Spring RTS Engine

I'm relatively new to Spring TA and I love the game itself to the point I decided to try my hand at making my own map. Until I ran into a little problem which I've been racking my brain on for the last 5 days I've been working on this. The mod I'm using for this is BA 7.01.

So far I've tested with the kabold units and they all seem to have a hard time moving on the map properly.

Coding in my .bat file for compiling my maps
Coding in the SMD file As I mentioned before I'm a complete newbie (Also an idiot most of the time) and I have read a few of the tutorials I could find already and I still don't know what is wrong. Far as I know, the height map isn't the problem since I've checked it's movable highlights with every unit and everything is green where it needs to be and red where it needs to be. (It's a flat map, something simple for my first time.) I've tried various min and max height settings and nothing seems to have worked so far.This link will have the sd7 map inside the .rar file.

And thank you for taking your time to read this post.

Sincerely,
Nakmeath.

P.S. I'm aware the metal map and texture map is off by little and a lot. The reason for this is because I re-made the Height map in case if it was causing my current problem. Once this problem is fixed, I'll fix the metal map and the texture map.

What exactly is the problem with movement? Is it pathing or unit movement? I noticed that your terraintype movespeed values are pretty high. IIRC these values are always multipliers to the actual speeds of given in mod, so try to be modest with them... If you want slippery effect 1.1 will do...

Nakmeath wrote: So far I've tested with the kabold units and they all seem to have a hard time moving on the map properly.

What is kaboid?

Kabold I think I meant from the kabold laboratory. As for the exact problem, the units created from the laboratory have a hard time moving on the map for some reason. For an example I would tell it to move to another part of the map that's a bit further away and I would get an error that it couldn't reach it's destination without it even taking a step. Sometimes it works with a single unit sometimes it doesn't. As for larger groups they barely move. As for walking short range, there are little to few problems with them as a single unit. As for the group, even a command to travel a short distance to move I get 90% of those units having an error saying they can't move to that spot. So far about 3 out of 10 units grouped as one move and stop before reaching the destination. Prior in my testing, I had each of the units speed set to 1 and still getting this same strange problem with BA 7.01. Not sure if I'm being clear enough here, but basically I give a unit a command to walk somewhere and there's an error saying it can't reach there when there's absolutely nothing in the way.

As for the Kabold units are like the infantry units until you start building the advance kabold laboratory, which builds more armored land walking mechs and infantry like units and then the experimental building which builds more mech like units. I haven't tested the vehicles in the mod on this map yet because of the kabold unit movement problem.

I think this issue has nothing to do with your map. It's pathing issue that you need to discuss with engine developers. Maybe it's also mod based problem. Have you tried any other mods?

Your map might be not smooth enough for the units to move. Can you paste the heightmap?

To see where you unit can move: select a unit and press F2. The parts where the unit can move become green other parts red. The unit won't move if there is not "green way" to the destination point (or if it is too complicate). Does it work when you give detailed move commands (queue move commands with Shift)?

After further investigation, im convinced that there's nothing wrong in your map, except it being ugly:) Whatsoever, test with 100 pyros, 100 zeus and 100 fidos emphasizes that, particularly in your map, spring pathing had some disturbing problems: Narrow and long pathways caused serious traffic jams, which AI wasn't able to solve, units got stuck in the jam and in same time pyros got pushed through from the sharp steeped edges to the sea.

Unless you are not willing to change your concept and make your map different, theres nothing we can help you what comes to basis of mapping. Then you need to discuss this through with the engine and AI developers, who I assume, is already very well aware of these kind of problems.

Cheers with mapping

Does he mean k-bots?

In that case I'll have to change the design plan then and yes I've tried some other mods, like the Gundamn mod and a few others. the Gundamn mod had absolutely no problem with the map I've also tried the Evolution mod which it had a few problems with it. As for the movement path screen, yes I did check that with F2 and I beleive I stated that everywhere that needed to be green was.

And thank you SirArtturi from what you teeling me and what I've observed, I have to say your correct in this matter... just didn't occur to me that it would (I"m a newbie) since I'm new at this and I personally thought there was some error with the map itself that I missed.

As for my height map if you want to take a look at it, it's here.

There is one more mod I've tried and it was BA 7.04 which displayed the same problem. Anyways back to the drawing board for me I guess.

Thank you for the help everyone.

P.S. Yes I meant the K-bots. I was tired last night and frustrated trying to figure out why the map wouldn't work last night. Yeah I'm kinda aware it's ugly since the texture was made for a previous height map, which I deleted, same with the metal map. Plus I have to find/learn how to create new textures and climates for L3DT since spring maker seems to have problems with my computer, but that's another story.

I don't know if this is related to your current issue, but your speed multipliers are crazily high. So high they'd break stuff like balance, unit animation, and maybe even the engine code making unit move. Except, that, what you do not know, is that Spring has a hardcoded capping of speed multiplier to x2. Even though your area will read in the tooltip as making unit go x7 or x10, your unit won't go faster than twice their speed.

