Spring RTS Engine

Feels silly making a whole thread for this, but blogs are for fags and there's nowhere else to put this.

So, what's going on right now for me, and for my mods more importantly. I'm dividing this post up into sections because I know it's quite long and you're probably only interested in some parts of it.

~~~~~

Regarding Absolute Annihilation

A few people have asked what happened with AA, this is what I tell them. Because I know a lot of people here have arrived in the last year, they only know what they're told and what the last version looked like, which ain't pretty.

So here's what happened, and anyone who was around back then can verify this. AA was on top of the mod chart with about 2/3 to 3/4 of the player base, this lasted for a little over a year after it was initially released. One day, I got a call from my brother-in-law saying come on to work, we've got something for you here. I got home that night, posted version 2.11 I think it was, and went to bed. I didn't check on things the next day, or even the next. Suffice it to say, 2.11 was incomplete, untested, and many parts of it just didn't work at all. It was completely unplayable. I made some effort to correct this but it was mostly a lot of hot air, I didn't have the time for it. About two weeks (iirc, forgive my memory) passed, and after that I came back to find that BA had taken over. BA started off as basically 2.11 without being completely screwed up.

Me and Noize, as far as I know, are on good-ish terms. I think. People have said, "he stole your mod" and they assume I'm bitter about it and that kind of thing, but I don't look on it like that at all. I let everyone down and I'm glad someone picked up the torch. I wish I had time to play it but honestly I don't play games anymore hardly.

AA is the result of years and years of work (version 1 for OTA came out in, I think, 2002 or so? No I think it was earlier...), and I do wish to return to it one day.

~~~~~

What happened

A few months back... around late October, early November, I was promised a weekend shift at my job. I asked for this specifically because (didn't tell them this, of course) I wanted to get back on modding, get my other hobbies back on track too. This would mean 4 days a week for modding primarily, at first anyway.

Boss said, yes, absolutely, that's a smashing idea. In fact this offer I made came at a time when my employer was looking for people to run machines on the weekend, so everything was golden.

Then they decided to get a certain new machine which relies on:
a) graphic design experience
b) windows skills
c) uber micro

Unfotunately I had just recently offered to work on our company intranet, and the president of the company said.... heyyy... I bet this guy could run it.

So there goes my weekend shift. They now feel that I'm too important to not be there during the week. They need this machine available to them 24/7, and besides which it's still very much in the R+D phase for some things.

So late October I say, I want weekends, they say jolly good, then mid-January they say no, can't do that anymore, we need you on days.

