Spring RTS Engine

If you were to shrink the average unit sizes and stats (besides health, damage, and cost), roughly in half without making the grid finer, and condense some maps in half, it wouldn't it be the same thing using half the computer resources?

Lets say if I had time to tweak XTA 8.1. Most of the early units are 2x2.
All T1 units (besides maybe the veh const, that'd be 1x2) down to 1x1.
Tech 2 around 2x2, 2x3 for larger vehicles (IE goliath).
Tech 3 around 3x3 or 4x4. A solar panel, I believe, is currently around 4x4 or 5x5.
Factories for T1 would be around 3x3, T2 around 4x4 or 5x5, T3 5x5 or 6x6 (Around the current T1 Kbot lab size?).

You could play the 40x40 'epic' as about a 20x20 without a difference (all range based stats reduced keeping orginal proportions), and without making the current grid size finer.

Why do I instead see larger and larger average unit sizes in mods, as if 2x2 or even 3x3 is the base size unit?

No. Why? Because pathfinding woudl have to be equally scaled down to acheive the same effect.


This has been brought up many. many. times before.

Whats wrong with shrinking the pathfinding?
It's easier to calculate paths for a 5x5 rather than a 1x1 unit?

So it's either memory or processor strain?

Either way, you still end up with everybody having a crapload of windmills on Greenfields. It won't work, you're still doing the same amount of pathfinding.

will make the ground texture look like shit because you have to zoom in twice as close as normal

also features will all be too big

Assuming that features were correctly-sized, and that you were on a map that was well-designed or SM3, then shrinking the size of the footprints would result in fairly major increases in Spring's performance, in large-scale mods.

However.

You cannot make anything smaller than footprint 1. So there's a limit, where it starts looking silly. If, say, your smallest units can't move closer than a few meters from each other, at game scale- no biggie. When it's tens of meters, it starts looking very artificial. So there's a very real lower limit where scale stops making sense.

Wouldn't the biggest advantage to shrinking the game size just be lower res map textures? I can't imagine anything else would really gain any advantage. Map texture is a relatively minor resource hog in comparison to path finding and poly rendering.