Spring RTS Engine

I think it's fair to say that the award for "most useless critique, evah" is now safely out of reach

no i've got much more worthless.

but heres the 1st draft. might add camoflauge or some color themes later.

probably going to un-square the gun barrel to a hex or octogon and and beef up the legs slightly so they arent so stick-ish

In the days of the Ancients, many things were possible, and they did many wonderful things, using science that we no longer understand, with machines we can no longer operate.

Many of these amazing devices remain entirely functional, many centuries later, attended with care by the Overmind's servitor nodes, perhaps in memorial to the genocide it failed to complete, or perhaps simply because while it is an insane machine, it remains a machine, and does most of the things it was intended to.

Skye Babylon, resting in the gravitational null between two huge asteroids in the Omnicron K-Aleph system, is one of those places, and seeing it fills the soul with awe. An entire metropolis, hung in space, shielded by clever forcefields that permit spacecraft to enter but retain breathable gases.

No human eyes have seen this place since the Fall. We're not even sure what it's intended purpose was- a resort for the wealthy? A base for miners, digging within the asteroids' metallic cores? It is a mystery at this time, and we can only admire the cleverness of the Ancients in building such a fantastic thing.

Click to enlarge. Still WIP, working on a few last things.

I like the knight but the gun is very haloish.
Map looks cool too, put a connecting wire between the central pylons of the double length bridges.

Argh that is amazing.

Argh try this:
To make smf texture completely invisible, you must make a 4 channel TGA texture with alpha channel as well, set alpha to full transparent, and use my mapconv with voidwater. Now all you have left is an invisible heightmap. Texture it with features and grounddecals.

@KaiserJ:
Looks wonderful. But better screens please...

@Argh:
Looks wonderful, but where is the skybox and why the rest of the area is gray? I don't know how did you do it, but I'd love to see that map floating in space with Oxygen shield around it. You know?

Argh wrote:

The ancients liked dora?

You should have some non platform stuff connected upto the platforms just for aesthetics purposes, that perhaps breaks up the 2d plane effect.... Power Nodes/towers?

Love the effect - but I'd like to see one of those platforms with actual hills and landscape on it, since you've got a few "park" platforms. Something like the hills surrounding an office park parking lot, or a large park, or something.

Hills aren't a problem. Can't make hills we can drive on yet, though- they'd have to be ornamental. I have an idea about how to go about it, I'll talk to Lua folks.

best i can do ATM, just home at lunch for a bite to eat ^^

shiny crystal mountain for gota

@bob: Knight is looking nice! you may want to work on your UVmap scaling, though. The chassis looks pretty stretched.

@argh: Don't forget to add a skybox or something before release! The floating effect is kinda ruined if it has nothing to float above .
@kaiser: SWEET! FLOWERS!

Don't worry, I'll come up with something. Not happy with skyboxes for this thus far, I'm thinking about doing a quick customization of P.O.P.S. to build a stellar sphere.

Argh wrote:Hills aren't a problem. Can't make hills we can drive on yet, though- they'd have to be ornamental. I have an idea about how to go about it, I'll talk to Lua folks.

Oh? I assumed the top surface of the platforms were actual Spring landscape, and not mapmodels.

No, all the geometry you're seeing is wholly "artificial".

This isn't necessarily the pattern I want to follow for future stuff (hence the badgering about invisible heightmap support, et al), but it will be OK for this project.

did you plan to use the height map as blocking map?

IDK, what do you mean by blocking map?

So, This is phase 1 of 1 Million of making an Ambulatory Dresser:


This would be a great companion of any Wizard but the plan is to make an Elemenstor Class for Torchlight.

This will be amazing.
I'd much prefer a Rincewind class, however. >_>