Spring RTS Engine

Personally I think that the problem most people coming to spring from TA have is not the lack of a good LOS visualizer but the lack of an "explored/unexplored" areas visualizer. The "blackened" area you get in most other RTSes... I'm pretty sure something like this could be cobbled together easily enough with LUA aside from the fact that I don't know if the engine actually stores this information because it's effectively unimportant to simulation... one could probably make one's own map for this by just reading the LOS map every time it updates and storing which squares are visable...

Someone with LUA abilities should do this just to see how people react to it... I recommend drawing a "grid" on unexplored terrain (draw line segments... probably in green or purple or red or something.

also the "radar blips" would look better if they were drawn to the surface texture instead of floating.

SinbadEV wrote:also the "radar blips" would look better if they were drawn to the surface texture instead of floating.

I think that'd look pretty nice for ground units, while you can still have air units that have hovering radar dots.

dizekat wrote:'Visualizer' currently just displays things as them are.

wait, does that really mean the game's LOS is as crappy as the 'L' visualizer? actual LOS updating as slow as 'L' fog of war visualizer?
because in my mod units will move a lot faster than what I've seen in other mods, and faster moving makes it worse for the LOS to catch up. so it would be like the unit moving into an enemy zone, waiting for LOS to catch up, then fire
I think there really needs to be an upgrade to this feature. both LOS and fog of war

SinbadEV wrote:Personally I think that the problem most people coming to spring from TA have is not the lack of a good LOS visualizer but the lack of an "explored/unexplored" areas visualizer.

actually it's both the good LOS visualizer *and* then lack of explored/unexplored areas visualizer

Chosker wrote:

dizekat wrote:'Visualizer' currently just displays things as them are.

wait, does that really mean the game's LOS is as crappy as the 'L' visualizer? actual LOS updating as slow as 'L' fog of war visualizer?
because in my mod units will move a lot faster than what I've seen in other mods, and faster moving makes it worse for the LOS to catch up. so it would be like the unit moving into an enemy zone, waiting for LOS to catch up, then fire
I think there really needs to be an upgrade to this feature. both LOS and fog of war

Actually I'm not sure. Thing is different unit's los is updated at different times. Need to check that. Maybe fast moving unit has it updated faster, I dunno.

REVENGE wrote:

Tobi wrote:Because it didn't fit the original goal of the feature, which is being able to debug the LOS map and LOS update/check code.

Interesting, seems to correspond to one of the reasons why the original hardcore TA player base didn't quite take to the Spring engine.

You'd be surprised how many in the TA community run their cpus below the 500mhz mark, one person complained spring wouldn't run on their 233Mhz cpu

speaking of which, how does original TA do LOS ? Or they just have tiny battles?

"L" button is sucky, since i dont want to see all that information at once, it would be enough if i just saw my LOS, and drawed everything else 50% darker.

Would be fucking awesome to be able to change those colors by mod... Or by widgets...

*cough* - ";"

Seriously, you've been playing for how long?

nice, now how to remove that other color? i want to see just 2 colors, 50% dark and normal color

AF wrote:You'd be surprised how many in the TA community run their cpus below the 500mhz mark, one person complained spring wouldn't run on their 233Mhz cpu

cellphones have more nowadays. we won't make spring run on a cellphone. such people can and should be ignored.

Completely black area just rewards people who have remembered the map. It would make Spring worse.

also the fog of war would suck in anything other than top down views the second you use another camera it would fail miserably

TradeMark wrote:"L" button is sucky, since i dont want to see all that information at once, it would be enough if i just saw my LOS, and drawed everything else 50% darker.

Would be fucking awesome to be able to change those colors by mod... Or by widgets...

see my earlier post, a widget that indeed changes those colors.

Google_Frog wrote:Completely black area just rewards people who have remembered the map. It would make Spring worse.

fine, then have it customizable to any color/alpha values you want. since when is this stuff all a yes/no black/white sort of thing in this game?

Otherside wrote:also the fog of war would suck in anything other than top down views the second you use another camera it would fail miserably

ever played a real 3D RTS? one with a flexible camera? if not then go do it. fog of war is fog, not an overlayed color, that's why it works

so besides all the ranting, discussing, commenting and nonesense talking...
is there any official word about this? is it in the to-do list? if so how high/low on it? or just is it never going to be done?

If you want a visual indication of the FOW, make a modification of the groundfog widget that is set to only draw the fog outside of your LOS.

I win this thread, y'all can go home now.

you mean the one that draws fog around the camera (not really unit LOS) ?

thats why i said to MODIFY it. so it ONLY draws the fog where you cant see... ... ...

I was just asking if you were refering to that one...

and I was asking because I actually did modify it. the Fog widget creates a (big) number of layers of 2-sided spheres with opacity, all around the camera (it's not really fog, and it does *not* take into account any unit's LOS, it's just an arbitrarily-distanced camera-only fog). since they're always around the camera you don't ever get to see it from the outside, but if I did it for every unit (instead of the camera) then you'd only see a black sphere around every unit. in this case what's needed is to *not* draw shapes where the units have LOS (and draw everywhere else)

so what I did was to create a grid of squares, and wherever there's a unit near it stops drawing them (I never made it take into account real LOS distance, just a generic distance for now). but since it's squares with hard edges it looks ugly.
optimizations: the amount of squares varies based on camera distance to the ground. zoomed in/out means more/less "resolution" (up to a limit), meaning seeing all the map won't get it to draw millions of squares. also it only draws squares for on-screen terrain.
and even then, in-game FPS were halved in the best cases, reduced to a quarter in the worst cases. usual values on my PC where reducing some nice 70 FPS into a choppy 18.

multiple layers can be added so that the fog "fades" instead of being a hard edge. but performance gets even worse.
close "resolution" can be increased so it draws more squares in order for curves to look abit more smooth and less as squares, but again, performance decreases as the amount of drawn squares increases

so that's it. it looks ugly, it's makes everything slow and choppy and since it's flat any cliff goes through it... but it works.
screen:

What's the difference between it and inbuilt los?