Spring RTS Engine

Felix the Cat wrote:For those who are fans of the Robert Jordan series... I'm gathering ideas and information for an attempt at a WoT mod.

And it should be obvious that Fang is indeed a fan what with his spouting of all that business about ranged combat/magic...

Im kinda inclined to agree with Fang and Noruas on this one. CC has been comtemplated many times and any attempts have been hackish affairs that look like crap and play just as bad. If you know some yet undiscoved method to do this that works 95% of the time share it with everyone and you'll garner a lot more support/help.

But anyway... i might have to look these books up, sounds like an interesting read...

Erm, why did I get dragged into this...

To get to the point... I have already proposed, elsewhere, what I think might solve the problems associated with HTH combat in Spring. It's a fairly minor change to the aiming code... not a gigantic labor of 1000 years.

I have not had time to look at it yet, and propose the specific change that would be needed for a patch, YET. And I probably won't get to this until after Thanksgiving- I am suuuuuper busy right now, both with IRL stuff and the latest release of NanoBlobs.

Here, for people who haven't read it yet, is what I said, after looking at Smoth's continuing attempts to get this to work:

The fact of the matter is that while targeting based on (range-to-center - radius) would be nicer, I'm not sure how computationally expensive it would be- I haven't read that part of the code since I figured out that the hitspheres were borked, and I wasn't reading the targetting code, really- just the collision-detection stuff.

If I can dig it up, why don't we look at it, and determine what we'd like it to do, and submit a patch? For something like this, I'm sure that the Spring devs would be more than willing to listen, if we had more than just wishes, and I sincerely doubt that the code for this is uber-complicated. I would be willing to bet that we just need to define the target point as whatever is being targeted now, Float3, minus the Radius from whichever axis of the Float3 was longest... that way we're always cutting the beam length, whatever that is. It will not, obviously, always lead to perfectly accurate results- if you do the trig, it'll result in beams swaying to one side or another of true center. But I doubt if the error would be too large, and it'd be mathematically simple. We could even get it closer, without doing true trig, by doing a quick ratio, so that if the target is at X45, Y40, Z10 from the unit, then we cut down each based on the result after cutting down X... not perfect, but should be close enough.

I do appreciate Felix's determination and vision.
To Fang: Right now Spring cannot handle melee combat doesn't mean it will never do; Felix may not have the ability to mod doesn't mean he will never have. Experience is accumulated through the process of actually doing something you've never done before. No one was born with the ability to do a certain thing. Forgive me for saying this, but your prejudice, not only against this subject but also against other matters, really disgusts me.

Guess what bwansy, I DONT GIVE A CRAP WHAT YOU THINK, NOR WHAT YOUR OPINION OF ME IS.. Point in case, I have little to no doubt in my mind that this mod will never be made, and regardless of whether melee combat becomes feasible in spring or not, does not in any way decrease the amount of work neccessary to make a mod of this sort.. for someone who has NO experience, to attempt to do this is not going to teach felix anything, it is just going to frustrate him, and lead to a mass of questions.. You dont learn something by starting at the top and working down, you work from the bottom up, doing easy to master things, and then once you have the skill sets you take on something more challenging.

Felix has basically shown up here and said roughly to equate this to another topic, I know nothing about physics, but Im going to attempt to create a unified theory of physics right off the bat..

Its ludicrous, do something small, this sort of project is not something to start your mod career in.. Not to mention spring is even with possible melee capability, not the best or even a reasonably good engine to attempt to portray the wheel of time.. Were not talking small skirmishes, were not even talking 1000 guys, were talking 10,000 guys fighting, or more, the Total War series would be FAR superior for an attempt to do the wheel of time, or you could try Mark of chaos, though either of those games lack the modability of spring, I can assure you this will be difficult..

Where does the key difficulty lie.. you will have to have calvary, you cannot avoid it, they are mentioned multiple times throughout the series, and any fan of the series worth his salt would know this.. Scripting/and animating a mounted knight unit, is going to be a giant pain in the arse, youd need Zwzsg, or at least near his level of skill in order to animate that without it looking like crap..

DO something less ambitious.. a TC as your first off mod is A BAD IDEA..

omg felix make a MTW2 mod ^_^ sure it won't be multiplayer but omfg that would be fantastic on so many levels!
do it! do it now!!!

On the one hand, Felix... if I listened to everybody who doubted me, I would never get anything done.

On the other hand... Fang is entirely right about baby steps. If I were you, I would make a mod with exactly ONE GUY in armor, and a factory, and work on getting that ONE GUY to be able to fight his clones convincingly.

In a couple of months of steady work, experiment and little failures, you will then know enough to build the rest of the mod, and then the real work begins. Don't give us grand, giant plans for millions of things. Just go do it. Use a K-bot to start with, so that you don't have to model or script... just get the basic game dynamic working, THEN teach yourself the next steps, and so forth. 99% of the grand ideas we see here fail, because people don't know how to do the basics, and are too damn lazy to get down in the dirt and teach themselves. Nobody is going to model for you, script for you, skin for you, or do anything for you- and if they do, before you have proven yourself, then you will not be helped. Sit down with the tools, and give us a simple, working mod depicting HTH combat. Then come back with larger ambitions.

