Spring RTS Engine

I wonder how difficult modding SupCom will be?

It seems that modding gets more and more difficult as games get more and more modern, simply because it requires more technical skills that are harder to develop for a layman (non-techie type).

For example, because SupCom will be prettier and more detailed than TA, it will require a higher level of modelling skills to create models for new mods for it, possibly a level of modelling skill that is really not attainable by someone without at least a modicum of formal training in 3D modelling.

The same can be said of Half Life 2, but look at the mods out for that...

Zoombie wrote:The same can be said of Half Life 2, but look at the mods out for that...

True, sort of.

Most of those mods were developed by teams of people with significant prior experience modding HL1/UT2k/pick-your-FPS-of-choice, and/or people with outside technical skills i.e. professional programmers or designers.

For a team of 5 people new to modding to create a mod for HL2 would probably be infeasible.

Uh-Oh Page two and it was off-topic... Maybe I should make this a SupCom topic?

Ehh, modding SupCom, I remember reading somewhere that CT said it would be easy/easier to mod than OTA...

Hopefully, but modelers are gunna spend 5 hours or so modeling the same thing.... I only spend like 2-3 Hours, at most, on some things...

Maybe it will be easy?

Wow... looking at the feature list I have to say IMO Spring is like a early beta of SupCom, where it has most of the features and moderately buggy. Somel features in the SupCom review I liked were that quantum tunnel thing and the attack vector thing where it shows the approx. time a group of units will arrive at the destination and the other stuff. That's pretty much all the stuff that SupCom has that Spring doesn't.

On a side note, how much do you think SupCom will cost? I always like free/open-source stuff over anything with a price tag so I'll stick with Spring

Oh, and the single-player campaigns sound good too

Yeah, shortly after my post I realized that Chris Taylor's misleading comment of "SupCom will be easy to mod" would probably confuse people.

I'm talking "mod" as in things like AA, SWTA, Gundam, NanoBlobs, etc. I think in TA-speak they would be "total conversions".

From what I can gather he's talking "mod" as in, tweaking numbers and such.

The difference? Modelling, animating, whatever other stuff you have to do. Creating the content, basically. I doubt that making a set of animated models that will look good in SupCom will be anything remotely close to easy.

And nobody2u, I believe someone made an ETA GroupAI that would display a group's estimated time to destination or something. I should look that up.

Most importantly... um, with Spring, devs may actually give us poor modders a feature, if we ask really nice. Oh, and we have not one, not two, not three, but at least four AIs, all with different strengths and weaknesses...

Basically, I see zero reason to hope that SupCom is going to be a better world. Closed-source sucks. Every SupCom modder will quickly find out that there are a billion things they just can't touch

OTAI is for all intensive purposes dead. No news on KAI or AAI dev has been heard for a good while, and NTai XE9RC22 seems to reach release status onyl to eb set abck over and voer again.

I wonder what kind of AI SupCom will use, I hope it won't be as bad as the AI in OTA, or at least the AI should be easily changed/improved. Either way, unless Taylor does the impossible and make SupCom open-source (yeah right ) Spring is and always will be much more flexible and easier to mod. Unless SupCom will come will a map editor like the one in Starcraft (I have to say thats a pretty good feature that comes with SC )

EDIT: The SC thing was just in my opinion, I don't want to start a SC flamefest that seem to be pretty common these days

Argh wrote:Most importantly... um, with Spring, devs may actually give us poor modders a feature, if we ask really nice. Oh, and we have not one, not two, not three, but at least four AIs, all with different strengths and weaknesses...

Basically, I see zero reason to hope that SupCom is going to be a better world. Closed-source sucks. Every SupCom modder will quickly find out that there are a billion things they just can't touch

Even more importantly, if someone wants to make a patch to add a feature, he can do so. It may even be accepted, depending on his coding style.

AF wrote:OTAI is for all intensive purposes dead. No news on KAI or AAI dev has been heard for a good while, and NTai XE9RC22 seems to reach release status onyl to eb set abck over and voer again.

AF, as much as we know you like your work which is very respectable, don't assume. Sub and Krogothe are both quite understandably a little cautious - I mean, you have your AI bundled with the Lobby. You're the majority AI, though possibly not the most used - and it's simply hard to shake the roots with an alternative. I mean, it's the same issue as the mods with fewer participants. The easiest way to make a splash is to come out of nowhere with an new bit of code, like Krogothe did - I mean, nobody who didn't read the wiki would even have known KAI was in development.

And yes, OTAI seems dead. It was an interesting AI while it lasted.

I dunno, Spring has so many hardcoded nasty habits that even with closed source SC would be more moddable for quite some time. At least if it has a more modern approach to hardcoding vs. scripts. I do expect SC to be more advanced than Spring under the hood even if the user might not notice that immediately. Better pathfinding, faster collision and drawing, skeletal animation that requires much less script-controlled stuff, generally less slowdown.

Of course it'll take more effort to make something on par with SC's included units but it'd take just as much effort (or more to accomodate for Spring's ancient restrictions) to match that quality in Spring. If S3O drawing wasn't so slow we could probably use as many polygons and texture resolutions like those seen in SC.