Spring RTS Engine

Just tried to play muck in latest Spring and the map hardness was 0. In older Spring the map hardness was -8 causing explosions to create little hills of epicness.

+1

Another thing is that it crashed after a few explosions...

I remember when you were able to bury your units. Those were the days.

Where do we need map hardness anyway? Imo its really annoying and nasty looking when the map starts to bend and deform from explosions and hits. To be able to deform map via mod should go another way.

MapHardness needs to be standardized and freezed!

I liked XTAs version of handling explosion craters the best, tons of small craters not just ones on commblast, nuke and adv fus death.

This does give me an idea though, maybe we should have craters generated that arent damned perfectly symmetric... Ill look into the source to see how much noise i could add to the explosion.

Im also not a fan of terraform, since its just apallingly ugly.

I dont think hardness should be standardized though, the only time real issues surface is then the explosions happen on greatly differring hardness level boundaries.

Deformation can be nice..why not?some randomness to each battle...
If only it wasn't slow..

The deformation isnt slow, whats slow is the repathing after deformation.

Well, if theres no visuals, ground decals like explosion grimes etc, It's just silly looking and useless. Theres nothing wrong with terraforming though, but as far as I see, theres nothing that deformation can give, visually but also not much in gameplay wise that it should be preserved.

Deformation is cool thing, but only with decals and proper deformation physics(now its just silly erosion brush...)

Standartization would make things easier, because you know always, how the map reacts. Atm its just chaotic mess where each map has its own softness or hardness...

CA's trying to use deformation as a way to make the battlefield evolve. Much like how wrecks are good conditions for some units and bad for others.

Occasionally we think deformation isn't affecting the game enough and double cratermult.

SirArtturi wrote: Deformation is cool thing, but only with decals and proper deformation physics(now its just silly erosion brush...)

But there are ground decals, and what do you mean erosion brush? Its just a round blob.

This is turning out to be interesting. It seems that the check to keep the ground flat under a building is performed before the building gets destroyed by the explosion... So the ground is kept flat even if the building is destroyed by that very blast!

Beherith wrote:This is turning out to be interesting. It seems that the check to keep the ground flat under a building is performed before the building gets destroyed by the explosion... So the ground is kept flat even if the building is destroyed by that very blast!

I think anyone could have told you that. This would be the reason that nuked bases end up full of flat squares.

I know, I see it every time, I just didnt think that a fix might be easy for it.

Beherith wrote:The deformation isnt slow, whats slow is the repathing after deformation.

Is that proven fact, or just guessing?

Auswaschbar wrote:

Beherith wrote:The deformation isnt slow, whats slow is the repathing after deformation.

Is that proven fact, or just guessing?

it's a myth, i profiled that some time ago and repathing had neglectable impact ( i kept profiling for about a minute after the explosion happened since repathing is scheduled in slowupdates )
i did post the results, but the links seems dead now

/spoiler: the duck in the truck gets stuck in the muck.

So i ran sleepy on 30 comms blasting in 60 secs one after the other, (not chain) and the cpu of heightmap update was 0.5%.
Also, here are some ugly perlin craters:


spring shading makes them look crappy

Thats weird, why was this changed? Muck and meltyheck used to work fine.

Behe: Dont use DSD, i'd suggest artic plains, craters are sexy as hell there.

CA has, for a long time, used deformation on every single weapon, prettymuch. The terrain gets nice and messed up, and we recently doubled cratermult as google said.

Whats wrong with terraform, behe? I think it looks a fair site better with the new system, among other things.

All we need is a way to override map hardness modside, then we can forget about all this 'standardizing' issues or whatever, leave it to the devs.

I think part of the problem is that terrain deformation isn't always coupled with appropriate texture changes. If a mod could provide decals that were permanent and proportional to the deformation (but that would be a resource-hog) or the map could provide a pair (up and down) of "deformation-maps" that were alternate textures to be alpha'd in as deformation gets further and further from neutral, then maybe it would look better... but as it stands, deformation can look very bad because it becomes obvious that the map's original texture has been stretched over the deformed landscape.

Yeah since ground decals are so expensive, I was just thinking of straight off color burning the original map texture after an explosion, but that might not be the best solution. Also thought of a few more ways to work this perlin craters; the noise should be concentrated on the edge of the craters, not in the bottom, but i need to think of a way to get that working nicely.