Spring RTS Engine

Can you please make Archers worth using? I hate having to build units just because they counter one other unit. Make them artillery/antiair combo or something. At the moment they are a waste of resources :O

I'll make the Archer able to shoot at ground targets, but do fairly crappy damage, so that its power as an attack unit is kept pretty low, and I will very deliberately make it impossible for it to kill itself any more (noselfdamage=1) and keep the area-effect lower, so that it won't tend to blow its comrades up, and give the guided weapon a trajectoryheight that's fairly high so that it'll shoot over things better. That will make the Archer minimally effective against non-air units, good against Wolves, and not have problems due to being shrunk to its current tiny size.

I'm also going to modify the TriRook, and have all three of the gunpods rise up out of the body, but have them on limited arcs, so that they can fire at three targets simultaneously, and I think I'll nerf their weapon by quite a bit, so that it does almost as much damage with all three guns, but is considerably weaker with only one. Could be interesting...

In terms of scale this version seems unfinished.

The sheer size of the square rook comapred to other units distorts everything, and means there's no middle ground between Lordsquare/tri/spirerooks demons and the teeny weeny kngiths and archers. They're so small they just look insignificant and worthless. Perhaps making square rooks smaller or having a unit inbetween the size of a strider and a knight, else there's just no continuence between the scales.

In all honesty, I've been seriously considering re-doing some of the units, including the Squares and Spires.

The square rook would look better if it was smaller than the strider. Because it's so big it compounds the problems with the model immensely...

Hmm... smaller than the Strider? I dunno about that... it might lead to some game-design issues. I'll look at it, though, and see what can be done. What I've been thinking about is standardizing all of the unit sizes according to the hitspheres, now that I know more about how Spring reads them... basically, in an ideal world, they'd all be multiples of 8, so some of the units (Wolves, Sheep, Knights) are visually much smaller than their hitspheres right now, whereas some are using odd sizes, and should be bumped to the next larger sizes, whereas some need to be smaller. The SpireRook is a typical case... I think the hitsphere is 50+, if I recall correctly... I think it should be closer to 32. I may have to rebuild the geometry/skins for several of the units, too.

The problem here is mainly just deciding how much time to throw at this... nobody plays the mod, so it's mainly just a gameplay exercise at the moment. I was hoping to see some screenies from Drone by now, in the hopes of increasing the playerbase, but it looks like I'll have to make them myself tonight... no biggie, I can run dynamic water, shadows, etc. and get some awesome shots... it's really gorgeous when you can turn everything up.

Ok, got everything to the new sizes. Everything has been standardized, I've fixed all of the unit tracks and other small details, and the units are now just about balanced enough to put out a new test version, and give me the "leisure" to create some custom, randomized death animations (yup, gonna use that).

Explosions are getting standardized, too, now that I have verified exactly how the size of explosions works. It's kind've funny, actually... it doesn't work like I always thought it did.

Last but not least, the next version allows for Friendly Fire to pass through units, if one wants, and the last time I checked, the fix for primary weapon orientation was still going to be in it. I'm pretty tempted to use that for some of the units, because it could really help out with some issues and improve overall gameplay. Knights, in particular, could really have improved combat behavior overall, I think.

Oh yeah, and on most (but not all) units, I have disabled damage to the unit from its own weapons. This has really helped the Archer and a few other units, because they occasionally were committing hari-kari when obstructing terrain interfered with them, especially on maps like Ashap Plateau. Small unit sizes is both kewl, and a pain.

Now that I'm done with all of these fixes and buffs, I will be now tackling the new resource model, and addressing, in particular, the whole "nano particle lag" issue.

I say get rid fo nanoparticles completely and use some strange animation, say something opens up and components start spinning

Or say like the earth 2150 repair component, wher an arm comes out and extends onto the unit being built and moves around randomly in a small area.

Trust me, the minute that I can get rid of nanoparticles, I will get rid of them. I hope that the fix that's in the next version includes getting rid of the particle objects themselves, not just the bitmap, because they're a fairly major remaining area of lag...

I added the tag to remove them myself.

Theres a tag to remove nanoframes too.

Kewl. That will be sweet. No more OTA-isms

Don't give up Argh... now that NanoBlobs doesn't present a health hazard to my computer, I'd play it, except that nobody is ever interested in joining a game, even after I spam a download link all over the lobby like the E&E folks do.

Keep spamming. Its working, slowly but painfully, with us EE folks...

I'm not terribly worried about popularity with the mod. I'll be making some loadscreens, since it appears that Drone's not going to, and I will just keep working on the final little touches for this build, then I'll get the new economy tests going while I give people some time to hopefully give me feedback about unit balance.

The thing with the mod right now is that it's almost back to being finely balanced and fun to play again... it's mainly just down to the core gameplay aspects, as usual... the critical Knight/Wolf/Spire balance, which is not entirely satisfactory... yet. Right now, in the current build (which is, obviously, pretty different than the one you guys have) the Wolf isn't quite worth using again. The Wolf has always been one of the hardest units to balance, because it needs to work offensively... but not too well Wolves are meant to be disposable scouts, nothing more, nothing less... their offensive abilities are distinctly secondary.

I have quite a few shots in nice poses, for example the autofac shot I sued with XE8 scrawlked across it, I believe I mailed you the original a while back.

I want shots with shadows, reflectivity, and dynamic water, and all of the particles/scars set to max. Trust me on this... for those of you who cannot use Spring's more modern graphical features... you are totally missing out

That said, I'm really happy that the current version is no longer bringing slower machines to their knees. It was a terrific amount of work to get it all optimized enough to run fast, and I'm glad it all paid off.

Ive started to play it, and I managed to get one person to play with me! (although he did ask for it to be played on Speedmetal...) But anyways, its a good mod, im going to keep playing it. Maybe one day i might get a game with a whole 4 people in it!

Maelstrom wrote:Ive started to play it, and I managed to get one person to play with me! (although he did ask for it to be played on Speedmetal...) But anyways, its a good mod, im going to keep playing it. Maybe one day i might get a game with a whole 4 people in it!

I hope he realized that you might as well play on a pretty map if you're going to play NB, because metal means jack :D

One of my favorite things about NB, personally.

Yea we played on the Riverdale maps, it was great fun.

The only problem is, he was pasically porcing. He just built Holders in blocks of 4 in his base, which made attacking with Knight impossible, amassed Wolfs to make air useless, and user Spider things to kill everything else that attacked. Then he just crawled his army of like 10 tris and 5 squares plus hundreds of spiders to my base

Its probably cause im noob, but i have no idea how i could have assulted this. How would i do it? it seemed impossible

I'm working with the new Spring development build... and I can tell you a few things already:

1. Taking out unit checks for Friendly Fire for certain kinds of units (artillery, guided rockets) makes things go much, much smoother. Spring uses a lot've processing power figuring out what's in the way, it seems!

2. I was pleasantly surprised by how non-disruptive turning off Friendly Fire impacts is for fast-moving weapons, from a visual perspective. You really will only notice with the occasional shot zipping through a really big unit, honestly, and it makes the game play a LOT smoother, and gets rid of some very annoying gameplay issues. I think Yeha might've given this mod a real break here.

3. Just wait 'til you see the new flamethrowers! They're pwawesome.