Spring RTS Engine

disclaimer/background

i've been playing around with chicken map concepts recently as well as doing a bit of mucking with different spring mods and roguelikes and minecraft and various things. i've always been a fan of survival type gameplay, as well as open-ended games... play forever, limited by your own skill sorts of games like asteroids or pacman; as well as arcade style survival like rampart.

recently i've seen some very cool, shiny new things for spring like carrepairers donkey kong castle, knorkes starcraft style reclaimable and dynamically placed resources, bobs driveable vehicles, and zwzsgs procedural hexmap.

all of these things together have mashed up and become sort of a concept that i've been thinking about at work for a few days now, i figured i'd post my ideas and see what choo doods think... maybe it's worth something, or will get others interested.

i feel like this idea would address what makes chicken defense a bit boring for advanced players, while maintaining all of the fun that it provides as a survival game-type (specifically, less porc, more units, more reason to roam around and explore)

overview

theme: a small group of colonists crash-land on an unscouted and unknown planet with limited food, building supplies and materials. it's up to the colonists to explore the planet and locate valuable supplies in order to locate sustainance and build shelters, as well as create weapons and structures to survive against an ever-increasing horde of hostile aliens.

in a sentence : game would be singleplayer or co-operative survival mode; somewhat like chicken mode, but with "safe" periods where players reclaim spawned resources CT style

basic gameplay

players would begin in the center of a large spring map with a single "colonist" unit. to succeed in the game, players would have to collect resources in order to build structures to survive against hordes of aliens. players would, over time, gain more colonists, numbers limited perhaps by a farm limit in the way of warcraft games. colonists could be upgraded over time to become specialized healers, soldiers, builders and other more advanced roles.

gameplay would be dictated somewhat by a day/night cycle... possibly of a period of 5 mins day, 5 mins night, where the daytime would be a more "safe" time (thanks minecraft) to send your colonists out to explore the map, harvest resources, and generally avoid the monsters who would stand around and only attack when they spot the colonists rather than spawning and attacking en masse; wheras the night time would be more like chicken mode where monsters constantly spawn and move towards the colonists, besieging them and generally making things annoying.

resources would be randomly scattered around the map according to rarity, and the map would be somewhat-randomly generated by deforming the terrain under map features placed in a grid across the map. players will be able to build structures that will provide renewable resources ... example, a rock of coal spawned on the map would provide temporary resources while a constructed solar panel would provide sustained resources. perhaps a system with several resources would work; "basic" resources such as power and building materials could be gleaned indefintely by building structures, wheras "rare" or "radioactive" materials would have to be located and harvested. map features such as tall hills could be used to the players advantage for renewable resources (CA wind) or lakes (tidal)

the map in my mind is quite large; maybe 20x20 with the colonists and buildings etc roughly the sizes of TA kbots and plants/labs

players from the start of the game would take the first day to build temporary defenses; after collecting some resources such as local flora and rocks, they would construct fencing (a la dragonteeth) and some pewpew lasers with their existing rare material, to survive the first night stage.

more abstract gameplay

ideally it would be the sort of game where in theory you could play forever, but difficult enough that it would be impossible to do so, possibly by endlessly scaling difficulties and numbers of enemies and/or decreasing amounts of spawned resources.

for a food limit in the game, i would use the "farm" model. players could perhaps construct tents to begin with, and then more solid structures like bunkers and eventually armed or advanced structures like arcologies or towers of doom.

players would be encouraged to explore the map and eventually attack alien colonies, because some resources would be rare and reclaimable only, or would spawn only in the wrecks of alien buildings (its funny how i keep calling them aliens, when ofc they are the natives of the planet. anyways.)

base expansion would ideally be by a slow daisy chain, preventing the player from blocking off large "safe zones" early. perhaps as the game progressed, more advanced races of aliens could spawn (like zombie colonists... or spherebots) as well as random giant aliens that roam the map regardless of day/night for added randomness and excitement.

possibly stupid gameplay

bobs vechs in "contact" are amazing. if colonists were eventually able to build vehicles for defense and attack (tanks, etc) as well as scouting (planes and small cars) or even just trucks to bring groups of harvesters into the field, it could add to the complexity and interesting micro.

over time certain colonists could be levelled to become "unique" units, a la GRTS or warcraft 3, with special abilities like dguns or jumpjets or other magical things (chuck noruas!)

existing game resources

we've got chicken mode. i suppose the core game would work similar to that, but with the "safe" periods as described. perhaps "eggs" could grow at the bases, which would hatch and become soldiers simultaneously every 10 minutes or so (in accordance with the day/night and safe periods)

we've got knorkesources, crystals that appear randomly scattered around the map, which are then collected by harvesters.

we've got carrepairers castle, which uses terrain deformation to dynamically align the heightmap to a feature.

we have morph based upgrades and games that use more than 2 resources

required game resources

we'd need some kewl models; obviously chickens exist and spacebugs are in the works, but also some colonist would be required. i like making things, and would make models for this. also, wombat can make some funny creatures and little men, so i'd force him to do it as well.

i -think- i've seen just about everything described in a spring game already, albiet in some cases in different forms...

anyways if you read this far, its only fair that you respond so i can read some of YOUR ideas

very very interesting, and fun idea.

