Spring RTS Engine

Hey Felix, I have something I need somebody to do, and that is to model WW2-era European buildings... everything from farmhouses to villas to residential homes to.. you get the point. There should be lots of reference pictures for it all over the place...

We're going to need dozens atleast (if not hundreds) so we should really start working on them now...

Sure.

What scale? i.e. do you want an entire house as one piece, or do you want to try to use my idea for urban maps, i.e. each section of wall is one 1x1 feature and you build square buildings with hollow interiors out of them, and leave some holes so things can go in and out.

Also, I need to know how many levels of damage are required. IMHO it would look silly if a house was hit by an artillery shell and not damaged, but it would look sillier if troops still had to go around a ruined house. So let me know what sort of damage levels you want.

edit. I did a couple of Middle Eastern-themed buildings, full repair and one stage of damage, here's a screenie of them - two minarets and a mosque.

[image removed, see linked thread below]

481 faces (most of it in the tracks/wheels), translating to 1200 tris.
...to emphasize that bit about the tracks/wheels - without tracks and wheels, the model is 173 faces/408 tris.

Maybe my tracks/wheels are inefficient? Maybe one of you could send me some of your tracks/wheels to use?

I say increase wheel size by like 10-20 percent, and chop a few out.. Not inefficent, but if thats going to be a tank with the rotating treads, then I think you'd best get rid of a few, or a lot..

You could probably bring the wheel cylinders down to 6 sides - would lower the count by almost 100 tris if my mental math is right.

I'm starting to model, so I may just drop some general GPL buildings when I have the chance.

Snipawolf wrote:I say increase wheel size by like 10-20 percent, and chop a few out.. Not inefficent, but if thats going to be a tank with the rotating treads, then I think you'd best get rid of a few, or a lot..

One certainly hopes the number of wheels will be historically accurate.


Anyway, lower the wheels to 6 sided, and make the tracks flat.

Well, let history be your leader. If it has problems such as lag, then change it, if staying accurate to real life and history are important, then stray not from your goal.

Nice model but its just a bit off... namely the tracks are too "tall", the gun superstructre is a bit too tall, the hull is too thin...

If only you would use say... blueprints, felix.

If you insist that that stifles your creativity, stick to the buildings where you have free reign.

Heh, I never use blueprints...

Yes but you should.

(and you have an unervingly good judgement for dimensions)

I did use blueprints, but now I'm in the process of making some measurements and getting the thing a bit better proportioned.

The problem is that either I'm not doing it right, or using blueprints in the way you suggest doesn't work in Wings.

Spiked, as I said, I'm doing some measurements. The surprising results? Well, the tracks aren't tall enough, the gun superstructure/"turret" is fine, but the hull area between the turret and tracks is much too thick.

... finished the measurements and the corresponding changes.
[image removed, see linked thread below]

Hey, let's take discussion of my models and of modelling in general to our TAU forums so we don't clutter up this general thread with specific technical stuff.

Well, it is about the mod..

Snipawolf wrote:Well, it is about the mod..

Much easier for me if feedback is contained in a separate thread, and model related stuff tends to generate a lot of posts, including a lot of pictures, and I'd like to try to keep this thread as 56k-friendly as possible.

If you want to comment in-depth or give suggestions/critiques, I'd appreciate it if you do it in this thread so I have it all in one place to use.

Are these going to be buildings, or fetures? If a building, are they going to be indavidual buildings, or something?

but other then those purely gameplay type questions, I think it looks really good. The power lines lack cables, but that would probebly be hard to do convincingly...

Those would be buildable structures. Feature structures would mainly be things like barns and whatever. The power line poles woudl be features and be impossible to have power lines, as there'd be no way to connect power lines between two polls. But that's okay, the power lines would be so small as to be invisible from any range but very close up.. no point.

Also the power lines look far too much like KKK crosses.. :S

They'd have to be on fire to be KKK, but whatever. Very nice.