Does Spring have the right capabillities for me?

[Thirsk]

Greetings all. Please excuse general noobness, I'm completely new here.

I've come across this here engine, and it all seems mighty fine, to be honest, but for the gamecreation I am looking for I need to get one thing settled: How capable is Spring Engine for creating dialogue with a choice of different answers (not unlike old RPGs like Planescape: Torment or the Baldur's Gate games)? And is it capable for driving a story forward, so to speak, or am I better served with another engine/modding for such purposes?

Thanks beforehand.

[imbaczek]

it is possible, but hasn't been done yet AFAIK. shouldn't be hard though.

one problem spring has is that it cannot restart the game by itself; the engine has to be shut down and restarted with different options.

[Hoi]

Yep, spring supports Lua, it's very powerfull, things like menus are possible.

http://spring.clan-sy.com/wiki/Lua_Scripting

[Pxtl]

There are some problems you'll have - first off, there is no support for the dialogue you speak of... but whipping that up in script wouldn't be too hard. The bigger problem is the engine itself - it's designed for dropping models onto a landscape, and meta-game is not well-supported to connect multiple games together, which is something you'll have to do if you don't want to restrict the player to a single maps (and maps are quite limited in size).

Your biggest problem will be graphical - making convincing and fun towns, dungeons, cities will be challenging in the spring engine, and will heavily rely on the new collision primitives that haven't been used extensively yet.

[Argh]

Doing click-on-stuff, see state-driven stuff is fairly easy in Spring. If you have some programming skills, I think that you could do a simplistic RPG with dialog trees fairly easily.

[SwiftSpear]

Spring IS an RTS engine, the structures in place in terms of gameplay and world creation are really set up primarily for RTS games. If you are planning on making an RPG, it's definitely possible, but aside from the basic rendering you have to realize you're basically coding every other part of the game from scratch. Very little of what spring currently uses is going to be easily recyclable in an RPG environment.

In terms of weather or not you can create dialog and menus. Absolutely. Lua allows you to generate and populate GUI items with pretty much whatever you want. Once again, you're going to have to create the format for that yourself, we don't currently have any project that uses something that resembles a dialog tree, but it's definitely entirely possible.

[KDR_11k]

If you want to make an RTS with a bit more story it might be possible (though loading different maps and keeping stuff across them won't be easy), for an RPG that involves tons of map transitions I'd avoid it.

[Thirsk]

Thanks for the excessive feedback everyone.

The idea wasn't really an RPG, just a platform to tell a story through the means of game, although an RPG wouldn't be too shabby, if you get my point.

In any case, I'm getting Spring and're going to toy around with it for a while, exploring the possibilities. If I find it to my liking I might come around one day with a project of mine : )

Anyway, thanks again, I'm slightly overwhelmed by the number and detail of the replies.

[SwiftSpear]

Thanks for the excessive feedback everyone.

The idea wasn't really an RPG, just a platform to tell a story through the means of game, although an RPG wouldn't be too shabby, if you get my point.

In any case, I'm getting Spring and're going to toy around with it for a while, exploring the possibilities. If I find it to my liking I might come around one day with a project of mine : )

Anyway, thanks again, I'm slightly overwhelmed by the number and detail of the replies.

We tend to bend over backwards to help people who are considering content creation for spring. Partly because documentation is poor, so many of us feel the need to help wherever we can, and partly because we just really like people making stuff for spring. Everyone has more fun with better content.

[Argh]

for an RPG that involves tons of map transitions I'd avoid it.

I can help on that end, now that I know how. So long as cheating isn't an issue, to be sure- I don't have a method that's cheat-proof, by any means.