Spring RTS Engine

An ingame command something like .refresh or something... checks the data files, implements any changes immediately. Obviously would require .cheat to be activated. Should be as streamlined as possible, taking only a couple seconds I'd think, considering if I remember right most of the . . ..... ...

Alright how about several commands, since you might update textures or pathfinding information as well, but might not want to update those immediately since they'd take longer. How about:

.refresh units - refreshes units directory
.refresh weapons - refreshes weapons directory
etc
.refresh all - refreshes everything

Would be a supercolossal massive help for content makers.

"Content makers"... is that the right word? Obviously we're not just "modders", but I wouldn't say we're really "developers" since we don't touch the game's actual code. "Content Developer"? Meh...

Another idea, maybe a way to update the map's texture+heightmap?

.refresh mapheight
.refresh maptexture
.refresh map

Would help with designing maps as well. Would take longer though, so shouldn't be included with .refresh all.

Maek desink in games with more than one person... It doesnt take THAT long to just restart spring to reload data anyway

It's only for developers, and would require cheats to be on, so there's no way it'd happen in a real game.

It takes 20 seconds tops to recompress + restart the game, sure, but 1) it's an unnecessary hassle, 2) that might be 20 seconds to test a single change that you need to do 50 times before you get it "just right", for instance when determining the ideal weapon arcs for a unit and you're changing values by 2 or 3 degrees at a time, or when you're changing weapon damage to make X destroy Y in a certain period of time, or when you're determining how much velocity a shot needs in order to travel a certain distance, or when you want to set up high trajectory firing but don't want shots to go too ridiculously high, it goes on and on. I can fire off a hundred more instances where you'd have to waste literally hours tweaking, which could be reduced to a few minutes.

There'd be fewer bugs in mods if these tweak/recompile/repeat things didn't occupy so much time.

I wouldn't post on a whim, this would be an important step towards making Spring more developer-friendly. "real" developers shouldn't have to sort through all the suggestions on here to find the ones that are serious, I strongly believe that, so that's why I only post stuff in here that I know would be of significant benefit. Generally...

Caydr wrote:It takes 20 seconds tops to recompress + restart the game, sure [...]

Use an sdd to avoid the recompression part. Just make a folder in spring\mods\ named "<whatever>.sdd" and have it contain the same mod structure as any sdz or sd7. It takes slightly longer for the game to load an sdd but it's still faster and simpler than recompressing each time.

Of course, that's not a solution for what's being asked for. I would like this too, and I'd like .reloadcob to work properly (it never properly reloads the cob, it just causes funky bugs and requires an engine reload).

The reload for luarules doesn't work either. IIRC it complains about a square at the last line of a file.

Would be a really nice feature!