It was in early January I first posted about that RTS 2.1 project, and a week or so later, when the new shift was supposed to start, I got told it wasn't going to happen any time soon. This is the reason there's still nothing to show, months later. Not laziness, not lack of dedication, nothing of the sort - simply that promises were broken at my job and there's nothing that could be done about it. Boss says they were going to hire a contractor for $40 an hour to run this machine, so you can imagine why they don't want to lose me immediately now that I've got it running right.

~~~~~

What's happening now

Ever since I posted GEM pictures - showing models, and with heavy captions "temporary textures" - and all I heard about was how bad the textures were, I've decided I'm never posting another screenshot until it's reasonably close to a finished product. It's just not worth the frustration of trying to convince people who can't read that it's not a finished product. You stretch one texture across an entire hull, have no markings of any kind, put "TEMPORARY TEXTURES" in red bold allcaps, and they say it's not as pretty as Empire at War. Not doing that again.

So what's actually, truly, going to be happening next? Once again, I've got a weekend shift in my grasp. It is likely still months away, but it's been promised to me, I've made it clear it's important to me, and they're going to give it to me come hell or high water. Besides this, I've got a lot of time off coming in the next few weeks. During this time, I'm working on GEM. My latest random shift in opinion has made me think GEM should be finished before I start trying to texture and balance what's done on RTS 2.1.

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Mod Plans:

Absolute Annihilation - On the shelf until its miraculous recovery on the wings of rapturous angels on the day all the planets align and along with an immaculate chorus descends Chuck Norris. It's not a priority at this moment, as I sit, in the mood I'm in, currently. This changes a lot, but I have the realistic perspective of knowing that BA is an excellent mod and it would take a lot of work to out-do it... besides which, I'm not 100% sure I really want to.

If I rebuild AA one day, it will be completely from the ground up. In the last year and a half, I've learned too much to just make another incremental version. It will also have to compete with the formidable success of BA and CA, so it will have to be an extensive job. For this reason, it's my last priority right now.

Advance Wars Spring - I've explained this a couple times already but I'll re-state: I made a full tech tree, all the units, partial texturing, no economic balance, partial gameplay balance. About 3 months to go if I proceeded at my previous pace. I worked on this quietly for about a year in my spare time, then I had to shelve it for a while. When I returned to it, someone else already announced their own version of it and I'm not going to be a jerk and say, "NO THAT'S MINE!!!". That is, unless they don't produce anything.

Galactic Empire Mod - This thing is about 3 months away from completion as well if I could proceed at the pace I did when I didn't have a job. Another month or so after that would be alpha and beta testing, and then you'd be playing it.

Unfortunately that's not possible because of my current time restrictions (often 4-6 hours a week total to spare), but because of its state of being close to completion, it will be the focus of my work in the near future.

I am re-tooling the mod to be different from my original idea. As a result, fighters will almost certainly not be part of the game initially. This will simplify the balancing of it, as well as eliminate one major roadblock. When the engine bug preventing fighters from working properly is fixed (loopbackattack being useless in its current state) they will be re-integrated. The focus of the mod will still be small-scale fighting "in orbit" around a planet while also fighting a simultaneous but completely separate ground battle. However you cannot hold the ground if you don't have space, and you can't hold space if you don't have the ground. I've already found this concept works very well in gameplay.

RTS 2.1 - The crazy large project that's theoretically impossible, create a new game of the scale of TA almost singlehandedly. Woo fun. But there's a trick to it that will allow this to be possible. What I've got planned is a completely unique idea in RTS games, and it had a few other things going for it as well. There will be a very large number of units, and a lot of strategic diversity. Pretty much any playstyle should be accomodated. It will also be very small in filesize, speaking relatively to other large s30-based mods.

~~~~~

Reality

I have no professional experience whatsoever and I've admitted a hundred times over that I take on too much work. Among my greatest personal failings is my poor time scheduling ability. Besides this I have no free time and may not have any free time in the near future. I'm making this post to make it clear, though, that I am making every effort to ensure I have free time again to work on this stuff again as soon as possible.

Please don't reply with the typical smartass "pics or it didn't happen" nonsense. I've posted pictures before, and you say "lol it's ugly" when I put a caption under it saying "ugly, temporary textures, etc". If I post a finished unit for you to see, someone will say it's the only one. If I post 5 of them, someone'll say there's only 5. It's a neverending cycle and I'm not wasting my time and energy on it again. Besides this, for RTS 2.1, which is probably the one that's most in doubt, if I posted pictures of it I'd be giving away a lot about the mod itself, stuff I'd like to keep to myself for now.

Don't feel obligated to reply, I only mean this as an update and there's not much to discuss.

Just get back into the fray and start getting things running on the test builds. I know the feeling, but you spend too much time making plans for things and not enough time just doing basic research. Since you last did real spring development the face of the project has changed significantly. Units work differently, lua has exploded what is possible, and new features are being applied all the time.

Now I've pulled my punches in the past... but seriously, you make a new post about your newest project or the state of some imaginary mod you're working on every 2 weeks. The problem isn't that people don't believe you're too busy to actually get work done, the problem that you show much less then you talk about.

I can appreciate that you don't like criticism when it isn't warranted... but seriously... why do you fish for attention so much when you have nothing you want to show?

