Spring RTS Engine

i think i'll stop polluting random WIPs with my work; i'll have more stuff to share, as may others in time... just going to drop it in here as i go

commentary is welcome


mini gunship; its unmanned and will be pretty small ingame. engine/wing parts rotate 90 degrees downwards to enter hover mode.


"AA tank" but it will hit ground units as well.... think rocket truck


missle silo; missile is hidden beneath the ground prior to launch


AA tower... shoots flak... turned out ok i guess


Buggy (amphibious unit?) possibly to balance with the lighttank


i think the image speaks for itself... emp + sawblade = ultimate spam counter.


medium allterrain


heavy allterrain


light allterrain

Very nice. I like how the tail is asymmetrical.

I like your style. Simple yet efficient. Just slick.

Tbh I'm shocked as to how well the units mesh ingame. For one, right from the start I didn't have any trouble distinguishing them when I was playing, yet I had trouble remembering which was which when I did the buildpics lol. Is that wierd or what?

Regardless, the design works really really well together.

mid : considered what you'd said to me the other night about making some units look different; i hope this trend of asymmetrical units will be eyecatching and make things easy to distinguish (although it does break somewhat from the rest of the faction)

sab : thx a lot man, for the newer ones i'm trying to consider stuff that i've failed at before, like greebling a bit too much and going against the geometry with the texture...

also seeing the first batch ingame and seeing how forb handled the reflectivity made me go "ohhhhhh" a few times (never in a bad way) and i've sort of designed more in terms of the uber shiney rather than the uber greebled... i think it turned out well.

(less greebles = less work = faster unit production = more units :D)

Very nice work. Have you considered trying more color/texture variation to make it easier to tell units apart?

I know Forboding says he finds it easy, but - being honest - he's bound to be a little biased. I don't know what kind of unit count you're trying for, but if you look to TA for an example, the units are all very colorful. Even if some of the shapes are similar, the colors are totally different, for instance Goliath tank vs Bulldog vs Reaper.

Also, I take it the red is team color? Have you considered allowing the team color to bleed out onto the nearby textures a little bit? I think it would create a really cool-looking glow - imagine if it was lime green or vibrant orange, it'd look like the tank was running on uranium or gatorade or something

gracias senor C.

re the coloring / skinning of the units : i've considered adding "badge" coloring to designate types of units; ie a riot unit might have some blue-grey panels and a blue badge decal, artillery might have green, etc etc... something to designate unit function i think might help noobs, as well as to make the differences easier to distinguish; i am in agreement with you in that it may well become a problem as more and more units are added; thankfully all of my skins are fireworks pngs, so its just a matter of opening them all up, selecting what i want to change, and clicking a few times; should be easy enough to implement (and i assume that eventually it will be)

i did consider a "glowing" teamcolor panel; but since forb is doing the reflectivity maps and doesn't own a copy of fireworks, this would probably be difficult to implement (certainly harder than the panelling mentioned above)

the other problem that might arise with adding the teamglow would be that the units are already shiny as hell, if i did add the glow it might not even be noticeable. certainly something to consider though.

idea : call the transport a magpie, as magpies like collecting shiny objects!

anyways, nice to know someone else is thinking about the same things when they look at these units as i do.

sab, your avatar is pure genius

pretty cool. although the last one looks a bit like a buzzsaw. I can't tell, is it a turret or a hover?

It's a tank with a giant sawblade and a negative impulse tractor beam on the top. Unit gets pulled to tank, unit gets cut up and explodes in a symphony of colors with much bloodshed, screeching of metal, and hot blooded man tears.

Forboding Angel wrote:It's a tank with a giant sawblade and a negative impulse tractor beam on the top. Unit gets pulled to tank, unit gets cut up and explodes in a symphony of colors with much bloodshed, screeching of metal, and hot blooded man tears.

AWESOME

EDIT: This post means: I like this unit concept and believe that such a unit will be awesome.

Comments?



Basicly every unit gets a pic and a description in front of their homeplanet.

i like it sabutai, i like it a lot... especially if you are going to describe the function of the unit...

an idea : possibly do more than one unit per loading screen? i think you could probably group by function; econ buildings together, raiders together, planes together etc... i like the CA screens that show a lot of units at once; makes the game easier to learn

also : i guess i'd better get a nice screen for each unit then :D i've been lazy about updating this thread; theres a whole ton of shiney new things to share.

anyways its sexy. gogogo!

KaiserJ wrote:i guess i'd better get a nice screen for each unit then

how about a clean model so i dont need to crop the background? ^^

Very nice, but please leave space for the spring loading text (although it changes depending on screen res >_>).

I like it too! Only the smoke looks too much like cigarette smoke from short distance or something...

MidKnight wrote:Very nice, but please leave space for the spring loading text (although it changes depending on screen res >_>).

It fits perfectly in between the logo and the text

aaah the smoke... yes this is only a preliminary pic. its how i imagine what the loadscreen with units would look like. the other, more general loadscreens can be seen in evo allready.

And the logo is 3d now!

SCHWEET.

now by clean... what exactly do you mean?

they are just screens from the renderer in 3ds... im not sure if i can do transparency as a background (i sort of dont think i can)

how about something like cyan or lavender in the background to make it easy to wand out?

As odd as it sounds, total white is the easiest to want out, at least for me anyway.

Basically kaiser, if you can take the shots and post em somewhere for me, I'll wand em out and pass them to sabutai.

Png is best, because that way I don't have to deal with jpg's artifaction (lolword) and making things stupidly difficult.