other planets.

Then kids watch it and go 'wow i want to have my own remote control army.' And they can then buy the game. Then they can actually use the exact same interface that the commanders are using in the movie. And then they actually feel like they are in the movie.






Ok some main steps to get here.


1 Need to design all units and get them in game.

2 Need to script all the game dynamics. (especially functions that are not currently used in spring)

eg

2.1 Almost all units are stealth and cloaked and are more detectable (from a further distance) if they are moving than if the are stationary. (Ideally this could be a linear scale where the faster a unit moves the more detectable it is.)

2.2 The would be a speed state button for each unit. Like the hold position, maneuver, roam. In original Rainbow Six there was a similar function.
For slow stealthy movement / normal movement / Running

2.2 different units have different sensor strengths and can decloak enemy units and different ranges. (this is also affected by the enemy units movement state.)

2.3 The majority of structures are deployable units. I need to figure out how to code this. (I know that Spring 1944 does this really well)


3 Need to create a GUI, and a menu and launching system so the game can be self contained and easy to purchase, download and play.

4 Need to create missions.

5 Need to create video cut scenes and create a way of integrating them into the GUI and in between missions.




After Points 1 to 3 are completed I could start shooting action sequences in the spring engine for use in the movie and cutscenes.

@Anarchid

I have been looking at your bouy model.

It is very cool.

To try and make sense of the the process you used:

You modeled it in blender.

Then just put the .blend file in the objects3d folder of the mod


Did you:

1 write the script by hand?

2 animated it in blender then export a script it and it worked.

3 animated it in blender, then exported a script, then presented it in a manner spring can understand.

4 something else entirely?


It would be awesome if I could bypass upspring altogether.

post the model file and the textures..

https://dl.dropbox.com/u/19320633/jellyfish.7z
Note that it is dependant on zk flotation gadget to actually work.
How to use: extract over your zk.sdd.

How is that FTFY when you then go on to say you can't export to s3o anyway?

For those who can't bother clicking a link.
For the lost and the broken, we explain:

It's a prooflink for not having to convert anything from .blend. For having transcended the vile need for s3o and for final liberation of art from contrived engine-specific formats, never to be locked up in the evil cage of vendor lockin again.

Like s3o once liberated us from 3do, and like lua liberated us from cob, now is time to throw away the chains of upspring.

RISE MY LOBSTER COMRADES, RISE!

I heard you can use blender files directly. I think Anarchid claimed to have done this.

And i have files to prove that (see above).

Did you:
1 write the script by hand?

Yes. I had it do some rather funky interactions with the environment (i.e, submerge/float/walk on land/swim underwater) that wouldn't probably be easy to convert from a blender animation - even if anybody knew how to do that.

There were rumors of blender to spring animation converters, and i think upspring is supposed to have a bvh->cob converter, but i found it lacking even back in days where i bothered to touch that pile of legacy that upspring is.

If you are seriously considering using blender directly in your project, here's my shortlist of pros and cons:
+ can open model at any time, edit, hit ctrl+s, be done with it.
+ significant decrease in intermediary tools clutter. You can model, texture, and deploy all from same tool.
+ no need to doubleboot or run a virtual machine if your primary desktop is not windows.
- assimp seems to ignore rotation transforms for pieces imported from .blend files (and i think .dae also suffers from that). You will need to apply->rotation on each piece, and then remember that their orientations start aligned with global axes.
- same applies to scale transforms, but that has lesser consequences. You just have to apply->scale so object+oldsizemesh+scaletransform becomes just an object with scaled mesh.

Feel free to check my example for reference of implementation.

For a long term project, you could possibly troll engine developers into fixing the orientation issue - but be sure to acquire sufficient kudos by then

Even if you could export blender animation you will still have to do some scripting. Often it is a good idea to integrate some gadgets with some unit scripts for animation or timing purposes.

2.2 different units have different sensor strengths and can decloak enemy units and different ranges. (this is also affected by the enemy units movement state.)

The first part is not already built into the engine. I think what you want is covered in this ticket, I cannot imagine this being hard to implement so if you show interest in these mechanics it should make it in.

Of course you can write a lua gadget to work around lacking engine features (as many people do). Gadgets have access to a lot of information and can change many things in the simulation. This includes access to all unit velocity, position and team and control over whether a unit is cloaked.

To go even further gadgets can control exactly which units any team can see. So in a free-for-all you could have team based decloaking. For example if a unit from team 1 is close enough to 'decloak' a unit from team 2 then a further away unit from team 3 will not be able to see the 'decloaked' unit. There is even an unused implementation of a system like this in Zero-K though it may have fallen into disrepair.

That is really exciting that the spring engine can use blender files directly.

I have been watching blender tutorials for half the day, and it look good and seems quite easy to use.

Ill have to get my head around how the alignment works and how to write the scripts but I think that if I just spend time trying things and asking questions when I get stuck it should become clear pretty quickly.


It is also good to know that what I want with cloaking can be achieved.

Learning to write gadgets in now another thing on my to do list.

I really like that idea of a unit only decloaking for the team that sees it. Very cool.

Lots of work ahead.

It's spelt Kernel ¬_¬

Some pro-nounce it as Core-nell though- the torvald-style, reflecting on it TA heritage..

I thought you were about to reference creed. Please god no save us!

@zwzsg

Sorry, I ve corrected my spelling mistake now.

I love Kernel Panic by the way.

inb4 z falls on his sword explaining that it wasn't me, were the words that he told her.