Ok so i wont promise anything, but im working on some infantry/ builder suits, maybe i can come up with something nice to share , what time are you online so we can work on this

Anyways what about the folowing.

A group of builders/colonists like 5 come from space and drop in the center of the map, in a drop ship, with them comes 2 drones that can morph into a metal storage/refinery and a solar plant,near the starting area would be 4 to 5 mineral patches, low in recources though.

mutch like your idea, then buildings could be:

- barracks, youd send in colonists into the barracks then armoured suits would come off, or healers mutch like you said,

- small turret, (upgradable, into flametrower, missile laucher or minigun style).

- ligth factory
can make small 4 wheeled like units that go into the wild fast and can transport colonists, that went to far .

about recources metal could be extracted by normal colonists with hand devices, then youd make large tracked tanks, that have huge drills.


About missions and stuff, you could add specific objectives, as number of recources colected, number of bugs killed, or something like COLONIZE THE WHOLE PLANET, get the bug nests pacified and make a huge city dome (wonder like building, age of empire style).

e.t.c.. if you want to go with this id like to help you.

Much work would be required, and I'm not even sure Spring is the right engine for that.

sci: yeah for sure, atm its just an idea, perhaps if i see some of your models it will inspire me further, and also to see if other people have additional ideas (well, they always do, and i wanna hear 'em!)

i like the idea of spawning with a small force, although tbh personally i was envisioning starting with 2 colonists, and ending up with max 20 or something, its all negotiable and up for discussion. certainly starting with more might give you more options to begin with (although playing with a full team of 16 humans, it might be more fun with less. hm.)

metal patches

i dont think i would use an actual metalmap, because i cant "place" patches after the map loads (wheras the hill / lake thing apparently is, as well as spawning reclaimables)... although, perhaps for mining it could be a solid map of metal with a large extractor radius. hmm.

z: what problems do you see with such an idea working in spring?

KaiserJ wrote:sci: yeah for sure, atm its just an idea, perhaps if i see some of your models it will inspire me further, and also to see if other people have additional ideas (well, they always do, and i wanna hear 'em!)

i like the idea of spawning with a small force, although tbh personally i was envisioning starting with 2 colonists, and ending up with max 20 or something, its all negotiable and up for discussion. certainly starting with more might give you more options to begin with (although playing with a full team of 16 humans, it might be more fun with less. hm.)

metal patches

i dont think i would use an actual metalmap, because i cant "place" patches after the map loads (wheras the hill / lake thing apparently is, as well as spawning reclaimables)... although, perhaps for mining it could be a solid map of metal with a large extractor radius. hmm.

z: what problems do you see with such an idea working in spring?

hm, conflict terra reclaimable rocks thats doable.

the problems i see in this, is that it must depend on 2 things highly detailed map, huge amount of work, and highly detailed and good looking textures on the colonist units/buildings.

not to mention the lua script work, like modifying the way buildings are made in spring, like forcing colonists to use a moving arm animation when building, and actualy adding a building animation.

Ofc we could change this and make stuff being built by drones operated by colonists, but wouldnt be as realistic and fun to watch/see.

The map would have to be the main part of the mod though, huge ravines detailed jungles, lots of animals moving around, a living world to see and watch, while exploring it.

We could eventualy add water as a recource, fresh water, and uncleaned water sources.

e.t.c...

the potencial exists, but indeed it is a lot of work.

seems very exciting, but i would raise two points:

- Imo if you want it to work, don't fuss with elaborate winsause animations and such, use some current models (or modify them a bit /spherebot comes to mind/), make a first version and then iron out the gameplay.

- I would scrap the procedural map idea. It would be the most complex part of the game to do well. They would definitely look (and probably play) worse than a custom-made map. If you come up with heightmap ideas and the rest of the mod is proceeding nicely, I'm sure mappers could chime in to do the maps. You could even do better configs for premade maps, specify zones in which stronger creep spawn, have different graphical themes for different areas and so forth.

One idea i would love would be player-buildable floodlights that keep the night-spawned creep at bay.

KaiserJ wrote:z: what problems do you see with such an idea working in spring?

