Spring RTS Engine

HeavyLancer wrote:It's a dumbed-down generic clone of OTA at the moment, to the extent that it still uses OTA content in parts. The most innovative things that I have seen in CA is the mex overdrive function, which is a natural extrapolation of the convertible resources system that OTA had (metal makers etc.); and the flat balance implemented a while back.

Ouch. That's it? Don't even mention chicken defense, morphing, priority construction, unique FFA playstyle with diplomacy, strange weapons like gravity guns and implosion bombs, and others.

HeavyLancer wrote:but CA has to innovate or it will stagnate and die.

Taking away a faction is not innovative. There's absolutely zero artistic value in it. I'm going to innovate my house by removing the garage. I've got such a creative mind!

HeavyLancer wrote:CA needs a big project push to keep everyone focused. I think that 1 faction is that big project we need.

It will have the opposite effect on me. If CA went 1faction, I'd lose all motivation to work on it because it would be, as aptly described, a dumbed down RTS. I'd go work on something else like The Cursed or s44. CA is already struggling for character and a storyline and currently the arm/core differentiation is all it's got. Take it away and it's a bunch of robots in one faction with no purpose. Yawn.

HeavyLancer wrote:It's a dumbed-down generic clone of OTA at the moment, to the extent that it still uses OTA content in parts. The most innovative things that I have seen in CA is the mex overdrive function, which is a natural extrapolation of the convertible resources system that OTA had (metal makers etc.); and the flat balance implemented a while back.

Ouch. That's it? Don't even mention chicken defense, morphing, priority construction, unique FFA playstyle with diplomacy, strange weapons like gravity guns and implosion bombs, and others.

HeavyLancer wrote:but CA has to innovate or it will stagnate and die.

Taking away a faction is not innovative. There's absolutely zero artistic value in it. I'm going to innovate my house by removing the garage. I've got such a creative mind!

HeavyLancer wrote:CA needs a big project push to keep everyone focused. I think that 1 faction is that big project we need.

It will have the opposite effect on me. If CA went 1faction, I'd lose all motivation to work on it because it would be, as aptly described, a dumbed down RTS. I'd go work on something else like The Cursed or s44. CA is already struggling for character and a storyline and currently the arm/core differentiation is all it's got. Take it away and it's a bunch of robots in one faction with no purpose. Yawn.

Thinking it over, I keep getting all these fun ideas that 1-faction would open up (things that would be tedious to do for 2 factions and hard to differentiate)... but really, CA is already very far committed to having 2 factions. 1-faction would be throwing out a terrifying amount of work.

If this had been suggested a year ago, I'd be all for it. Now it's very mixed. I mean, moving factional differences into factories would be my preferred approach, but CA is too far along for that kind of fun.

Factories become the new factions. You pick them at the start of the game and they dictate what units you can chose. All factions (factories) share the buildings though. Thats 10-12 factions! Whats more, you can mix any two of these factions together, or change faction mid-game. Brilliant!

All this talk about singleplayer and story is a total waste of time, we dont have a singleplayer (unless you count chickens, which is, uh, two factions) and we dont have a story or even a name we can agree on.

We do not have two different art styles. All that work on design docs to keep stuff coherent and concept art was useless, nobody followed it. Logos was meant to follow Mr.D and Nova to follow spherebot. Metal plates and angles vs smooth and contoured. The Logos laser towers and bots look smooth and shiny metalic like Nova units, the Nova fusions look blocky and greebly like Logos units, KR's models just look like black-coloured Nova units.

The art styles seem to mostly follow whoever is making the models: And that is not done per faction, its done per factory. If each factory mostly adheres to an art style, the game can be more coherent and we need each modellers to only make 9 or so units to get a complete set.

Still, i think its only sane to have it be a re-branded fork of CA. New content, new name, perhaps even new development system.

Saktoth wrote:we dont have a story or even a name we can agree on.

We don't? I'm under the impression that the general idea of your story (desolate universe with two robot factions made by man being the apparent sole survivors) was agreed on by all, and more specific details (including the name) aren't vital to the design (and we do have some idea on what we want for the story).

KR's models just look like black-coloured Nova units.

About this: there are only two models I made currently used for Logos units (IIRC): the Shadow and the Vulture.

Being a precision bomber (and a plane), the Shadow can afford to have more sleek, curvy designs than the other Logos units. Yeah, I'm rationalizing here.

As for the Vulture, it just so happens that it IS a black Nova unit. It was originally the Peeper, then Licho super-sized it for Eagle when we decided to drop scout planes, then MidKnight dumped some black paint on it and made it the Vulture, to make way for Bellbutt/Cirrus. :/

RIP CA 2007-2009

thank you for ruining it Goodbye

Never thought that sak would have such a poor concept of a good rts.

I think the bottom line here is that the 1faction idea seriously neglects the importance of aesthetic feel to the player's experience, regardless of whatever benefits it might have from a pure gameplay perspective.

i dont see any positives out of 1 faction. Even IP Free quicker isnt true because even with 1 faction there are still a significant amount of models missing to make a good RTS with depth and good gameplay without totally raping CA.

