Spring RTS Engine

Snipawolf wrote:I don't think i will have radar jammers in my mod, I mean, IT IS SUPPOSED TO BE FUTURISTIC! There shouldn't be a counter for everything... I mean, if the war started a short while ago, how does the enemy have information on ALL of your stuff, thus making counters for everything!?

I have an idea, radar and jammer levels!

Level 1 jammer blocks level 1 radar but won't block 2 or up!

So on and so forth!

Umm...if you haven't played OTA, it said that the war was going on for 4000 years...

After 4.000 years of war core invented the night-vision goggles

And arm invented the Electric lightbulb. Although called it the mystic light-in-a-bulb-shaped-glass-thing.

Rayden wrote:After 4.000 years of war core invented the night-vision goggles

Realism =\= Gameplay.

Would it be too much of a hack to modify the sun position slightly on every pass?

Das Bruce wrote:

Rayden wrote:After 4.000 years of war core invented the night-vision goggles

Realism =\= Gameplay.

Huh?

Night vision would look cool :)

Couldn't the night just reduce the line of sight for all units?

That's not really night :)

Rayden wrote:Night vision would look cool :)

Is gray screen cool?

why are terrain shadows and lighting recalculated if they dont change and the sun stays at the same intensity/colour/position? Shouldn't they only be recalculated when the terrain changes and for moving objects/features???

Actually they are calculated once and stored in a shading texture stretched across the map.

jcnossen wrote:

why are terrain shadows and lighting recalculated if they dont change and the sun stays at the same intensity/colour/position? Shouldn't they only be recalculated when the terrain changes and for moving objects/features???

Actually they are calculated once and stored in a shading texture stretched across the map.

Thats just the shading though, not the actual shadows.

Das Bruce wrote:

jcnossen wrote:

why are terrain shadows and lighting recalculated if they dont change and the sun stays at the same intensity/colour/position? Shouldn't they only be recalculated when the terrain changes and for moving objects/features???

Actually they are calculated once and stored in a shading texture stretched across the map.

Thats just the shading though, not the actual shadows.

Not to mention that your new map format obviously supports moving lighting. But nice try

Still the thing is, we take a roughly 75% framerate hit for ONE light source when shadows are turned on. If individual units each had their own light source, or (gulp) a pair of headlights, it'd be a slideshow. A very, very pretty slideshow.

Zaphod, how much trouble would it be for you to make your terrain demo program have a key for adding light sources? This would give us a tool to see how much of a performance hit the game takes with every additional one. And maybe the ability to spawn stuff...

Reading where this topic is I would say that dynamic lighting a world for headlights will kill every computer for the next 10 years to come. Why not just use some nice sprites that are cast onto the ground making it look like it has rt lighting?

mehere101 wrote:Reading where this topic is I would say that dynamic lighting a world for headlights will kill every computer for the next 10 years to come. Why not just use some nice sprites that are cast onto the ground making it look like it has rt lighting?

Earth2150 did it without even flinching, surely it can't be that bad.

Bruce, it isnt that doing it is hard; its doing it well, in other words, optimizing and tweaking every last function call, that is time consuming. We're quite fortunate that Spring is as far along as it is, considering how few people are working on it - compare to the hgundred or two hundred that may be working on Earth2150 or Starcraft II or whatever.

mehere101 wrote:Reading where this topic is I would say that dynamic lighting a world for headlights will kill every computer for the next 10 years to come. Why not just use some nice sprites that are cast onto the ground making it look like it has rt lighting?

Would require transparent textures, something that is not yet possible.

Earth 2160 did it with out flinching too. And that has good lights, And it was made in 2005.

Drone_Fragger wrote:Earth 2160 did it with out flinching too. And that has good lights, And it was made in 2005.

By a team of dedicated, highly experienced, paid developers.

Making good lighting could make need to rebuild the whole engine up again...

best to get started before tweaking the current one then ;D