On the specific issue of textures... man, if they aren't done, then just show obvious placeholders, like KDR does. Shiny stuff with a smattering of stuff that's really done sends the wrong message.



On your general treading-water-ness... meh, I know you can get stuff done if you want to. I still think, and have told you, that you simply bite off more than you can chew. You can get ONE GAME done in ONE YEAR. That's all you can do, unless you recruit a big team. And it won't be a big game, either- P.U.R.E. has maybe a third of the unit-count of, say, S'44.

Pick one, get it done. It's like getting married, dude- commitment is the key. The fact that you're kicking around so many things is, to me, a sign that you can't commit. The stuff about screenshots is irrelevant.

Moreover... have you learned how to animate yet? And write some Lua? Work with CEGs? Without those three things, your ability to actually complete a decent project is zero, and you need to get serious about learning it all, even if that means taking some ribbing from the usual suspects. Or recruit people who can. Hell, KDR and Lurker seem to write Lua for just about anybody, if they have a real need and a project, and are on good terms with them

I'm sorry to put it that bluntly... but man, the bar just keeps getting raised around here, in case you've been in a cave or something, and haven't noticed what's going on.

It's become almost impossible for a two-man show like me and GMN to finish anything that doesn't suck compared to the group projects, tbh, and I've kept my oar in since the very beginning

didn't I read this thread a month ago

you can do it caydr, argh does mostly pasted panels with bevels and some over weathering. That isn't hard and apparently despite my objections, people liked it. So I'd say that can work for you.

also as argh said, post some unfinished shots and just say they are WIP. No one really cares that your textures sucked more that you didn't always say it was WIP instead it was just presented hey guys look at this awesome stuff.

I don't think it's your plans that hurt you but you seriously destroyed your credibility by announcing stuff and then failing to meet the deadline. And grossly failing at that, I remember when you promised you'd release something the week after and then you didn't show ANYTHING, just a stupid reply to some post. Makes it look like you did exactly zero after all that announcing. Don't make big announcements if you cannot follow up on them! Keep quiet and only post when you have something to show.

Caydr wrote: What's happening now

Ever since I posted GEM pictures - showing models, and with heavy captions "temporary textures" - and all I heard about was how bad the textures were, I've decided I'm never posting another screenshot until it's reasonably close to a finished product. It's just not worth the frustration of trying to convince people who can't read that it's not a finished product. You stretch one texture across an entire hull, have no markings of any kind, put "TEMPORARY TEXTURES" in red bold allcaps, and they say it's not as pretty as Empire at War. Not doing that again.

There is a reason I rarely post anything concerning evolutionrts here.

besides in the textures department, I've got ya beat

Forboding Angel wrote:

Caydr wrote: What's happening now

Ever since I posted GEM pictures - showing models, and with heavy captions "temporary textures" - and all I heard about was how bad the textures were, I've decided I'm never posting another screenshot until it's reasonably close to a finished product. It's just not worth the frustration of trying to convince people who can't read that it's not a finished product. You stretch one texture across an entire hull, have no markings of any kind, put "TEMPORARY TEXTURES" in red bold allcaps, and they say it's not as pretty as Empire at War. Not doing that again.

besides in the textures department, I've got ya beat

OHHHHHHHH, OUCH!

It's not like I wouldn't accept assistance with evo (texturewise I mean)...

On the contrary I would gladly accept the help, but understandably, most people have tier own project to work on or another project that they are working with.

I offered to do one as an example and you turned me down cold :\

Argh wrote:On your general treading-water-ness... meh, I know you can get stuff done if you want to. I still think, and have told you, that you simply bite off more than you can chew. You can get ONE GAME done in ONE YEAR. That's all you can do, unless you recruit a big team. And it won't be a big game, either- P.U.R.E. has maybe a third of the unit-count of, say, S'44.

