Spring RTS Engine

how do i get the mod to work (were do i put the files)?????

Mod files are always .sdz file format. And are placed in the 'mods' subdirectory in the TASpring folder (usually C:\Program Files\TAspring\mods).
Restart the Client and you're done. (clicking on the reload modlist button in the 'host game' window works as well)

As stated many times before: this mod looks lovely.
I too find the texture on the top of the holder quite odd.
Had several great games with it. The Square rook isn't really offencive, nor defencive. it's an LRPC, and able to move one pixel a minute.
But if you build them in range of the enemy base (which isn't hard since his range is large) they do massive damage.

I endured no balance troubles, exept that IMO teh holdres should be able to kill knights. The knights regen so fast, two holders can't kill even one of them before he kills them.

.sdz???? when i downloaded it it gave me a zipped folder with tons of files

nvm i got it to work ... had my friend send me the file over MSN .. XD i luv it

Just rename the .rar to .sdz

.sdz???? when i downloaded it it gave me a zipped folder with tons of files

That's because you have some application that recognizes .SDZ as a ZIP file. Just download the file... don't unpack it, unless you're curious about how we've built the mod.

BTW, people should feel free to tear it apart, if they want to learn more. All that I ask is that people don't re-use our content without our permission. IOW, you can take the scripts and learn from them, rename them, etc... just don't rip off our units or sounds. Speaking of sounds, I'm going to put more custom sounds in the next version... I'm hoping to make the entire mod un-tied to OTA content.

Let's see... amphibious Demon... hmm... I'll think about that. Other than the Wolf and Lord, there aren't any amphibious units.

Holders vs. Knights... well, that's a tricky one, just like SpireRooks vs. Knights. Basically, you're supposed to use Holders and SpireRooks together. A SpireRook by itself is pretty weak. A Holder by itself is weak. Two of them together, though... is a whole 'nother story. And backed up by a stream of units of whatever kind, gets pretty kewl.

As for the SquareRook, its animation was made using methods that make it easy to speed up/down. I will try doubling its speed (that'll still be slooooow compared to everything else, but it will seem fast), and see if I can't do that, drop the range on the mega-cannon, and up its rate of fire. Maybe that'll give it a better niche. I'll play around with that and other things this week, based on feedback, and see what I can do.

Well why do missles need to be ballistic?

Basically, missiles have to be ballistic, because the other choices are:

1. Line-of-Sight (i.e., fire in a perfectly straight line) which would be useless at long range, because the shots would tend to hit the ground along the way, or drift out to maximum range and burst- hardly ideal. No trail, either. Also, the units then couldn't fire over each other. Big bummer.

2. Guided, Line-of-Sight... really useless at long range. because terrain would tend to get in the way. Also couldn't fire over each other. But that would have a trail.

3. Starburst. Useful at long range, other than the annoying fact that we cannot really change how long it takes them to get up to their "ceiling" height, and basically they're not useful against fast things (which, in NanoBlobs, is everything worth shooting with Archers). No proper trail, either. But they'd at least fire over units in front of them.

Soo... until the Spring developers "un-tie" the smoketrail properties from selfprop, tracks, etc... can't do it. I've already whined and moaned about how they tied all sorts of things about how Explosions work together, so that they aren't intuitive either, so hopefully they'll take pity on me and start un-tying these things, so that we can have more flexibility with the visuals. But, until then... my hands are tied. The Archer's shots have to be ballistic for gameplay reasons, but I can't have a trail. In my mind, it's more important to have the gameplay be right, than to have the visuals perfect, so that's what I chose to do

perhaps use that those missles the raven is using? (catapult in AA)

Make the Square rook amphibious. Biut do it like the OTA pelican, so that when it enters the water its legs fold up, shrink, whatever. that way, thered be a "battleship" of some sort :D

@Noize: No, that wouldn't work. Sorry, this is just going to have to await for the Spring devs to fix things that are picky in the game engine.