I wasn't aware of that but I Have tried the unit settings at lower speeds. Also the same problem came up with a second map I'm working on. The walk ways and everything much wider. I wonder if the lack of texture or something could be causing a problem at this point?

1/1/1/1 ... Use it. Typemaps are bad mmk?

I've tried the walking unit speeds all at 1 and I've also tried putting the flat area I want to being colored a light shade of grey on the Height Map and adjusting the min and max height in the SMD file. I've also tried looking at the map itself in the Spring Map Maker to see if there's something hidden I'm not seeing with the second map I'm trying this out on.

I'm starting to think at this point that something could be wrong with the compiler I'm using, which I forgot which one it was. So I'm going to delete the ones I've been using and re-download and install another one to see if this will perhaps fix this strange issue.

You still don't trust me saying it's pathing problem? Moreover, It seems to be pathing problem in BA. BA is known to be very "unit heavy" mod. It's nothing new that sometimes narrow pathways get a bit crowded and stupid AI can't find its way out. I think it has also something to do with triangular shape of your map.

Please record a demo and post it here or give it to some developer.

PS. The texture of your map has nothing to do with the behauviour of units. They can't judge what looks good or bad, It's just mathematics :)

Forboding Angel wrote:1/1/1/1 ... Use it. Typemaps are bad mmk?

There's no typemap in this map, just defaultterrain speed modifiers. But yes, if you want slippery effect on your ice theme map, I suggest using something between 1.1 - 1.2.

I tested the map with those values being at 1 and constantly got the same error.
I also tested the map with a few friends of mine and a few weird things happened.

1. The K-bots still had some difficulty moving around.

2. There was always the host getting a sync error on the map.

3. When someone's commander died, it reported to each player as having won the map. (Thanks to some friends I chat with in Vent.)

4. Sometimes when going to build the first unit spring would also crash only on this map.

I can't think of anything other then that I have something going wrong in the compiler I'm using at this point. Since these sync errors only showed up on maps I've attempted to make.

Nakmeath wrote:
I can't think of anything other then that I have something going wrong in the compiler I'm using at this point. Since these sync errors only showed up on maps I've attempted to make.

Hmm... Not sure if this could be possible issue. What compiler are you using? I heard some rumours that latest spring update is struggling with sync errors so that could be the case too...

Edit: Actually, what the hell! I've come this far so you could send me the source files and I could try compiling it!

I've uploaded the map files to here

That is the second map I'm trying to compile and failed miserably each time.

I'm going back through what I may or may not need and I'm going to look around some more in case if there's something I missed about compiling maps.

P.S. That website is the only place I know of for free downloads at the moment.

Compiling... stay tuned

Edit: Works fine in Evo. I removed the terrain type section since there isn't a typemap in the first place (and I think this is what caused the problem in the first place).

Uploading Sauce (Minus the texture) for you...

Ok here's the description of my testrun:

-Compiled with mothermapconv
-Source imageformats changed to .bmp
-Found out alphachannel from heightmap (Also weird lines allover the map you've made. What is the function of these my friend? :)
-removed the terraintype modifier since you dont have a typemap (You were right Forb, although I'm not sure if this has any effect because of overrun by maphelper/mapdefaults.lua)
-Test run with BA 7.04, 100 armzeus, 100armfido, 100corpyro

Result:
It worked good overall except that traffic jams occured and units had hard time to find their way out. Is this the problem?
Open the demo with spring.exe

Ok so Sherlock, solve this puzzle!
Whatsoever, could you please describe the problem better and send a demo out of it? Cos I think the problem is in your head rather than in the map...

Then I'm going to try to record some videos using Fraps (only program I've got that'll work.) Also I'm a mapconv from a download that named it mapconv12. I also looked at the map you compiled and for the time being that leaves me to believe that either my images I'm still trying to use is saved in the wrong .png format style or .bmp style. Cause I've noticed that on the map(s) I've compiled from those images and tested kept having some white streak lines going out from the top of the map and from left of the map when you zoom out all the way. I have some a video showing this.

I'm going to load those vids up into either photobucket or to Youtube, after I try a few more things and get mothers map conv to work with the files Forbidding Angel supplied. I don't know if it's my Windows O/S or what that's making it disagree with the size of the height map or not. So I don't have to answer this later, I'm using Windows Vista Professional 64 bit in case if that's also being an issue.

As for the videos I'll get them up ASAP.


EDIT 1: Using Mothers Map Conv (after I finally got it to work) fixed my over all problem completely. I don't know what was wrong with the height map but after repeatedly getting my image editors (mostly GIMP and Window's Paint) it finally compiled correctly and the map worked properly. So thank you Forbidding Angel and SirArtturi. For now I can say it was the type of compiler I was using or at least some of the settings in it being wrong somewhere. At this point I can say the videos aren't needed now. And as for the strange lines, I did have something planned for them but they didn't turn out like I wanted them to, but I'll be fixing that later. For now I need to do some other testing to make sure it's 100% working order before I make any new maps and changes.