Well, you'd want very large maps. Even Picasso's trench, the longest map possible, is quickly crossed by your average spring unit.

You'd want unexplored terrain be unknown, which Spring doesn't handle. Yes, there may be hacky workaround, but...

You'd want tons of lively features on your maps, which could give a poor performance with Spring.

You want tons of others feature that aren't in the engine, and sure they could be Lua'ed, but, err, at some point, you gotta ask yourself if you wouldn't be better of with another engine (dunno which) that trying to shoehorn your wishlist into an engine that wasn't made for them.

Maybe with a year of work, you could put all your initial post idea into Spring, but player would still get the uncomfortable feeling they'd be hacked in and not cleanly done.

bana, i think i'm in agreement with you on both points after consideration. a procedurally generated heightmap is still a cool idea, but really isn't instrumental to the idea... maybe it could work better on a large FFA style map with lots of blockage

also i really hadn't thought about the art style, but i can agree that if this idea were to get done as a project, that putting in dummy units would be the best move, if anything to hash out the plan.

the floodlight idea is pretty cool... i dunno how i'd handle the day/night thing exactly; an alternative could be a desert planet that has alternating periods of sandstorm and calm (using the fog gadget) or a snow planet with something similar; as long as it provided a cyclic nature of explore/defend

z: maybe a mazelike map of a size like 24x24 could suffice, especially if players didn't have fast units available from the start (that way, there would be a nice cache of spawned materials far away later in the game)

having hidden terrain would be cool (and amazing in terms of a procedural map) but i dunno if it would be gamebreaking not to have it, especially in the case of a pre-made map where you can't see the enemy units...

now that you mention it, maybe a lower-poly approach would be best, especially for spawnable items and most enemies... maybe even a cartoonish approach a la warcraft but with a futuristic twist? im sure it would still look good (and frankly quicker to make)

and yeah, you may be right about engine suitability, but at the same time, it just seemed to me that a lot of the things i was asking about were already in games (excepting of course the procedural map, which in retrospect seems like a bit too much work to bother with)

so with a "traditional" map of 24x24, lowpoly features and characters, and no hidden terrain... does it seem quite as bad?

No reason to go too low poly, players would control small amount of units and too large amounts (>1000) of creep will kill cpu with other things before polycount will matter.

Edit: we already have a night/day widget and i just saw a vid with dinamic lights ingame, so floodlights and day/night cycle should work. Theoretically the sandstorm idea could work too, but the only fog widget i know cant do areas, so it would muck up visibility for all players.

Honestly, night/day cycle is just cooler. Keep sandstorm for some desert maps where it kills air/shields or something.

But my map you mentionned earlier is procedural So is the "map hijack" mission in my BA mutator. Also, the random procedural bit was IMO the interesting aspect of your project.

The poly count isn't what make high number of features or gaia units eat all your megahurtz. It's more the collision, animation script, that kind of stuff.

Why use 24x24, go straight for the max (63x63 afaik), what I was saying is that I wasn't sure even 63x63 would be enough to really have long game of exploration. Well, maybe it is, 63x63 ta maps like epic fortress would take hours to explore even with a jeffy.

Maybe instead of spending lots of times with models and decently looking game components, try work with filler content to test the concept out. I have about a dozen game concepts that I thought were a good idea and started throwing together only to realize they wouldn't work out so great so the time invested in a polished game wasn't worth it.
It might be doable but you will probably have to sacrifice some ideas for simplified versions. It does sounds fun, and makes me kind of think of dwarf fortress, where you can choose your man perks/ skills.

Use your legos, Kaiser!

zwzsg wrote:But my map you mentionned earlier is procedural So is the "map hijack" mission in my BA mutator. Also, the random procedural bit was IMO the interesting aspect of your project.

The poly count isn't what make high number of features or gaia units eat all your megahurtz. It's more the collision, animation script, that kind of stuff.

Why use 24x24, go straight for the max (63x63 afaik), what I was saying is that I wasn't sure even 63x63 would be enough to really have long game of exploration. Well, maybe it is, 63x63 ta maps like epic fortress would take hours to explore even with a jeffy.

your procedural map is full of winsauce, but I don't see us making nice realistic textures via the procedural path. Feel free to comment otherwise tho, you are a magician with dem bits.

Did you mention you were thinking of crafting? Crafting resources tools and weapons seems like it would be a pain, but maybe a simple system wouldn't be too hard to set up.

Also: I've asked car about this:

we've got carrepairers castle, which uses terrain deformation to dynamically align the heightmap to a feature.

It didn't seem like it was a dynamic system, but more of a morph per piece system. Unless of course Car was just blowing smoke up my ass.

