Spring RTS Engine

With a nice camera angle, the Depth of Field shader could spice things up. (with some optimisation)

how about not needing a map at all.
its super low hanging fruit as far as code goes.

ie, if no map, generate a nothing map.

its tecnically easy as pie. and solves the easy case, could be generalised to further to reduce dependance on smf/smt altogether. and specify all resources for maps in lua.

I could get a pull request for the easy case in a night if you can get dev support I will do it if its wanted. I'm working on something else right now or i would do it for the shits and giggles*

*Australian slang, alternatives would be "for the hell of it", " do it just because", " for the lols" etc.

enetheru wrote:I could get a pull request for the easy case in a night if you can get dev support I will do it if its wanted.

I guess it all depends on how much load time that would actually save. I'm just now testing the blank maps (any minute) so I'm not sure how fast it is yet.

enetheru wrote:for the shits and giggles*

Funny, here in North Dakota (US) we say "for shits and giggles" - the

gajop wrote:I think enetheru/Silentwings' blank maps are ideal for this.
At least I don't want a (visible) map as a default.

I think I'll also stick with those ( or the above) but this thread is still useful for other ideas, non-default ones.

I updated OP with everything mentioned so far

Funkencool wrote:

enetheru wrote:I could get a pull request for the easy case in a night if you can get dev support I will do it if its wanted.

I guess it all depends on how much load time that would actually save. I'm just now testing the blank maps (any minute) so I'm not sure how fast it is yet.

load time savings would be negligible.
what I originally meant that was if spring cant find certain elements of a map it just fills the array's with zeroes and moves on. making it so spring doesnt crash oif there is no map found, or if it cant load a map properly.

could achieve the same thing by keeping an empty map in the base files and loading it if no map is found I guess.

But thinking about it for normal end users, if map load failed, you would want to stop loading the current map and load the empty map again. Only for edbug purposes would you want to load broken maps to see whats missing.

anyway just musing.

could achieve the same thing by keeping an empty map in the base files and loading it if no map is found I guess

Seems that would be easy enough that code change wouldn't really be necessary.

On a similar note:
It seems the blank maps and most small maps load in about the same amount of time (a few seconds), at least for me.

I wonder how much detailed skyboxes would effect load time?
A void map with a nice skybox and some subtle camera movement would look really nice.

This seems like something I've seen on here before, maybe I'll have a look around and see if I can find one

Skyboxes: viewtopic.php?f=56&t=11009

But I'm not sure how good it will look, maybe without the map there the corners/joins in the skybox would show.

Apophis looks pretty good, plus it even has background music and shooting stars built in. For me at least the load time really isn't to bad, or is at least worth the wait.

Each game should have its own client, but you could make a general client for people who like to play multiple Spring games like a lot of the people on this forum.

Jazcash wrote:Each game should have its own client, but you could make a general client for people who like to play multiple Spring games like a lot of the people on this forum.

Most definitely but if the client is in-game; people need a way of getting into that. That leads to the biggest question of:
How will the engine know the user wants to play only BAR?
Well it can't really, without that engine being dedicated to only BAR (or by running a custom script/shortcut). Which is up to the developer. Either way the engine needs to be manipulated to do this, and it can't be default behavior.

So what I'd like is some way for a non-dedicated spring to still be able to access these menus, and or launch into these menus, easily.

If a game dev wanted to they could easily bypass this to go straight into their menu. They would just need to configure spring correctly.

So my proposal would be for spring to scan game archives and grab these menus, while also providing a simple way to access them.

Simply put, a non-configured spring could look something like this.

The menu bar on top could even be minimized, or a 'back' button placed somewhere. You could even make it so when the user clicked the 'BAR' button, it reloads spring into bar which handles it's menu system however it feels.

And the user could still easily switch between different menus.


If the game dev want's spring to skip all this and go straight into their menu; they would only need to configure spring to do that. Then they could rename spring.exe into nameofgame.exe and it would be like a real game, with it's own executable

Nice mockup btw

Could a moderator by any chance move mine and jazcash's post's to my other thread viewtopic.php?f=23&t=33238 where it would fit in a little nicer?

A few things:
1) Enetheru's map's filename is called Blank v2 but it's actually Blank v1
2) Both maps have the same name => conflicting
3) Both maps have the sky (although seems like enetheru's has more => I don't want any)
4) Enetheru's map has grass

PS: Both maps have this weird blue off-map thingie when using my lobby instead of funken's. Is it knorke's widget that's killing off-map blueness?

gajop wrote:1) Enetheru's map's filename is called Blank v2 but it's actually Blank v1

make the name anything you like, its irrelevant. the only name thats relevant is the smt file because its saved in the smf, but you can override that in the smd/mapinfo.lua

gajop wrote:2) Both maps have the same name => conflicting

smf files have a unique ID, why not use it? https://springrts.com/wiki/Mapdev:SMF_format

gajop wrote:3) Both maps have the sky (although seems like enetheru's has more => I don't want any)

entirely controlled with the mapinfo.lua/mapname.smd, just choose the settings you want. there will always be sky afaik, just make it as invisible as we can.

gajop wrote:4) Enetheru's map has grass

weird.

gajop wrote:PS: Both maps have this weird blue off-map thingie when using my lobby instead of funken's. Is it knorke's widget that's killing off-map blueness?

I believe both maps were using the smd file instead of lua, so its not in our archives whatever the problem is.

gajop wrote:4) Enetheru's map has grass

I checked my map, it doesnt specify a grass map at all, so I conclude that its a bug in spring engine.

enetheru wrote:

gajop wrote:2) Both maps have the same name => conflicting

smf files have a unique ID, why not use it? https://springrts.com/wiki/Mapdev:SMF_format

I just wanted to say that you can't have both maps in the Spring maps folder and have it detected by the engine. I'm also pretty sure all Spring archives need to have a unique (name + version) field.

enetheru wrote:

gajop wrote:PS: Both maps have this weird blue off-map thingie when using my lobby instead of funken's. Is it knorke's widget that's killing off-map blueness?

I believe both maps were using the smd file instead of lua, so its not in our archives whatever the problem is.

/Shrug

Just want to add that I'll probably be using a default background image, so these fixes aren't critical for me.

Your image of my Blank v1 looks black to me! The map contains no lua, has perfectly black lighting and a perfectly black texture, so if it looks dark blue to you I guess it must be a user widget or some other local thing. Didn't realize I needed to explicitly turn off clouds, can do that.

Afaik all types of Spring archive need a unique name+version combination, or there will be collisions/desyncs.