Spring RTS Engine

*millions

I doubt it's millions. Not with the world economy being what it is. Hundreds of thousands? Maybe. More than enough to pay off Blizzard's production costs? Almost certainly.

Argh wrote:I doubt it's millions. Not with the world economy being what it is. Hundreds of thousands? Maybe. More than enough to pay off Blizzard's production costs? Almost certainly.

StarCraft sold 9 million copies as of two years ago. There is no doubt in my mind that its sequels will reach that order of magnitude.

Peet wrote:

Argh wrote:I doubt it's millions. Not with the world economy being what it is. Hundreds of thousands? Maybe. More than enough to pay off Blizzard's production costs? Almost certainly.

StarCraft sold 9 million copies as of two years ago. There is no doubt in my mind that its sequels will reach that order of magnitude.

Yes, but preorders, Peet. Argh was talking about preorders.

Korea

Obligatory.



Aaaanyway... back to P.U.R.E.

Good luck with this! It will be intresting to follow where this goes.

BTW, is it ok to still enjoy firing up P.U.R.E 0.55? That particular version is quite enjoyable on some fairly low end hardware I insist on running Spring on. But given the huge efforts being invested in the game's development after the 0.55 release my affection for that specific version almost feels a bit like blasphemy...

BTW, will be missing some walls of text filled with intelligible English and a fairly sane and moderate tone even when not agreeing with others (I've seen too much of the 'raging and insulting' variant of discussing stuff on the internet and NO that rabid variant of discussion is NOT a sign of anything vital or positive... so Arghs less non-raging tone is much appreciated.).

Keep up the good work.

I got LUPS working and integrated today.

Given that it's part of the GPL side, and I'd feel remiss if I didn't share... here's how to do it yourselves, for all the LUPS-less projects out there.

1. Download this package.
2. Dump these files into a .SDD or make a SDZ.
3. Make a dependency line to call this "mod".

If this is replacing stuff you've modified (mainly core Lua stuff), you're on your own.

Thus far, it's the only way I could get it to work. Not ideal, but it only took a few hours of messing about, and voila.

If anybody is ever wanting to improve LUPS again, here would be my wish-list:

1. It needs to use customParams so that it's unitDef-based, like the rest of the particle systems.

Having all of the internal configs stored in gfx_lups_manager.lua is not the end of the world, but it's very newbie-unfriendly.

2. The documentation has improved terrifically since the last time I looked at LUPS (i.e., there was some, and while it was wrong about a few things, it was good enough for me to figure it out). I feel like maybe when I get my "land legs", I'll talk a bit about what can be done, write an example or two. I figure that providing the "package" format is probably going to make a lot of people want to start playing with it (note- I haven't done anything except debug it and get it running with the Bomber in P.U.R.E. and testing the Shockwave Gadget with weapons atm, but I'm sure that's just going to be a very minor amount of time- some of you might want to wait until I've cleaned up my build a bit first, of course, so that you can see my examples running with a copy of P.U.R.E. later on).

3. How likely is LUPS to cause those poor ATi people to crash and burn? I'm assuming "not likely" at this point, due to enough testing, but I thought I'd ask before assuming it's stable.

4. I get an error from Shockwave. Something about a bad return value from Explosion(). Looks pretty much like how I have it for the IonLaser... any idea what that's about?

5. As you can see, I've packaged this as an add-on module. I'd like to see a lot more stuff done this way, so that people are working on modules, not working on the internals of something in particular. IDK whether there will be much interest in this, of course, but I thought I'd say something about it, since I've moved farthest in this direction already.

Argh wrote:3. How likely is LUPS to cause those poor ATi people to crash and burn? I'm assuming "not likely" at this point, due to enough testing, but I thought I'd ask before assuming it's stable.

Last time I checked (and it was a few months ago) it didn't work 100%... unless you lied to it and told it you have a geforce. When I did that, BA/CA planes gained the pretty exhaust flames and nothing crashed. This is with 4850; not sure how it works on earlier cards.

Hrmm.

Anybody have a clue as to how to get it to detect the higher range of ATi hardware? The way I figure it, if people's cards are supposedly GLSL-compliant, might as well give them a shot at seeing the FX- I'll have to tell people that if they experience a crash / massive slowdown, that they'll simply have to turn shader support off. Not ideal, but if there are a significant fraction of ATi users who can run it, it might be worth doing.

Bit worried, though, after the debacle with the simple lighting system- I'd rather be safer and uglier than make customers think that I hate them

Just wanted to let people know- I've reached a breakthrough point with the LUPS module very quickly.

I've gotten 90% of the port to customParams working already (I'm going to be able to show some spectacular new weapon FX off soon, to demonstrate some conceptual things), so that the LUPS module can be a stand-alone piece of software that can be maintained separately from any given project. More when I get per-Unit automation (i.e., driving this stuff via COB and other tricks) done.

So, if you're already messing with the LUPS module, please wait a bit, I'm just getting going here and the next release will be a lot more immediately useful. I only wish I had more time to mess with this, frankly. But tomorrow I have to get back to the long march towards Gold.

Ok, as promised, here's the final revision (for now).

I even wrote a simple example program, based off of the Shockwave Lua, that gives people a whole new set of ways to control:

1. If their Weapons give off any LUPS effects when they detonate.
2. What LUPS effects are called.
3. What parameters to fetch before initiating the particle system.