Moreover... have you learned how to animate yet? And write some Lua? Work with CEGs? Without those three things, your ability to actually complete a decent project is zero, and you need to get serious about learning it all, even if that means taking some ribbing from the usual suspects. Or recruit people who can. Hell, KDR and Lurker seem to write Lua for just about anybody, if they have a real need and a project, and are on good terms with them

Har har har, RTS 2.1 can be done in less than a year, well probably not, but I'm going to unrealistically say so. It's a very special mod. Also GEM I've been working on for positively AGES, like, in bits in pieces, for years. Years and years. It was originally supposed to be for a 2002 (iirc) game, but that game turned out to be crap. So the majority of the work was done to begin with... to say that it's unrealistic to do two mods in year is probably fair, unless one's half done and the other's a special case.

No, can't write LUA, maybe I'll learn, not sure. I'm not sure what "CEG" is so you'll need to use something that's not an acronym. Apparently acronyms aren't my strong suit. I'd search for it but the search function seems to ignore anything shorter than 4 characters, and I'm about to go out the door (to my second job) so I can't search any forums atm. Chances are my answer is, "No but maybe I'll learn." I'm self-taught in everything I know, one more thing probably won't kill me.

I realize my credibility isn't much to look at right now, for obvious reasons, but that's the reason for this post - to clear up the assumptions people have made about the reasons nothing further was said by me. Things were taken out of my hands. I had PROMISES at my job, so I made PROMISES about what I was going to do with that extra time. You and me both got screwed. I'm set back over a year, and I come back to find that the engine is probably quite different from the one I knew.

To put things in perspective again, AA died because of my job, AWS died because someone else decided to do it too, GEM died because a single tag doesn't work (I've made the decision to go on without the enhancements it would bring now), and RTS2.1 died because of broken promises at my place of employment. None of this is my fault, none of it could have been avoided, none of it could have been predicted.

Yeah, the bar keeps getting raised for Spring mods. LUA and CEG is stuff is several miles over my head, so I now I do models for other mods (IW, PURE and occasionally S44) on request and work to improve my texturing. If you want to re-enter the race (so to speak), you'll need a ton of catch-up...

It's really a pity that you pissed off most of the people who know all about the new stuff, who could have kept you up to date even.

Forboding Angel wrote:It's not like I wouldn't accept assistance with evo (texturewise I mean)...

On the contrary I would gladly accept the help, but understandably, most people have tier own project to work on or another project that they are working with.

Have you posted the model sources up anywhere? Also, if I were to remodel something, sticking to the existing format would you use the remodels?

Yes, I would, as long as the unit kept it's existing shape (of course it could be changed, I'm not THAT much of a stickler). But that only really goes for the latest modeled stuff, and even that's negotiable.

One thing tho is I have issues with letting other people do it, because they may do one and I never hear from them again. SO we have one unit that looks real super neato and sticks out like a sore thumb and makes the whole thing look bad. Now, if I had someone that was actually dedicated to helping me do things (models and textures) then I would be very happy to loosen up, however, most people also don't understand how much work it really is to get something like this going.

Smoth, the reason I turned you down is: tl;dr(my own ineptness with texturing)
#1 you are the busiest person I have ever met (that's not a bad thing, but you must admit that it's true)

#2 time spent texturing evo is less time for you to spend on gundam (which is the damn best looking game for spring - rivaled by SWIW) I also don't think it's fair of me to ask for something like that because there is pretty much nothing that I can offer you in return that you can't do better yourself, not to mention the fact that without you particularly, I wouldn't be able to do much with the spring engine at all (perfect example would be your cob scripts, I don't think I've ever seen bos/cob scripting quite that beautiful).

#3 There is no way in hell I could ever even come close to being able to draw and texture like that, instituting the sore thumb rule. Also, at that time I had a long ways to go before a true playable game would emerge, so I opted for speed over anything else.