Otherside wrote:RIP CA 2007-2009

CA wrote:Reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated.

Otherside wrote:thank you for ruining it Goodbye

Never thought that sak would have such a poor concept of a good rts.

Goodbye then. If you are going to be so intolerant of other's opinions and ideas then you don't have to contribute. Ad hominem attacks like that only belittle other's opinions of you.

However, if you leave, remember that whatever contributions you have made to the CA project will stay around. Evil4zerggin stopped contributing a while ago because of differences with other members of the core dev group, and some of his lua is still used.

On another note altogether: I think we should at least go for stylistic consistency within factories, 1 faction or not. That should be marked out on the wiki. Perhaps a list of factories to be done?

I think I'm smelling a fork happening soon...

erm who are you to say anything ?

im one of the longest lasting CA players ive seen it go through its many phases. The good times, the bad times but this is the final nail in the coffin.

Id tolerate someone else's opinion but in this case its going to lead to the end of a game I enjoyed, when the changes aren't needed and people are getting ahead of themselves. Sacrificing 3 years of work just to be IP free GJ GJ GJ. Have fun with your bastard child of CA.

But each to there own. And critcising someone's gameplay concepts are hardly a ad hominem attack. If i said Shut your W**** Mouth Mother F***** then sure.

1) Reason Zerg left was because we had too many models to replace and mod is not free. He wanted to work on something he can publicly advertise.

2) Otherside made no major contributions

3) Insisting on current path may lead to other people leaving as well. Because 2 faction mod with full factories units will never be remodeled and my patience is running over.
I don't care how it's done, but without being OTA-free we cannot advertise outside. Without advertising outside CA will die due to lack of players. It's already too different from BA and too challenging for newbies due to its faster pace so player numbers are below self sustaining level now.

Atm the best way to make the mod free is to remove one faction. Other way would be to use shared models for both and removed rare stuff (hovers).

CA's strength lied in its faction diversity. To be perfectly honest i think CA in its current form codensed in to one faction would be a pretty bad RTS.

And there was no real attempt to get modellers/concept artists. One post on one or two forums outside spring doesnt cut it.

Theres some pretty cool Indie Rts's in Moddb with good concept artists/models etc CA will have a hard time building up a playerbase especially if your sacrificing gameplay/story for subpar models compared to its competitors.

I tend to think MidKnight gets a bad rap for the Logos turrets - the Logos model isn't just boxiness, it's crudity. Logos turrets look like grain-silos with guns. For me, that fits. If they were elegantly tapered, that would be another matter.

Personally, I like the idea of "faction differentiation in the factories". I think an important consideration is this: can there be multiple factories in similar roles?

If the game start on Comet is still generally "everybody starts Vehicles except for a handful that try air, plus people experimenting" then yes, 1 faction reduces the diversity of play. But what if there are two or three real _vehicle_ factories, not just the "early-game and late-game vehicle factory" which, let's be honest, is what tanks are. And while bots are almost-as-good-as-vehicles on a wide flat map like Comet, they still generally suffer a bit.

That's fundamentally what I was getting at with my "make the basic bot lab radar-stealth" idiotic idea... roughly "give more starting choices for your opening factory". If there was no "basic" lab and all the labs were weird, then there are more options. That may not be the best approach, but you get the idea.

You could increase _factory_ differentiation by culling some units out of the constructor list and making them available only as morphers, but this would be tricky since you'd need to come up with a lot more than just the basic "cloaker", "radar", and "shielder" morphable buildings. It may involve bringing back the big shield tank, for example.

Either way though, it's important to remember that CA is a good game _right now_. Going 1 faction will effectively be throwing away that game. You will have a new game, and it could be better than CA, but it won't be CA. It's understandable that some people are very angry about that.

edit: Extreme approach: end TA's concept of "factory-by-unit class". Three factory-classes: naval, land, air. Several factories in each class (3 naval, 4 land, 3 air, for example) with a mix of units for every role of various movement-classes, including amphibiousness/hover, and various magnitudes (example: lab with bot-raiders and pure-AA, tank samson and assault, all-terrain artillery, the walking shield, and hover antiswarm, and the Karganeth. All cons are amphibious and all-terrain). Obviously this is a bizarre approach, unsuited for CA, but it would solve a number of problems (and create many too).

Of course, this approach falls apart when you hit a pure-Kbot map, since it means that each factory has one or more massive holes in its spread (vehicles would be worthless, so any vehicle units in the lab become holes in your unit-spread).

Do the same with mixing subs, boats, hovers, and amphibs in the sea labs, and gunships and aircraft in the air-labs.

KingRaptor wrote:I think the bottom line here is that the 1faction idea seriously neglects the importance of aesthetic feel to the player's experience, regardless of whatever benefits it might have from a pure gameplay perspective.

PLUS ONE. I'm not here to play the mathematically perfect game. If I wanted to do that, guess what? There's chess and checkers. Perfect balance there, but where's the fun? Chess gets old after a while for us average folks who aren't highly skilled geniuses. Yet CA and other spring games go strong despite cries and screams of balance problems. Because they are fun, the robots are cool, the weapons fun to use and it's fun to make your enemy blow up, you feel like you're playing out a story of an epic battle. And one of CA's benefits over BA/OTA is the faction differentiation which enhanced this experience of playing out a story.