It's like CEG on crack, people! You can build stuff with whatever arbitrary, dynamic, random stuff you can think up, and the damn thing is faster than CEG performance-wise by a wide margin!

The one thing it doesn't have that I want is the same thing missing from CEG- animated particle systems that follow procedural rules for motion, but that use a series of bitmaps over their lifetime in frames, for the animation of very complex visuals. I can almost certainly write that (in Lua, based on the SimpleParticle code) myself... later.

I really, really wish I had time to mess with this now, but I won't until I'm sure that the SP stuff is solid, which will probably be about when Gold is released.

So, I'm going to provide the example code below, but you're going to have to wait, if you want to see more base particle effects and extension of the codebase from me.

The "blister" effect (which can be used for nice anime-style bubble-bombs and other stuff where you want spheroids) is just one teensy example of where I want to go with this stuff. Eventually, I'd like to see a lot of custom effect classes available just in this module alone, and I can already see that there are a lot of things I'd like to play with, or combine with CEG.

Personally, the more I look at this stuff, the more I keep scratching my head and wondering why nobody's been yelling from the rooftops about it. It "just" needs some enterprising artists / designers who aren't afraid of manipulating some simple code to make wonders.

Anyhoo, enough philosophy. Here's an updated build, with various un-necessary crap removed and a (very starter) weapon FX kit.

This will be getting improved, when I have time again, but it's a demonstration of some basic concepts- see lups_weapon_fx.lua to see how I'm calling specific effects with parameters loaded from a weaponID's customParams.

This Gadget does not need to be in the LUPS module, btw (and this is probably the last time I release it like this).

So, each mod / game can have a custom version of this and similar things, with total freedom to customize to their hearts' content, without screwing up the general GPL-friendliness of a communal LUPS module (i.e., if I or other people make newer, shinier versions of the core module, so long as we don't get rid of previous effects or change parameter names in ParticleClasses, then it won't hose other folks- needless to say, if you want to work on this concept with me, we'll have to be careful about backwards compatibility).

When I'm done with COB-controlled events and static unit-was-created-died-cloaked-reclaimed event handling (i.e., I'm probably dropping all the hardcoded unsynced behaviors in gfx_lups_manager.lua, eventually), then there won't be any reason for most people to touch the core, unless they're writing new particle systems. Then everybody can use it, and as the core gets new systems, an updated version can be made available. Or people can just name it differently and fix their game / mod on a specific version, if they'd prefer.

Anyhow, here is a custom example of an effect using the "blister" and "shockwave":

[customParams]
{
sfx=yes;
shockwave=yes;

blister=yes;
blister_growth=2.0;
max_blisters=5;
min_blisters=2;
min_blister_lifetime=10;
max_blister_lifetime=20;
min_blister_size=15;
max_blister_size=25;
min_blister_deviation=15;
max_blister_deviation= 30;
blister_core_red=1.0;
blister_core_green=1.0;
blister_core_blue=0.8;
blister_core_alpha=0.75;
blister_outer_red=0.0;
blister_outer_green=0.7;
blister_outer_blue=1.0;
blister_outer_alpha=0.1;
}

Try sticking that into any weapon TDF, after setting up the main module (hint- you may need to delete archivecache to register the dependency). I think you'll see that while this is admittedly a baby step, that baby is going to become a giant over time. This is powerful, useful mojo just waiting to get used, people. I haven't been so excited since I got the first version of World Builder made. Too bad the timing's crappy, I hate leaving something like this un-polished, but meh, it is what it is.

Argh wrote:Personally, the more I look at this stuff, the more I keep scratching my head and wondering why nobody's been yelling from the rooftops about it.

jK has been for ages. He's just too busy writing it to do much shouting, though ocassionally he beats us over the head and tells us to stop using CEG's because LUPS is the future and does everything and is all you ever need and washes your dishes and fellates you.

Saktoth wrote:

Argh wrote:Personally, the more I look at this stuff, the more I keep scratching my head and wondering why nobody's been yelling from the rooftops about it.

jK has been for ages. He's just too busy writing it to do much shouting, though ocassionally he beats us over the head and tells us to stop using CEG's because LUPS is the future and does everything and is all you ever need and washes your dishes and fellates you.

not true, lups does not cover the full ceg gamut and several cards cannot render it.

Obligatory videos of cool stuff, please.

Nobody said anything about replacing CEG. That can't happen until the day finally arrives that ATi cards don't cause huge problems.

Obligatory videos of cool stuff, please.

No time, I'm afraid. It's really not hard to assemble that stuff and begin a round of learning, though. Might take you 30 minutes.

beyond the issue with the ati cards, not all of the cegs are covered in lups.

see thread in LUA forum where I had initially looked at moving my cegs to lups.

Um, that was awhile ago, and based on what I see (haven't tested them all, granted) you can make all of the base CEG effects in LUPS atm. It has ground flashes, etc. now.

jK has been for ages. He's just too busy writing it to do much shouting, though ocassionally he beats us over the head and tells us to stop using CEG's because LUPS is the future and does everything and is all you ever need and washes your dishes and fellates you.

Well, he's basically right, assuming that he deals with the ATi issues. I wish I could help with that, but I probably can't.

It really does look like it'll become a very important part of the future of effects on this engine, though, now that it's modularized. It's why I burned a full day on integration now, even though I can't take full advantage yet.

Made money yet?

Topic states "going", not "has gone".