Spring RTS Engine

People kept complaining that mods don't replace the TA econ Spring has hardcoded so I lua'd something else...

Fibre's economy partially resembles the game Perimeter. You start with a citadel and can spawn nodes and other buildings. The citadel and nodes provide area for you to build stuff on, outside of that area only nodes can be built (the range circle on a node is the distance it will connect to other nodes at). Resources are local, every node maintains a charge (charges at a rate of 10 per step unless its area overlaps with other nodes) which is used to power buildings and construct stuff in the node's area. Nodes need a connection to the citadel to function, if the connection is severed the nodes (and all attached buildings) turn neutral and become property of the first player to make a connection to them.

Units aren't free moving in Fibre, a factory will produce a certain number of units depending on its type (though v1 has only one type) that will move to the beacon that belongs to the factory. Units can't be selected, they can only be moved by moving the beacon, if the beacon is moved on an enemy unit or building that's an attack order. The beacon can only be moved within a certain radius of the factory so even factories need to be made near the frontline.

This version is ugly, incomplete (missing many units), unbalanced and probably buggy. No idea what'll happen if it's used on 75b2, it's made for SVN (and needs a patch for alwaysvisible projectiles at the time of writing).

cool!

looking at this, I had an idea: Twixt RTS.

I tested it and it works really great :)
Good work on that ! :)

Damn... thats exactly the idea i once got :D i was going to make such game... but dropped it for my lazyness...

Rock onward.

I'll note that if you are using 'alwaysVisible' for the inter-node link rendering,
you could do it using raw lua drawing (and it could be done fancier than the
engine rendering, and potentially faster). You could also set it up so that they
are always drawn for allied teams.

The link lines are already drawn with Lua (that way I don't need to worry about their length or terrain collisions, if you look closely you can see that they still use the circle texture used for the ground circles because I haven't made a proper tex yet), the alwaysVisible is necessary because I made all units blind and except for the beacons alwaysVisible, enemy shots wouldn't show up without that tag.

I didn't feel like elaborating on the available units yesterday so I'll do that now:

Citadel: This thing's the root of your base. It produces a large amount of energy (3x as much as a node can) so it can power a lot of expensive stuff. I plan to make it possible to move the citadel to the front line which would give you a great energy advantage at the risk of losing the game completely if the enemy manages to strike it.

Node: Generates a circle of influence and energy (up to ten units per tick, less if its influence overlaps with other nodes). I think I explained this thing already, it has a dummy weapon that shows the range it can connect to other nodes at.

Laser Turret: A cheap turret, it has a very short range (same as a node's circle of influence) but does a lot of damage. It's good both for defense against mobile units as well as fighting up close and personal. The low cost lets it recover HP quickly which makes it difficult to destroy laser turrets with low damage weapons.

Rocket Turret: An all around average turret, it has moderate range and damage and can be used against practically anything.

Mortar: Artillery turret, it has less damage output than the two above but can still wear most targets down in reasonable time.

Starfire Cannon: Another artillery, this one covers a large area in shots every time it fires but doesn't fire that often. the damage a volley does can be quite high but I'm not sure the turret's very useful since it's possible to repair the damage before the next volley strikes.

Drone Factory: The only factory implemented in v1, it maintains a swarm of 30 drones that are quite powerful when they are sent around as a group. The drones are quite weak alone but their number makes them really powerful. I'm not sure if the drones aren't a bit too powerful considering the range you can project that power at.

Plans for future development are more artillery pieces, more factory types and a transmitter building that can shovel energy from one node to another at a very lossy rate (I'm thinking 2:1 currently).

BTW, repairs happen at a fixed rate of 10 energy per 2 seconds, the energy is taken from the repaired building's pool.

got link?

Oh, right.

The simplicity of this game could push it a long way in the free ware game stakes.

I made a darkstars post about it:

http://www.darkstars.co.uk/2007/fibre-10/

I can't seem to get it to work. After installation and starting (with a bot as enemy) i do get a startbuilding but when i try to build a node it just keeps blinking slowly and is 'ghostly white'. Plus that there are alot of lua error messages.

What am i doing wrong?

Needs SVN Spring.

tombom wrote:Needs SVN Spring.

And how would one get this 'SVN' spring? Cos i tried installing the SVN lobby client from UF and it says on connecting that its a old version and the server only accepts 75b2.

You have to go into the settings and select the test server. Also keep in mind that SVN refers to Spring as a whole here, just the lobby won't fix your issue.

http://buildbot.no-ip.org/~buildbot/spring/installer/

Find the latest non-update one, install to a new folder.

Hm, i got into the lobby with the correct client and stuff but when i try to start a game (or run spring.exe itself) i get this error msg:

in dutch:
"Kan de toepassing niet juist initialiseren (0xc0150002). Klik op OK om de toepassing te beeindigen."

Which translates to english to something like this:
"Can't initialize the application correctly (0xc0150002). Press OK to end the application"

My 'normal' spring version works just fine btw.

Spring issue, there is (or was) a thread about it in Help & Bugs IIRC.

Well i followed all the advice given in that thread and given the fact im not a moron of the magnitude of that german guy im afraid something in this SVN spring version is just fucked up (compared to the normal spring).

Too bad, this mod seems a really cool idea.

Yeah it's some random kid I wouldn't pay much attention to him.

You should make a new thread in H&B and report the problem there as well as your specs etc., perhaps it can be pinned down. I'm quite sure there will be more people who are going to have the same problem once 0.76 is out. Too little people try the test releases but moan later...

I made a thread about it in the help and bugs thingy so i'll see what turns up.

http://spring.clan-sy.com/phpbb/viewtop ... 104#239104