Spring RTS Engine

[img]http://kdr_11k.from-hell.net/colorwar.jpg[/img]

http://www.darkstars.co.uk/downloads/vi ... 3.sdz&dl=1

It's fairly simple, you control a UFO, you can shoot its laser (when it's charged) and that laser spawns a block. Blocks self-replicate and thus spread across the map, faster downhill, slower uphill. Your goal is to have the most blocks when the game ends. It ends when there has been no growth for 10 seconds. Your laser charges faster the more metal is buried under your block mass. Blocks don't grow across water so even placid streams will stop their expansion.

Yes it does get pretty laggy towards the end, the blocks are features though and it doesn't get THAT horrible on my system (Athlon 64 3000+, GeForce 6800).

I expected something different, now where are those sheets....

Holy chrome, KDR does it again.

Interesting concept.

Its like watching two bacterial colonies compete for space :D

Cool game. To make it more playable and fun, IMO there should be 3 changes:

- quick reload
- faster ship
- slower creep growth

maybe higher view radius or a radar or something too. Also it would be cool if we could set the size of the little thingies in modoptions, I imagine bigger spots would mean less lag.

You could have some stochastic algorithm that replaces clusters of blocks with a bigger single block to help reduce the lag casued by lots of small features? E.g. Randomly check n blocks per frame as replacement candidates?

I need to actually play this now!

It's cool!

Game of life?

Oh fuck, KDR is at it again.

CarRepairer wrote:Game of life?

I thought about using that for something but the behaviour is so complex in practice that a human couldn't really plan ahead and would just act more or less randomly and look what happens. See e.g. http://www.asahi-net.or.jp/~cs8k-cyu/fl ... index.html

I think slowing the expansion would be an option, faster shooting can already be gained from claiming metal patches. The option to disable LOS would probably make sense too. No idea how to merge blocks though.

It was fun. Though of course only on certains maps. Indeed, having full map sight would be nice.

Idunno, a cellular automata mod might work with prefabs. You know, let the player drop gliders, bloaters, glider-guns, etc.

It's interesting, and props for doing something interesting... but there really isn't any meaningful conflict yet. You're pretty much just playing against the map and time.

Needs collisions between cells, mutations... something to shake things up and keep players hopping. Maybe have a third-party actor that attempts to eat the cells? Cells that split off, and form Gaia-controlled colonies? Random "radiation events" that kill cells off randomly everywhere? "Seeds" that grow fractally, and will eventually sub-divide the board, to form walls that players don't directly control, and thus represent an element of chance?

Could be a really interesting concept, if you developed the gameplay a lot more, and made some finished content though. It's the first thing since THIS that I really thought might be worthwhile polishing.

Moar pix:


Argh: Well, you have to outwit your opponent, and act quickly, in fact it's just like a RTS: Taking strategical decision under tense time pressure.

You're just going to pick the same best spots on a map every time, as things stand.

Until you have a way to reduce your opponent's growth, random factors disrupt the model, etc., there isn't a lot of "game" here, just clicky-clicky and memorization.

Not true in FFA. And we have over a thousand maps to play on 1v1...

Argh wrote:You're just going to pick the same best spots on a map every time, as things stand. [...] there isn't a lot of "game" here, just clicky-clicky and memorization.

This could be said of every other RTS as well.

Argh wrote:Until you have a way to reduce your opponent's growth.

Plant a seed in front of his cell front.

Well, there is that huge variety thing, sure. But it's like Go, only you can't capture enemy pieces, and you can't direct the position of placement past the initial moment. Takes a lot of the real strategy away.

And besides which... anybody wanting to play this seriously will want to use the same map all the time.

Argh wrote:you can't direct the position of placement past the initial moment.

You are aware you can fire more than once, right?