It's dynamic in the sense that it terraforms when you build the tower, and detects nearby towers to make bridges between them. It's not dynamic enough to detect the shape of any unit you build. Needs specific unit setup and experimentation.

gawd, it just begs for spring version of the most awesome wc3 mod.

so, ill give some suggestions, that are easy to do (hopefully) or already exist in another games.

players pick 1 unit class at the very beginning of the game (bobs contact).
-builder (few players will be able to pick this one, can build AND harvest)
-basic marine (same, few players can pick this one) after getting some exp player will be able to pick class (something like 0k but not chosed at the game start) its basicly all about morphing. classes would be like : tank (more hp, less damage) assault (more damage, less hp) sniper, scout (actually mix of assasin/scout/sapper, fast movement speed, can place few mines, some shitty turrets just for support, shields (like BA one, but much, much smaller, like in HALO )),
-'herbalist' (builder will build for him 'space farm', herbalist will morph it into one of ... many farms, which he will use to produce 'potions' (as long as i realise inventory doesnt exist in spring, i would suggest that farms produce small drones that will give special abilities to friendly unit after contact)) abilities would be like, more damage, speed, hp, invisibility, immortality, med, energy.
- medic - well, self explainable. again, spring might be the problem so i would suggest regular spring repair (for 1 unit) healing bacon (like nano, area med). dunno what else is possible, probably boring class :C
- mage ? warlock ? templar ? only unit that needs energy to operate (energy potions, will produce small amouth of E itself). abilities highly limited by spring
- engineer - only class that can drive vehs, using collected resources by harvesters to create vehs in the lab built by builder.

maps

well, u make one huge map, where resources are randomly ( i think thats important) scattered all over it. second, more complicated option is to make same map, but which is possible to see/scout only during day (smoth's maps thingy?) during the night, 'playable' are of the map will be reduced (using moor's 'map edge vanishing effect') so u basicly need to fight and survive (no harvesting ? well, u had whole day to do that!)

models

hurr, well u got legos. but from the other side, making classes is basicly creating 1 marine models and then adding backpacks, different helmets etc. so it shouldnt be such a huge problem. would be nice to use cremuss models as buildings :}

summary - well, i probably missed many points. anyway, every class is important here and team wont end the game without one of them (well, they will without medic maybe, but not builder). according builder, he will make many buildings, which will work like workshops for other classes. tbh only issue i see in this idea is crafting, without which this whole idea fails shouldnt be that hard to do i think. all it needs is quite big team of creative coders.

I like the idea and I agree that you should make a gameplay test with existing models before putting a lot of work into it. These kinds of games are hard to design in a way that doesn't have an obvious solution so you would really need to stop and flesh out the mechanics so you have a good idea of how it would fit together.

You should be able to make maps large enough and players small enough to have a big enough play area. I've played a few wc3 maps like this and they don't have to be particularly large.

Back to the procedurally generated map idea you could always create the map as the player explores it. This also solves your problem of visible terrain through los. A heightmap could be procedurally generated at the beginning of the game and stored in an array in chunks, when a player is near a chunk the chunk would be terraformed in with lua.

Monsters would need to spawn at the edge of the known chunks so chunk spawning range would need to be quite a bit greater than los. It would take a bit of trickery to make the monsters spawn in a consistent way as more chunks are uncovered. Maybe a system of virtual monster paths could be devised that spawns monsters at the nearest real spot along a path.

Unfortunately the texture of a map cannot be manipulated via lua so this idea sort of falls flat on it's face.

Edit: If you can edit the texture while the map is loading this idea is still possible. Simply use a fog gadget and deep water for the unexplored parts of the map and match the texture up with the terrain which is going to be placed there.

as long as i realise inventory doesnt exist in spring

abilities highly limited by spring

Wombat, who filled your head with such lies?

then show me game with unit which can collect items and unit with active abilities (more than just a dgun)

Monsters would need to spawn at the edge of the known chunks so chunk spawning range would need to be quite a bit greater than los. It would take a bit of trickery to make the monsters spawn in a consistent way as more chunks are uncovered. Maybe a system of virtual monster paths could be devised that spawns monsters at the nearest real spot along a path.

Moor

If you want you can take chunks from contact to test your game. It sounds like there is a lot of similarities. but you might have to rewrite some of the unit scripts from scratch since mine are huge and messy.

If you ask me, spawn monsters during the day, have all of them assault the player's base at night. So the player could thin out the monsters during the day by fighting only a small number at once.

Wombat wrote:then show me game with [..] unit with active abilities (more than just a dgun)

Kernel Panic and Gundam are just the ones I've worked on. Technically Cuberor's Finest also has the jumpjet but that's just one ability and THIS has the volley fire mode for the Longbow.