Spring RTS Engine

Its no news but I think one of spring's biggest flaws is the lack of a correct display of LOS range. Units popping out of nothing is not nice, also I think newbies (and probably all other rts gamers) expect a LOS view.

So, basically I messed around with the Lua functions for setting LOS colors (inspired by Dizekat's LOSColors widget). Regardless of what I tried, having radar and jammer coverage displayed together with LOS made the whole scene irritating because its hard to interpret four different overlayed colors (at least for me).

So I removed radar and jammer colors entirely from LOS view and kept only the LOS. Making all the areas without LOS darker than the actual LOS area. Looks familiar to me, probably because other RTSes do it this way.
That ends up like this:




Hm, looks ok so far. But radar and jammer range display is missing from the game now. To have an replacement for it I played around with User's sphere drawing function to have a widget to display radar and jammer coverage. While holding META key, the sensor ranges are displayed like this:




(Blue is sonar range, green and red are obvious)

Sure, its not as accurate as the LOS map itself but I personally still like it more because its very easy to interpret and you can get a fast overview about sensor ranges.

Well, what do I want to say... Basically this (free to discuss): I think it would be great if the LOS view would be improved to have it as the default view. Having this would have some benefits. One is that players usually expect a display of LOS range in an RTS game. I can tell from my own experience that I was quite irritated that I have to press L to see the LOS range (drawn in odd colors).

Here are some points I think would be great to have in L-View:
-working shadows
-higher refresh rate of LOS range
-better resolution of LOS map

Another thing I noticed is that the ground texture is slightly blurred in L-View. Looks like this to me:

(Normal View)


(LOS View)

I have long argued that LoS view is essential to gameplay, but my opponents in CA claim the loss of shadows is too much of a sacrifice and we should not apply LoS view as the default state. I also hope that the bugs surrounding this feature are fixed in the engine.

very_bad_soldier wrote:Another thing I noticed is that the ground texture is slightly blurred in L-View.

More specifically, the map's detailtexture is missing when in LoS view. I've had this happen at times, and then it would get fixed when updating my drivers, then it would return again on a new version of Spring, and so on.

very_bad_soldier wrote:Here are some points I think would be great to have in L-View:
-working shadows

Next-Next release

very_bad_soldier wrote:-higher refresh rate of LOS range

next release has a new option called ExtraTextureUpdateRate, default: 45 (gameframes)

very_bad_soldier wrote:-better resolution of LOS map

there is HighResLos for a very long time

CarRepairer wrote:

very_bad_soldier wrote:Another thing I noticed is that the ground texture is slightly blurred in L-View.

More specifically, the map's detailtexture is missing when in LoS view. I've had this happen at times, and then it would get fixed when updating my drivers, then it would return again on a new version of Spring, and so on.

Not true.
In the current version it renders the detailtexture, also it is the cause why the metalmap got 'darker'.
Still it is impossible to copy the (shadow-)shader results with FFP which is used in ExtraTexture modes (LOS, Path, Metal, ...).
This will be fixed in the next-next release when there are uber-shaders, so terrain will be always rendered via shaders no matter if you use shadows,los, ... or not

+1 for this feature request

On a related note, why is l-view such a HUGE resource hog? If I have ~120 fps with it off, switching it on will usually bring my FPS down to about 25 or 30. I mean I know it's doing a lot of drawing but having a color overlay shouldn't be more taxing than thousands of units are.

jK wrote:

very_bad_soldier wrote:-better resolution of LOS map

there is HighResLos for a very long time

IIRC I added that setting to try it out some time.

I don't recommend to use it because the improvement is barely visible (IMHO) and the performance hit can be large (4 times as much memory accesses when updating rendered LOS map IIRC).

Tobi wrote:I don't recommend to use it because the improvement is barely visible (IMHO) and the performance hit can be large (4 times as much memory accesses when updating rendered LOS map IIRC).

Same for UpdateRate.
But ppl with highend PCs should be able handle it.
Also I tweaked it a bit so LOS view will be ~14% faster in next release.
Additionally, the UpdateRate is now bound to GameFrames and not to VideoFrames anymore. Means that it checks each VideoFame if a new GameFrame begun and if so it updates the ExtraTexture. This way the UpdateRate is clamped, e.g. when you got 120fps before it updated the ExtraTexture twice per second, now it just updates it each 1.5sec independent of your fps as long as you got >30fps (if you got <30fps it updates less often).

PS: this would be a ideal candidate for multithreading

Nice to hear that there are things moving at the moment.

How about dropping the radar and jammer display feature from the LOS View in the first place and declare displaying radar/jammer ranges as Lua-Land? Maybe also the processing time can be lowered by this?

Another thing: In LOS View I get a massive fps drop (70->20) when placing a mex (in BA). But there is no fps drop in plain F4 View.

How about dropping the radar and jammer display feature from the LOS View in the first place and declare displaying radar/jammer ranges as Lua-Land?

This can be blocked by terrain, it's much better to do it in the engine.

Yes but personally I would prefer the ease of use over accuracy.

Well, then, how about depcoupling LOS view and radar/jammer? Either by introducing an radar view just as LOS view but using another key or by making LOS view the default and using L-Key just for toggling radar/jammer?

Btw I found another issue in the current LOS View. After some minutes of play the units rendering alternates. From one second to the other the units get rendered in darker colors. This can be fixed by pressing L twice to switch to normal view and back to LOS view then. I have no further clue yet how to reproduce but it happens regularly for me ingame.
Is it a known issue or would screenshots help to track it down?

very_bad_soldier wrote:Well, then, how about depcoupling LOS view and radar/jammer? Either by introducing an radar view just as LOS view but using another key or by making LOS view the default and using L-Key just for toggling radar/jammer?

[;] ?

I think that having four different colors (from los/non-los/radar/jammer) in the current LOS view (by pressing L) is an issue because it is somehow confusing. But since the actual line of sight is IMO more important than radar/jammer coverage I think it would be nice if the user would be able to toggle them independently from each other. So the user can enable the LOS permanently without enabling radar/jammer coverage at the same time. If the user wants actually to see radar/jammer coverage he has to hit a key (like it is currently with L-View).

he meant to press the ";" button ingame, it does what you ask

uikeys.txt wrote:// bind Any+; toggleradarandjammer

Wow VBS didn't know about the ; key all this time. How lolzy!

Is it sufficient if I say now something like "Oopsie"?

i think my color settings were the best (red for radar and blue for jammer, but no los). BUT this widget looks really promissing

The widget is mostly pointless now since I learned you can already toggle LOS and radar/jammer independently.
Well, in case anyone is interested here is a working version of the widget...

Personally I think LOS view could use some TLC - I think the biggest flaw is trying to use colour-layers for everything.

I'd go with a different approach:

1) shield-sphere-like effects for jammers.
2) Just draw the outer edge for radar. A fuzzy border would look nicer than shading everything green.
3) For sonar, remember that in Spring, Sonar is functionally just underwater LOS. So use one LOS effect on the water itself (showing above-water LOS) and one LOS effect on the ocean floor (showing Sonar).

Pxtl wrote:Personally I think LOS view could use some TLC - I think the biggest flaw is trying to use colour-layers for everything.

I'd go with a different approach:

1) shield-sphere-like effects for jammers.
2) Just draw the outer edge for radar. A fuzzy border would look nicer than shading everything green.
3) For sonar, remember that in Spring, Sonar is functionally just underwater LOS. So use one LOS effect on the water itself (showing above-water LOS) and one LOS effect on the ocean floor (showing Sonar).

i think the updated iceui does this (colored borders)