Spring RTS Engine

This man named Johnny Chung Lee has demonstrated some amazing Wiimote hacks that have appeared on YouTube. They focus on using the Wiimote's infrared camera in conjunction with LED diodes to track surfaces and enable interaction with software.

Some highlights include:

"Head Tracking for Desktop VR Displays" - He simulates VR via depth and orientation tracking

"Low-Cost Multi-touch Whiteboard" - He gives projected images and regular displays multi-touch input

"Tracking fingers" - He uses IR reflection from your fingertips as multi-point input

All of this can be done for about the cost of WiiMote + $10 worth of LED stuff. He's written the software that you need to deploy on your PC.

My question is, could we create some new LUA widgetry to work with, specifically, his multi-touch pen input hack and make new intuitive ways to control our interaction with Spring? I mean, we already have the capability to draw lines, add points, and use line gestures for movement. If Spring could track two point input, wouldn't it be possible to turn other commands such as attack, guard, change zoom level, etc into gestures? And more importantly, would doing so make Spring mods more fun/intuitive to control and play?

A spur of the moment idea I just had; not sure if this is even possible, or, more importantly, if it's a useful improvement over mouse and keyboard. Your thoughts?

wow...i never thought about this, but does anyone play spring on a tablet pc?

muahaha...the next gen of rts gaming is not virtual reality.... but huge touchscreen-interactive "overview of battle"-type tables that you see in the combat information centres of carriers and such

Yes I've given a fair amount of thought to this; you'd have to provide some sort of LUA interface to the C# wiimote/gesture APIs that the Carnegie Mellon prof made/contributed to, and then give them the ability to substitute in for mouse clicks and keyboard events and spring macros and such.

It would definitely be an interesting proposition; however, i think it would be a lot better if a general gesture/touch/pressure API was introduced into LUA (basically, say a gesture or touch or pressure equals a mouse click or triple mouse click, or mouse click + spacebar or whatever), and then expose interfaces to whatever you want - tablet PC pens, wiimotes, what have you.

The problem is that Spring's input system right now isn't very flexible; no modern OS's is. Everything is driven by mouse clicks and square selectors used in combination with digital keyboards and other forms of basically discrete input.

I can't, for example, draw an arbitrary lasso around my Desktop icons to select them. I would love in Spring to be able to draw some arbitrary shape around a bunch of units to select them, instead of just using rectangle selection boxes with mouse.

The first step would be allowing for more flexible *mouse* input - arbitrary shapes that have meaning (such as aforementioned selection-lasso), gestures, and then it would be much easier to add in some API or LUA library that allowed for converting wiimote, tablet PC, or whatever, input into its appropriate mouse counterpart, and using that to execute the command.

poll neesd more options

SDL has added (or will soon add) multi-mouse interface which could be cool too.

The problem I see is that a keyboard has like 96 keys or something which with the modifier keys (and the fact that in a proper implementation ALL keys can be treated as modifiers) is capable of an excessive number of control options that would need to be duplicated with gestures in a way at LEAST as intuitive as the keyboard...

TO be honest I never used the keyboard much myself in any RTS as there are few times when an exception behavior is needed and quite often in spring this is just holding down a modifier when giving a mouse command.

It would be cool but I doubt without a significant paradigm shift we would be able to improve the interactiveness... and then you have to deal with all the winers who don't have 2 mice still.

The one coolest thing for me would be to implement the head tracking... but I still doubt everyone would take advantage of it (I can't find my bluetooth adapter anyways).