Spring RTS Engine

Something that has been annoying me a little bit is that even though we have a fully 3D game with a veiw that can rotate to any obscure angle you want it to, the buildings are all stuck continuously facing South. What im suggesting is the ability to, when building a building, having the ability to choose its rotation. A bit like (If i remember correctly) what you can do in C&C:Generals

Example of how it could work:
If you just want to build one building, you just click the position you want like usuall, but you keep the mouse down, and drag it to the direction you want your building to face. So place building, keep mouse down and rotate it by moving the mouse.

If you want to build lots of buildings in a row, make them face pendipicular to the dircetion of the line (so units could still walk out of them).

I dont know how hard this is to implement, but it would be a very nice feature to include.

You couldnt drag, because it's already set so that if you drag you get a row or square or box of what you're trying to build rather than that single instance just being rotated.

No thats shift drag isnt it?

Other wise imk stuck for ideas...

How about holding alt for rotation? i dont think creating a box of buildings is so usefull...

It can be. Like on all metal maps, make a box of metal extractors. And with the ctrl+alt+shift (I think) you can make a hollow box. easily surround your base in Dragon's Teeth, Weapons, and other things. The box is handy.

alt is bounded to that too.

Drag and you get a line, hold ctrl and you get a square, hold alt and the squares hollowed out to a box.

Maelstrom wrote:Example of how it could work:
If you just want to build one building, you just click the position you want like usuall, but you keep the mouse down, and drag it to the direction you want your building to face. So place building, keep mouse down and rotate it by moving the mouse.

Alantai Firestar wrote:You couldnt drag, because it's already set so that if you drag you get a row or square or box of what you're trying to build rather than that single instance just being rotated.

But what if you don't drag outside the footprint, just make a small circle inside to rotate. The type of things you might want to rotate are the larger buildings, factories, annihilators, and fusions so there should be enough room.
Even easier, once you start the rotate inside the footprint you can move outside without starting a line build.

No, it should be that as u rotate it with teh mouse inside, if you start to drag outside with a line, it will do a line with everything facing that way. That would work far better.

IF you realy wanted to rotate a building im sure youd spend a little extra time doing so so having to keep inside its boundy is no big deal.

aGorm

Well on some maps it is a big deal. Like on the really small cramped maps. You have to put your factories in the north of the area, or the units cant get out. But with this you can rotate them anywhere. So no more cramped bases with straight lines everywhere.

I think thats a good idea, might be a little fiddly, especially on units with small footprints.

Instead of rotating individual buildings, I'd like to have an arrow somewhere on my screen that I set once for all.

At the beginning of the game, the arrow would be set to be pointing in the direction: "from the starting position to the map center".

When I give a building building order, the building would be by default facing the direction of the arrow.

At any time during the game, I can change the direction of that arrow. With something like O + mouse. Unless there's a little building orienation dial on the GUI that I can just use. I still would prefer to have the arrow only show when a key is pressed because otherwise most of the time the arrow would take room on the GUI for nothing.

It only change the direction for future building orders, and if possible selected buildings under construction.

If I change the direction of the arrow while there's some building far in the queue of a construction unit, then those buildings don't change direction, the keep the ones they had when I gave the order.




If I realise that a building half-built is facing the wrong direction, I still have till it's completed to change its direction, by selecting it and turning the arrow. Even if it may sound unrealistic to some, I think it's needed for gameplay reason, and anyway a building underconstruction hasn't be ever used yet, so it can't be abused.

If that is to hard to do (because for building with elongated yardmap for instance, the new orientation would have to be still on free space), just discard the idea.

It would be sorta odd that we couldn't change the orientation of building in a queue without reissuing the order, but would be able to change the orientation of a building under construction, but that makes sense once you realise that to change the orientation of buildings in a queue, you'd just have to discard the order in the queue and reissue it which cost nothing, while when the construction has already started, you can't anymore stop and reissue it.

If the whole idea of 360° selecteable orientation is too hard to code, allow at least the four N W E S orientation for a start.

If we just have the NSEW (I like this idea) you should be able to to choose a unfinished building and set it direction (directional keys wasd or a cycle button ) it's facing, or choose a contruction unit and give it a direction and any buildings it makes (including cued ones) will switch to that direction... most people don't cue non-square buildings right next to each other so this shouldn't cause conflicts... unit groups given contruction orders, I'm not sure about... these orders could even be given to con-yards to allaw boats to go out the back for instance...

wasnt there a mod for the original total annihilation that hacked this in?

Yes, however it would be trickier to implement in spring. First the nubmer of buildings quadruples, and the nubmer of build pics needed rises too since build pics in spring dotn work as they do in OTA

this idea would improve spring a bit only objection i have is we not get rid of alt boxing. its a devil of a time for land units to go through a pass filled with mines after the spaceing has been enlarged

I thought of this last night as well, yeah it would be useful if buildings could be build in angles, box building isn't that important IMO.

I think the spacebar isn't used for anything; perhaps we could press that to rotate it 90 degrees?

So a "4 versions of every building mod" is not a good idea then... seeing as all the other units can turn I'm sure it wouldn't be hard to implement with the current code...

possibly letting a contruction unit set the frontdir or heading of the unit based on an additional unit property... not familliar enough with the code to know how hard that would be...

The space bar isnt used, but it is used in the new GUI.

Perhaps an alternative would eb to press on the palce you want to build but keep hold and use the scroll button on the mouse or ctrl+home/End

What about a another key that isn't used? maybe the num pad numbers?