I keep telling people this, over and over, and it never ceases to be true. Fanger is right- if your mod's game design document is over one (short) line, and you have zero experience, then your chances of success are very nearly zero.

So, make a mod with a game design of, "You build little guys with swords and kill the other guys with swords. The last guy standing wins." Which sounds dumb... but it's lot less likely to fail than some giant, involved thing with a huge backstory... and it's more likely to keep you focused on making things work

you dont just go to budding mods and modders "LOL U GON SUXX" and tell them they cant do it and they shouldnt bother.

if you think somthing sounds bad, dont just point out the faults. point out an alternate method or suggested changes.

Sometimes there's no alternate method. It is actually helpful to other modders, it saves them time and frustration, to warn them in advance when they're clearly heading to a dead-end. Doesn't mean they're not free to try, but at least they know they shouldn't count on it. If common wisdom says it's not possible, either you agree with common wisdom, either you prove it wrong by publishing a unit that do it, but simply saying "other people do cool stuff, so anything is possible" won't do it. And indeed if you plan on using impossible feature in large scale in a mod, you'd better check you can do it and that it's working well instead of making 100 units before realising that common wisdom for once held, and that it doesn't work and all has to be thrown away. So yeah, first devise a way to make melee, then make one melee unit, then play around with it, check how it behave, and only once you're checked it works well enough, start a whole TC that use it. If it was only a side aspect of the mod, something you could eventually do without, it wouldn't be that important, but here it sounds like Felix wants to make a whole mod revolving on an aspect on the engine that has repeatadly said to be tried and be impossible. Sounds a bad plan to drive full speed ahead into a wall many experienced people crashed into already while saying "yeah I know currently no one can pass through, but I'm confident there is a way somehow".

As whether or not melee can be workarounded in Spring, I won't say cause I don't know enough. Ok I admit tried in TA, with two approaches, and one felt promising, but near no one is supposed to know that, and I have yet to investigate all consequences and publish.

For scripting lifeliking horse animation dinamik would be a better choice than me. Ever seen his velociraptor, elephant, and whale?

And if you dislike Fang comments, there's only one way to prove him wrong, it's: Just do it. You'll spend month learning how to mod, modelling, texxing, scripting, tag editing, fighting the same incomprehensible bugs for days, eventually if you don't lose you motivation midway, after a year or so you'll have learnt a lot and managed to get a nice mod, the sum of countless hours of sleep deprivation and hard work, you'll post about it, and ... get either wholly ignored or flamed over little details. Just like Arg and Smoth. Welcome to modding!

If Felix said he will come up with all the features all at once, that is of course rediculous. But did he? Why can't he start with only one mage that shoots firefalls first, and then expand it gradually as he gains more experience? And did he mention that he will do this all by himself without collabotating with or even seeking help from other experienced modders? Fang, you made E&E all by yourself, and I do admire it, but keep in mind that many mods are made by a team of modders, each with different skills.
That's my point. If felix is really going to do this all by himself and brags about doing the most difficult things at first, then he is definitely stupid. But he didn't mention those.
We are all members of the Spring community. A healty community should be a place where members encourage and help each other, not attacking each other by saying "my mod is the best and yours sux" or "I can do this but you cannot because you're a noob".

zwzsg wrote:You'll spend month learning how to mod, modelling, texxing, scripting, tag editing, fighting the same incomprehensible bugs for days, eventually if you don't lose you motivation midway, after a year or so you'll have learnt a lot and managed to get a nice mod, the sum of countless hours of sleep deprivation and hard work, you'll post about it, and ... get either wholly ignored or flamed over little details. Just like Arg and Smoth. Welcome to modding!

I'm going through that stage right now. Started with zero modeling and scripting knowledge this summer, nor do I have a grasp of balancing anything (but I've got NOiZE for that )... well it wasn't so difficult for me to get familiar with the scripting language while slowly progressing at modeling but it was very depressing and frustrating, especially if you lack the necessary skills.

I'm currently starting over for the third (or fourth time, stopped counting) and still suck big time at texturing and a whole lot of other things. And yeah, doing the impossible things first will slow you down. I noticed this while making the tracks of a tank reverse when it turns, but in the end I succeeded. This of course will vary from person to person...

Anyway, you'll have to either get some people who got the skills or build them up yourself starting small just like Argh and Fang said. Especially when humans are one of the most difficult stuff to model IMO.

So instead of jumping right onto making humanoids I'd do some basic mechanical stuff, like a catapult or a ballista.

Oh yeah, and be warned, you'll probably scrap most of the stuff you completed and do them again and again and over again because you figure out new methods and ways out how to do stuff simpler, less wasteful/complicated and easier to uv map (in my case) etc. It's a long steep ladder to climb.

Fanger, if I wanted to make a mod for some TW game, I'd make it for some TW game.

Now, please show a little bit of respect and leave. I do not want your opinion, I don't care about your opinion, I place no value upon your opinion.

Others are free to keep contributing whatever they feel like contributing. The "gtfo" only applies to Fanger.

Speaking from personal expirence, making a mod is all fine and dandy untilly ou actually try and make the said mod. I think I got five modles (not even units. Just the modles) and gave up. But thats just me.

I'll belive's it when's I see's it. Best of luck till then.