Spring RTS Engine

You would need to re-do, from scratch, and awful lot of it. That sort of defeats the purpose of using the TA:K content, IE, its easy to port. Unless you already know what you're doing, and the complications involved, i think you'd be better off making a mod from scratch.

You would either need an awful lot of lua, or you'd need to modify the spring to support TA:K features (A worthwhile endeavour if you know how).

Of course, if you like, you can just take some of the content, models etc, and make a new mod from it without all the stuff that doesnt work.

@soma, be suprised, i'm still alive and going.

Anyways since im more or less of the "I need orders" and "jobs done sir" type i should be able to help if given a task. Through my somewhat limited knowledge of lua, scripting and the like it should be a bit straightforward, well for experts at least.

for the personal mana supply and the like it should be somthing like having a lua call to an individual value, something that will have to require a new UI specially made for TAK to support this.

it may also be possible ( although i doubt it) to have a melee unit to have a collision check when performing the attack animation at a specific frame then it should be possible to apply damage.

The individual unit ai would have to be revamped, it may be possible (although unlikely) to make the unit home in on nearby enemies and repeat until it reaches within a small range and perform collision checks and animations.

I have no idea what image format the spring textures are in and to apply them to a model in spring but it may be possible although i doubt it to possibly set the specific RGB colour (magenta) to invisible.

I have fixed around half the textures although they are in .gif format and i dont know if thats of any use.

and if you want to flam me ( please dont) take into account that over last year or so ive had my hands tied up with other affairs.

But anyway I hope this helps at least a bit anyways

I would go to warcraft for fantasy mod inspiration instead. TA:K is so half assed when it comes to magic and such, unit abilities.

Obviously you never played it properly

Taros is the only proper magical race anyway.

As for this stuff, there seems to be too much stuff that I don't know how to do.
Making a UI, implementing TAK functions, LUA... lol

And I had been trying to learn LUA for use with Supreme Commander for a while but havent done anything with it.

I can do TAK scripting with one hand behind my back but after looking at the files and testing for a couple days, its been leaving me quite stumped.

I think sorting out the textures is the first step.
Even though I only tried once, I couldn't get the alpha channelling stuff to show in game. I dont know whether or not you would have to actually retexture the units or if editing the files and formats is enough.

Personally it looks like a hard task even with about 10 people helping (which we don't have lol).

Seem to just get people telling us stuff that we probably need to do but not much help when you don't know much about Spring

All the unit making tutorials aren't much help either since I'd need to probably make a few units before getting it right.

But yeah the only people who could really help us are people who know about TA and Spring files, and those types of people probably weren't interested in TAK in the first place lol.

I think for the textures, what we have got to do is create a UV map for the model and add the textures on. The textures have got to be like jpg or dds as bmps have no support for alpha transparancy. One problem for me though is how on earth do you do that

Try .TGA

.dds needs a plugin, its not that hard to figure out tough.

Ordinary JPEG doesn't have an alpha channel either. TGA, PNG or DDS and no other.

Actually iv'e also found gif to allow alpha tranparencies as i have done when converting half the textures but i dont know if that works

no no no.

1 bit alpha transparency.

Your model needs to be an s3o to use it. Its one of the channels on texture 2.

IIRC TA:K models are 3do and sue the 3do texturing method and as such cant use the 1bit alpha you need untill they're converted.

iirc smoth had working melee and there was working melee code posted somewhere that was workable?

That reminds me of something, I played this one mod that did have a mele unit and it worked find, if i can find out where that was or what it was (should hopefully be on my HDD (i think)) and i may be able to see how this works. That should hopefully loosen the workload on that lua script proposition

Hang on,
so basically to get the fixed textures to work you would have to redo all of the 3dos into s3o's?

If so...

3do->s3o is trivial now.

Could you just replace the .3do with s3o on the end of the file names?

Coz there at least 200 units in the game.
Would hate to actually have to open them up with a program, one at a time.

You would have to open them all separately and... I think somebody devised a method of conversion a la batch, but I can't find record of it.

SoMA-6T6 wrote:Could you just replace the .3do with s3o on the end of the file names?

Coz there at least 200 units in the game.
Would hate to actually have to open them up with a program, one at a time.

No. Unlucky.

... if that's too much work, stop now Really dude, it's maybe 4-5 hours of solid work- first you need to extract all the TAK textures and convert them to JPG or BMP, then you need to make a texture archive, using UpSpring, so that UpSpring can read 'em, then open your models up, do the 3DO-S3O conversion, saving the textures as 512 bitmaps, then set a simple hitsphere, say radius 16, just for early testing purposes.

The only really complicated part, frankly, is going to be the alpha-trans itself, which is going to involve editing the alpha channels by hand. However, IIRC, there weren't all that many units in TAK that used alpha-trans anyhow.

It sounds like a lot of steps, but it really isn't. I could probably convert all of the OTA stuff into S3O in a few hours, tops. The only reason none of the OTA mod maintainers haven't done this is ... er ... um ... terminal laziness? Ignorance? I dunno, actually... they could've improved the looks of OTA stuff about 10X by now, just by converting to S3Os with UpSpring and making use of glow, reflect, and alpha-trans...

At any rate... it's not hard. Go get UpSpring, go read Maestro's manual, it's linked in the Wiki, then come back with questions when you get stuck, it's not hard to do, it's just getting the work done.

But if you don't even have the stomach for that, you should just quit pretending you're going to actually do this. Sorry if that seems harsh or whatever, but it's the practical price you must pay...

Yeah to be honest I have better things to do than waste that much time.
I'm not willing to do that much when I don't even see it working in the end anyway with half of the obstacles to get over.

And considering that is just the unit's appearances...

But then there is the other half of me that tells me that a great game like this is going die very soon and never be remade or have a sequel.

It was just so misunderstood... lol

But like I said, its nice to dream sometimes

I believe you can do the work to make Kingdoms content functional here and I feel that you will find players if you do. It is ultimately your call to make.

Wait, how does 3do to s3o work? You need the s3o to be uvmapped dont you?

Wouldnt you have to re-create the texture by hand?

IMO this isnt that important. Maybe edit the alpha textures so they are black instead of pink and put up with a little crappy-looking-ness on a few units.

The .cob/.bos and other bugs and gameplay issues (melee, spells) are far more important, i think.