I believe those are all the relavent lines Noize was pointing at. Setting very low or 0 wobble should give you arced trajectories, with smoke trails, and no missiles going all over the place.

.2 was awesome!
because:
early game raids with microed knights were AWESOME
midgame knights for coms/krogs archers for support (not that useful cept on certain maps) zipper scouts rooks are general useful against enemies but weak to archers
its was incredible
i want it back
but with prettier models
IMHO i think that gameplay in .3 is far inferior to .2!

Lies.

Hlaf the stuff in 0.2 was useless becuase it kiled itslef. And all it boiled down to in 0.2 was rook spam and demon spam.

rook spam < archer spam
krogoth > knight spam
with the explosion damage to other units halved or so it would be insanely fun still. better models would help too

Well, I fall somewhere in the middle, really. I liked the early raids with Knights, but I also thought that balance was badly broken after early game. Which is why I've spent the better part of 2 months fixing it... while teaching myself how to make pretty things

I guess what I'm mainly getting from MineMat, etc. is that they really, really liked the very exciting "breakthroughs" possible with Knights if they survived contact. The only problem with that is that ... that feature was caused by what, by most people's standards, was a *problem*- the chain-reaction effects of unit explosions, especially Sheep going up like bonfires.

I'm not sure there's any way to reconcile the "we hated that" faction with the "it was what made the gameplay work" crowd. When I saw that that was happening in 0.2, I noted that I wasn't sure if it was a bug or a feature, because it wasn't done on purpose- it was just some sloppy data entry that ended up being in 0.2 without me paying attention.

Perhaps this could be done by making Sheep and AutoFacs go up with a bigger-than-average boom... and I'll have to look at the lethality of Knights (for the millionth time- believe me, I revisit each unit every time I do anything) and see if I can build a game model where the Knights are pretty much totally lethal to everything except each other and Lords (because, if they kill Lords in a half-second, that's lame) but it'll all still work. There's a whole lot involved, though. For example, one of the things that I took out've the mod, on purpose, was the Rook's spray cannon. Why? Because it made it fairly easy for Rooks to form inpenatrable interlocking fields of fire, which is what tended to happen in 0.2 after a certain point. However, now that the Archers work differently, and I have SquareRooks in the mix as an additional balancing tool, I can revisit this issue- perhaps I'll let that work, but it'll be cost-ineffective if your opponant counters by adding these units to the mix. I'm still in thinking-out-loud stage, though, so don't quote me later.

At any rate... I'll think on this a bit, and see if there's any workable compromise. My thought on this is that there just isn't- we either have chain-reaction death... or not.

I just have to totally disagree with anybody who thinks that the game was all that fun after early play, though. Rook spam was very unexciting, and the current play is a lot more balanced, nuanced, and interesting. There's actually a real point to using every unit, all the time, from early game to the very end, which is a big change. Moreover... massing Knights still will destroy an enemy strongpoint or base. I should know- I got steamrollered that way this morning

At any rate, I'm sorry that you don't agree that the overall gameplay is much smoother and more varied, MineMat, but I've heard your and Altaric's comments, and I'll see what I can do. I liked some of the aspects of 0.2 that you clearly enjoyed, such as the massive death you'd sometimes see when Knights hit bases, but I didn't like midgame or lategame play at all, and I'll see if I can reconcile these things now that I have more variables to play with... and a 100% working mod, which is what all this delay was about, after all. Just keep giving me feeback, and trying out the versions- we're in public beta here, so I'll probably release another one in 24 hours or so.




Anyways, i'll take a look at those TDF entries for the Raven rockets, and see if that actually works. Could've sworn I'd done it before and it didn't work, but hey, I'm at work and I haven't slept for over 24 hours, so I may not be remembering correctly.

There are other things broken with the mod on the engine side of things- the main thing bugging me is the lack of proper explosion support for S3O models, thus far. Put a feature/bug request in on that one, and I'm hoping the Spring dev team will actually humor me on that one- I love Spring's explosions, and I really want them for S3O.

