Spring RTS Engine

Im wondering what it would be to have a 2d mod. Becuase I reallllyy want to make this mod I have in my head, its a 'space' rts (funny becuase its 2d) but I want everyone to be able to play exorbitantly huge battles.

My questions are..

Can you make a 2d mod?

Would you get better performance becuase of the lack of triangles to draw from your GPU? Basically the mod would have the kernel panic feel, but 2d and..space ships ^^;.

I think you could have flat models, but... hurm.

What exactly do you mean with 2d?

why

Use the icon system

No point, the GPU will not do any work and the CPU will be bottlenecked by things unrelated to rendering like pathfinding etc.

make the mod for OTA

Are you serious?
I would suggest using some other engine.

Like what engine <3?

Ta supports sprite based units. Spring can do it via lua I am sure but I have no idea where to start to tell you how to do that.

Sorry the guys are so strong but the thing you need to understand is to us, 2d is like taking a step backwards. As in the lua forum located on this site. I am pretty sure that there would be a way to do sprites in lua.

Muzic wrote:Like what engine <3?

Maybe stratagus?
http://www.stratagus.org/

Um, you could just use the Icon system to make a 2D mod... set the distance to absurdly-small, so that everybody always sees icons... use point-based models with children-points (for turret control) and add some sounds and FX, and yer done. Very easy to do.

Problem is the icon distance is a user setting, not a mod setting.

The mod can set a multiplier though, there's a limit to the icon distance the player can set. In CvC I forced upgrades to appear as icons even at very short distances. To be fair I haven't tried setting my icon distance to the maximum yet, I keep it relatively low because at some distance you're not going to be able to tell stuff apart anyway.

Ta supports sprite based units.

Oh really? Unless you mean something like my naked santa and majorette tankwhich are actually 3d units, but with a script that constantly counter the unit rotation, show one face at a time and hide the others, faces which use textures with transparent pixels, so they don't benefit from any speedup real sprite would have, I have yet to see sprite based units in TA.


And as it has been said, graphics aren't the bottleneck in Spring, you can have 3000 poly models or 2D icons, it doesn't matter: the maximum size of battle before average computer choke will be limited by the "SimTime".