Spring RTS Engine

Spring Engine already have a land, sea and air layer, but what about adding a Outer space layer?
That would be totally awesome because you can fight with space ships and space stations and adding orbital weapons for attacking the ground and building space transports to move the land and air units to other parts of the planet, so that by doing it you can improve your economy or you can attack you enemy by ambushing them on the other parts of the planet.

This probably eat a lot of performance though so we need to add the multi-processors feature so it won't eat a lot of FPS.

What do you think about this idea?
Got any more suggestions or ideas?
Is there any problems with this idea?

I am going to *try* to be nice. Because I think you may not be firing on all cylinders, and obviously have NO idea what is currently possible with the Spring Engine, or what is involved in modding.

COMPLETELY UNNECESSARY!

1) Spring is not *A. just remember that.
2) Very easy to make a subset of units that cannot be shot at by any other given subset of units. you can even make aircraft that fly REALLY high, thus giving you an 'orbital' layer

umm, yeah, thats about it. lerntomod before you request more features plz.

*edit* forgot something

ALREADY POSSIBLE!

Er, yeah. What he said. It's cool, you just need to play more games than BA sometime.

Pressure Line wrote:I am going to *try* to be nice. Because I think you may not be firing on all cylinders, and obviously have NO idea what is currently possible with the Spring Engine, or what is involved in modding.

COMPLETELY UNNECESSARY!

1) Spring is not *A. just remember that.
2) Very easy to make a subset of units that cannot be shot at by any other given subset of units. you can even make aircraft that fly REALLY high, thus giving you an 'orbital' layer

umm, yeah, thats about it. lerntomod before you request more features plz.

*edit* forgot something

ALREADY POSSIBLE!

Setting units attitude very high isn't going to cut it you still see the map that you use for the game, instead of the atmosphere of the planet, space and the stars. Besides zooming out to see the space ships using the method that you use, will most likely will lag the game. Unless if you guys can figure out on how to zoom out to view the entire battle without causing major lag would be most appreciated.

Also YOU DON'T NEED TO TALK LIKE THIS!!!!!!!!!!

Super Mario wrote:Setting units attitude very high isn't going to cut it you still see the map that you use for the game, instead of the atmosphere of the planet, space and the stars. Besides zooming out to see the space ships using the method that you use, will most likely will lag the game.

nope. spring turns the units into icons at long range :)

Pressure Line wrote:

Super Mario wrote:Setting units attitude very high isn't going to cut it you still see the map that you use for the game, instead of the atmosphere of the planet, space and the stars. Besides zooming out to see the space ships using the method that you use, will most likely will lag the game.

nope. spring turns the units into icons at long range :)

You still see the map that you use for the game instead of the atmosphere of the planet, I also want the space battles to be around the planet at different spots in a sphere shape.

which brings us back to the idea of sphere-shaped planets

I want two balls of glue, to be my friends, and I want to go dancing NAKED!... ... ...and a chair made of cheese and a table made of cheese.

srsly. all of this is MTR stuff. has been hashed over and over again, with the conclusion being "its not really possible at this time"

the basics are possible. making a set of units that fly waaay above the battlefield and have limited interaction with the ground. the other stuff requires MASSIVE engine changes, im talking 'total rewrite' level changes.

unless you are seeing if this is a liked idea before nou go and code it, in which case go nuts buddy. (but tbh, i sincerely doubt that that is the case.)

Well... it would be possible, with a little Lua magic, to have a "space realm" where you can't see the ground any more, if you have a space unit selected. Spherical worlds, no, just no.

Argh wrote:Well... it would be possible, with a little Lua magic, to have a "space realm" where you can't see the ground any more, if you have a space unit selected. Spherical worlds, no, just no.

With impending multi-engine lobby support, I could seriously see some developer just branching the source and making an alternative 3 dimensional space rts engine from what we currently have. That's what I'd personally like to see anyways.

In that case IMHO you can as well rewrite from scratch and just copy some (huge) chunks here and there.

Whoa. I said that we could do some hackery, and fake it. 3D worlds, hell no, that would involve completely rewriting the pathfinder, and a bunch of other serious suck. I wish somebody with more free time than common sense would write a straightforward "spherical world" Gadget... then you could all see for yourselves how much this idea actually sucks

All you need to do, to make this... is to check for the presence of Units along the borders of the map every so often, with Spring.GetUnitsInRectangle, and if any are present in the resulting table, great, go to the next step. If at one side, insta-move them with LuaMoveCtrl to the other side, just outside the "border". Nothing nasty there, insta-moving things is very easy.

If you wanna get fancy, re-path them afterwards, so that people can purposefully queue that up and get reasonable results. Not really difficult to do, I just think that the results would be awful, frankly. Write a Gadget, make a BA mutator... who knows, maybe I'm wrong.

That would suck because of the implementation, not because of the idea.

If you have proper pathing around the globe and seamless boundaries between east<->west and south<->north (Or rather, proper spherical map, instead of rectangular map with wraparound) the idea could work out nicely, I think.

Ofc we don't have this and it will be very hard to build it into the engine as it is now, so it probably won't happen

So you'd want to hide the ground layer when the player is looking at the space units? Of course you can just lua it so the ground is hidden then but wouldn't you be hiding an important piece of information for space-ground interaction? People don't like being blind to the battlefield, that makes them vulnerable.

KDR_11k wrote:So you'd want to hide the ground layer when the player is looking at the space units? Of course you can just lua it so the ground is hidden then but wouldn't you be hiding an important piece of information for space-ground interaction? People don't like being blind to the battlefield, that makes them vulnerable.

That's what the warning messages is for.

Super Mario wrote:

KDR_11k wrote:So you'd want to hide the ground layer when the player is looking at the space units? Of course you can just lua it so the ground is hidden then but wouldn't you be hiding an important piece of information for space-ground interaction? People don't like being blind to the battlefield, that makes them vulnerable.

That's what the warning messages is for.

When you get a warning message it's already too late.

Tobi wrote:In that case IMHO you can as well rewrite from scratch and just copy some (huge) chunks here and there.

Yeah really now, I wonder if we'll see some of this going on in the future.

KDR_11k wrote:

Super Mario wrote:

KDR_11k wrote:So you'd want to hide the ground layer when the player is looking at the space units? Of course you can just lua it so the ground is hidden then but wouldn't you be hiding an important piece of information for space-ground interaction? People don't like being blind to the battlefield, that makes them vulnerable.

That's what the warning messages is for.

When you get a warning message it's already too late.

Not always, it depends on the unit and the mod. (it would be nice if there's a widget that would view the unit that is under attack fast would be very helpful.)

You'd still want to see what's going on. I really don'T see why you would hide the ground layer.

I really don't see why you would hide the ground layer.

You can just show them the radar, or draw a semi-transparent barrier between space stuff and ground stuff, when space stuff is selected, or both.

That's the whole point of a real "space layer", imo- it's a game within the game. You need to provide some distance, or it gets too confusing, and you get questions like, "why can't my uber-battleship shoot at tanks", which you need to preempt by showing players that they're not fighting alongside the tanks... they're fighting in "outer space", or the "upper atmosphere", or whatever.

At any rate, it's all pretty academic to me, I saw this implemented once, and it was pretty terrible.