I suppose what it comes down to is this... I would be absolutely thrilled if someone where to help me with evo in the textures/models department but there are two things I would need from that somebody, and those are:
Focus: If you help me 5% of the way though the entire process and just just up and leave, I'm screwed, royally. I need someone who will stick by me. Remember that all the stuff in evolution is free for anyone else to use, so in theory you could use the stuff for your own project as well. Hell at that point, a lot of the hardest work is already done and evo already uses luadefs and a lot of other very very cool things, not to mention that the cegs are a mixture of the ones that smoth made, ones that I expanded upon or created on my own. So that's something to consider.

The second thing is: You have to like the game. I'm not saying you need to play it and only it, that was never the point of evolution. Evolution was supposed to be helpful to people starting out with their own project and to be a game that noobs and vets alike could play and have fun with it. You at least need to like the game for what it is and if you play it once in a while you need to at least be able to enjoy it.


At times I borderline on apathy because there is so much I have to do and precious little time to do it. I can't force people to help me, and I don't like to nag either. In short I guess the tl;dr is that I'm afraid that if I don't do it myself, things will only end up half completed. Evolution's storyline somewhat relies on my ability to add units (a lot of them) in practically no time, but what I would like to do is put new models and textures into the game as they get done, providing that the person(s) helping me with it are dedicated to finishing the job.

I'll happily throw up the source models if anyone wants me to. I was jsut gonna wait till the campaign was finished and then package up everything I have into a nice neat little (well actually it's heug) bundle.

I'm sorry to sidetrack this thread, I really didn't intend to, but if people are interested, and I mean really interested (not just a half ass side glance) in helping evolution out, then I will gladly take all the help I can get, including setting up a branch in svn where everything can be kept in an orderly fashion.

If you read all this, thanks! If not, I can't say I blame you. Wall o text anyone?

thing is forb, some things are SUPER easy to teach and I have a bunch of custom brushes and patterns which I just give out to people who need them. but tossing a psd at you with a few layers can show how to do things by example.

Forboding Angel wrote: The second thing is: You have to like the game. I'm not saying you need to play it and only it, that was never the point of evolution. Evolution was supposed to be helpful to people starting out with their own project and to be a game that noobs and vets alike could play and have fun with it. You at least need to like the game for what it is and if you play it once in a while you need to at least be able to enjoy it.

:/

I don't dislike evo, but I don't find it very fun to play personally. I just want to tweak the models and textures to see if I can't come up with something I personally find a little better. I was just testing to see if you were strictly opposed to implimenting a better model set if one was made, since I didn't really know what value you put in the current set. Fair enough, I don't expect you to use something that sticks out like a sore thumb and is incomplete... but "He did a bunch of work for my project but I didn't use it because he said the gameplay isn't to his preference" is just lame.

I wasn't really looking to join some modding team full time, I just wanted some avenue to practice where the bar isn't set increadibly high and my work could ultimately be useful while my own project is stalled due to me discovering a new gameplay dynamic it was failing at that I'm not sure how I'm going to implement at a design level yet.

SwiftSpear wrote:

Forboding Angel wrote: The second thing is: You have to like the game. I'm not saying you need to play it and only it, that was never the point of evolution. Evolution was supposed to be helpful to people starting out with their own project and to be a game that noobs and vets alike could play and have fun with it. You at least need to like the game for what it is and if you play it once in a while you need to at least be able to enjoy it.

:/

I don't dislike evo, but I don't find it very fun to play personally. I just want to tweak the models and textures to see if I can't come up with something I personally find a little better. I was just testing to see if you were strictly opposed to implimenting a better model set if one was made, since I didn't really know what value you put in the current set. Fair enough, I don't expect you to use something that sticks out like a sore thumb and is incomplete... but "He did a bunch of work for my project but I didn't use it because he said the gameplay isn't to his preference" is just lame.

That isn't what I was saying swift. Basically it comes down to this. If said helper cared nothing for the game (and I mean at all), then why would he care about how it looks?

Because some people have fun at doing art. They like opportunities to practice their skills, to pick up new tricks and methods, or generally improve their workflow. I don't need to like the gameplay for that.