Licho wrote:Atm the best way to make the mod free is to remove one faction. Other way would be to use shared models for both and removed rare stuff (hovers).

That is why I created the "remove hovers" poll which just barely lost. I don't understand some of the arguments for keeping hovers like the game would be "broken." Come on guys, hovers could be removed and game would still be equally as fun. And we could bring them back when thesleepless makes all of the hovers.

What about saktoth's freeca fork? I'd rather see that than 1faction.

Pxtl wrote:I tend to think MidKnight gets a bad rap for the Logos turrets - the Logos model isn't just boxiness, it's crudity. Logos turrets look like grain-silos with guns. For me, that fits. If they were elegantly tapered, that would be another matter.

+1, finally someone agrees with me. I think they are Midknight's best models so far and fit well. Milo (hammer) is pretty awesome looking too, it just doesn't fit the hammer (body/gun are way too beefy for HP/projectile), but the model is great.

To me Milo's biggest problem is his size. If he were the same size as the Rocko, the crudity of the model would be less obvious from range. He's too low-poly and undertextured to be that big, and his size is disproportionate to his cost anyways. Plus, his large size seems to contribute to their tendency to pwn each other... but on the other hand, if they were smaller they'd probably pwn the Warriors defending them.

Otherside wrote:And there was no real attempt to get modellers/concept artists. One post on one or two forums outside spring doesnt cut it.

Get out. You have no idea what you're talking about. I personally contacted and conversed with almost forty artists, seven or eight in person... and I did that before I disconnected from CA.

Of late I've been talking with Licho and BasiC, of all people, and I would have to say an enthusiasm for CA which has long been dead is stirring. We've mostly been discussing what has or hasn't worked, and some more effective development models. Anyway, I think 1faction is a viable option. You can only expect people to do what they enjoy with some measure of social support. There isn't enough interest, enjoyment, planning and support in the present model to get both sides done in a reasonable timeframe.

i contacted artist/modelers to and none wanted to worked on CA for various reasons. No real big push was made by the dev team at large and the urgency has only been recent.

I'd opt to create 3 smaller factions rather than one or two really big ones. Asymmetric balance is more interesting for loads of reasons. I'd just take your completed assets and then start dividing up 'techs' among teams; give one team t1 bots and t2 air, give another t2 vehs and t1 hovers, give the third...and so on. Or something. The roles you require for each faction is really dependent on what other roles everyone else has, so you can reduce as far as you like.

I agree that reducing to one team is a poor plan; RTS factions are basically toolboxes, and much of what makes play interesting is not so much what your chosen toolbox can do, but what it can't do - and I mean -really- can't do.

There are two extremes when it comes to the availability of tools for players. One is zero limitation - a player can access any tool (unit) at any time for zero cost. Switching emphasis in force composition takes zero time, and imposes no penalty. The other is extreme limitation; the player is BOUND to a particular set of tools as soon as they make a choice - such as a faction (World in Conflict multiplayer is a great example of this; each player starts as a "support, armor, or infantry" faction and is limited to those tools. I called these extremes 'soft tree' and 'hard tree' when I was playing with these ideas a little over a year ago.

Where you place your design between the two extremes really depends on where you want the emphasis of your game to be - do you want to reward situational analysts and people with deep knowledge of the units (tools) available, or do you want to reward excellent unit usage and creative application of given tools? The trick, of course, is that a game requires a different set of unit roles depending on which emphasis you choose. *A tend to be an interesting mix, since the plethora of units leans towards a more analytically rewarding game, while the 'realistic' physics/movement/accuracy/ect tends towards creative unit usage.

To be continued >_>

What is a faction? It is a group of units you select before the game that determines what strengths/weaknesses/strategies you have to play with. Though you can pretty easily get the other options with res or from an ally (though, not so much capture).

What is a factory? It is a group of units you select during the game that determines what strengths/weaknesses/strategies you have to play with. You can get the other options, if you pay for it, but there are 12+ of them and each is unique, allowing you to mix and match several across a team or as a single player.

One faction = more units/techs/strategies/etc.

I dont understand this rampant mouth-frothing. Its a fork anyway.

We don't? I'm under the impression that the general idea of your story (desolate universe with two robot factions made by man being the apparent sole survivors) was agreed on by all, and more specific details (including the name) aren't vital to the design (and we do have some idea on what we want for the story).

Nope, i was Ninja'd by Licho. He put up a 'Use current story?' poll and the 'current story' he linked to was an entirely new story about the heat death of the universe and creating pocket galaxies. I tried to put up a new option as 'Use Saktoths story' but i was the only one that voted for it, possibly because i put it up too late and nobody cares enough to pay attention. Feel free to re-open the vote but now that '0k' has won the name poll it only makes sense to go with lichos story.

Still, if you're going to change your mind and re-open that so you can change your vote, id say 1 faction is even better for my storyline: It allows each commander in the singleplayer setting to be a distinct entity with a personality and interactions with many different groups, idealogies, enemies and stories.