You say that knights kill everything that is not a knight or a lord, or at least that is what they should do.

Well, it pretty much seems that way in v3. What stuns me the most is, that the spire rook has gone from omni-potent to useless in one iteration.
Because of its current slow rate if fire, a modest swarm of the fast knights will kill any number of rooks or holders. Holders are totally useless btw, anybody who builds them will lose. That has various reasons, which partly appliy to both rooks too.

As the holder is stationary, that implies that there are areas to defend.
This is not true, as your ressources are effectively mobile.
Whenever you come to a halt with your units your are effectively giving your opponent time to mass a force to crush you scince he know where you are and can flank you or surround you at will. The rooks and holders are prone to such an attack.

Furthermore, archers are dead cheap and kill rooks and holders like no tomorrow, obviously. But also, knights can kill them easy, no matter what cominations and numbers of rooks and holders you use. Lasty, rooks and holders dont hit wolves effectively, thus rooks and holders are going to lose you the match.

Please revisit rooks and holders for the next release. I suggest to remove holders and square rooks, or turn square rooks into a demon-like mix of knight and archer.

The spire rook needs to have a range greater than that of an archer, so it kills archers. Knights and wolves will still be able to devastate spires, as their speed doesnt give the rook enouhg time to kill them.

The only units i have won the recent v3 games with were a combination of knights and archers at 3:1 roughly. That combinatin pwns all defensive structures, can fight other knights better than just pure knight spam, is fast to build and move, and this it wins for you. Add some wolves for opportunity targets or spotting for the archers and its an optimal force right now.

And one serious demand, that you must obey by all means:

Release an offical map for Nanoblobs, post the link here. It is MUCH easier to balance attributes and parameters when the setting stays the same. Nanoblobs plays totally different on castles than on ashap for example, and i wonder what gameplay is intended. Although the knights/archer comination rules on both types, thogh you might want to add more archers on tighter maps.

First impressions:

-The units are super-shiny, which can cause absolutely massive hardware lag if it catches an unsuspecting new player unawares. Even without the shadows and reflection on, the units still bogged me a slight bit.

-no rook spamming! They definitely have some vulnerability to them now, but I've seen them used to make a really strong line in an interesting setup. Slow speed and a short ranged weapons with slow reloading means they can't do anything but defend now.

-I really don't think that an overlord/Demon are necessary, Square Rooks seem to have fitted the base-cracking role well enough for me

-Everything goes a whole lot slower than it did in Nanoblobs b.2. What would you think of halving the buildtimes for everything?

[edit]Alantai posted while I was writing, so I'll just add a couple of things. I definitely agree that Spire Rooks need some kind of boost, maybe a bit longer range, but they are meant to be killed by Archers, so they shouldn't be able to out-gun them.

FizWizz wrote:First impressions:

-Everything goes a whole lot slower than it did in Nanoblobs b.2. What would you think of halving the buildtimes for everything?

Are you crazy ??? Get a second impression, then come back here.
If its too slow, you definatly dont play it right.

NanoArena is almost done. It's the closest that I have to an "official" map, really, and I've used it for a fair amount of the testing, since I designed it very specifically, with the help of Hrmph, to create some odd gameplay and explore certain issues. I just want Hrmph to compile one last set of changes that would make the map feel 100% professional.

The rest of the issues are all, more or less, what beta-tests are supposed to find

[edit]I would have to agree with Fizz, that gameplay is definately slower-paced during early game. That's on purpose. Players had to slow down the game to play it against a bot in 0.2, to compete. I wanted to bring things closer to parity, basically, and slowed things down. That change, by itself, is pretty meaningless- the calculations for workertime/buildtime are straightforward enough. It's the rest of the balancing, much of which was started by getting rid of the chain-reaction effects, that has changed the feel so much.[/edit]