Spring RTS Engine

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It's a nice enough idea that's been posted a few times but there's a few problems:
1) No player looks at the skybox
2) It's not possible AFAIK currently
3) Nobody cares enough to make it possible

tombom wrote: 1) No player looks at the skybox

Yaaa, I've played geyser plains for quite some time before i specced a game and saw how awesome the skybox is.

Well, the Sky box is a cubemap, but if you load X number of cubemaps and have them fade between each other, you might...

Well, I wonder if somebody can implement this. Cool idea, but I would rather see the new map format, no offense.

Skybox as a kind of Gif ? Megabyts for nothing, that´s the way you do it.. play the-

No, serious, the only real thing to get a good animated skybox, is to make it the unrealTournament way... real 3D .. everything else is dirty workaround phail

tombom: reflective water + great skybox... = sex...





I also do look at the sky fyi. (click for larger image)

We could use a nice sky portal ala unreal but frankly I would rather see other things working on

A lot can already be done with the lua DrawWorldPreUnit() call,
yall just need someone with the skills to set it up. The one thing
that I did note (while testing something else along these lines),
is that some water modes do not play nicely with the depth buffer.

Does DrawWorldPreUnit operate before any of the Commanders are placed, btw?

Would be much cooler if the map wouldnt have edges or have a continuation....in general to make the solid colored background into somthing nice.

agreed.

Also, how do you make a map darker or lighter? Is this an ingame setting? Or potatochopping?

To really do animated skyboxes well we need to have tools to at least semiprocedurally generate them. It's going to be way to hard to do anything impressive with animated textures.

I'm not saying no, but this is a big project that would need someone with coding ability to really put alot of love into it to make something good. Once again, not saying no, but if it's my decision there are still other things I'd have take priority... singleplayer, hitboxes, sm3, and what not.

You'd need two skyboxes I think. A daylight skybox and one which acts as a mask to darken the former. You can probably darken/tint it with shaders too.

was that in response to me or ss?

Just a general reply...

rattle wrote:You'd need two skyboxes I think. A daylight skybox and one which acts as a mask to darken the former. You can probably darken/tint it with shaders too.

That works for simple day and night shifting... but it doesn't really make for a dynamic "animated skybox". When I hear that phrase I think moving clouds, orbiting planets/moons/suns, volcanic jets in the distance, space stations with blinking lights at the peak of the skyline... and so forth.

Once again, just giving us access to say, gif images, doesn't really solve the problem at all... What we'd need to be able to do is fundamentally define animated objects and program routines and what not for them, effectively, if we could use and layer different 2D objects onto the skybox and then control their positioning, movement, and action timing/queues, then some really really cool effects would be possible. But that's alot of work to make happen.

Argh wrote:Does DrawWorldPreUnit operate before any of the Commanders are placed, btw?

DrawWorldPreUnit draws things before the units.

for ex, if in DrawWorldPreUnit i draw a big cube and a unit drives behind it, i will still be able to see the unit, because anything drawn in the function gets z-sorted behind units.

in DrawWorld, things get z-sorted exactly as a unit would. if a tank moves in front of it, you cant see it, if a tank moves behind it you cant see the tank.

How hard is it to make the map "continue" beyond its real edges?

Gota wrote:How hard is it to make the map "continue" beyond its real edges?

How hard is it to force an optical illusion, then use lua to spawn terrain from the edge to meet the simulated horizon line?

Very hard. You'd have to create a bunch of geometry via LUA, probably procedurally, using some combinations of primitives, and the "horizon line" would be utterly dependent on the distance at which fog would make it irrelevant to draw more stuff. Maps without fog defined would have an unlimited view.

The biggest problem with making maps continue beyond their "end" is probably texture matching... It'd take some smart algorithmics to make work no matter how you look at it.