Spring RTS Engine

I aiwll make (remake) battletech soring game. who's with me?????????

FUCK

YEAH

knorke wrote:FUCK

knorke wrote:YEAH

I concur.
I have no skills in any module development area whatsoever, however, so my verbal and mental support shall be thrice the more intense!

Graet idea m8te! How come nobody thought about it before???? We need more people like you!! Just post your idea and I'll have the mod ready in two hours.

...Knowing spiked, he probably will...

seriously, hes a modeling machine...

this kind of project is always ambitious, but not impossible. Somethings you might want to consider are how to get the by part damage. everyone loves customizing mechs but id stay away form that, maybe variants for a mech/ vehicle (similar to livinign legends). i see you are doing clan and IS, so you need to plan how you are going to make use of there differences. are you going to have infantry? power armor? how will the economy work? are you going for classica battletech rules or mechwarrior 1-4? blah blah blah....

i wonder what pressure line is doing. also if you post some shots up on mod db you;ll get hit with a ton of assholes, but you might also attract some people willing to help out in the project.

you are going to solo this? good luck!

bobthedinosaur wrote: are you going to have infantry? power armor? how will the economy work? are you going for classica battletech rules or mechwarrior 1-4? blah blah blah....

i wonder what pressure line is doing. also if you post some shots up on mod db you;ll get hit with a ton of assholes, but you might also attract some people willing to help out in the project.

No infantry or BAs.

Economy has 3 modes; Beacons aren't done yet but it will basically be S44 flag gadget with some changes. Damage mode is done and working. Also, you buy units instantly and build orders you can't afford are disabled.

bobthedinosaur wrote:seriously, hes a modeling machine...

Thanks m8.

I might as well go ahead and SPAM MY IDEAS.

First off this has already been in development for a few weeks. I didn't want to publicize it at first due to my habit of starting something and then quitting after a week or two, but as I still seem to be raging ahead and we've actually put together something tangible, I figured might as well come out of the closet.

To answer some questions:

1 - CBT will be the primary source and currently many unit and weapon stats are based on their CBT counterparts (range, dps, armor amount etc).
2 - The basic game mode will be in the form of two opposing players (or teams of players) deploying their Dropship on the map and then spamming mechs, vehicles and VTOLs out of it with which to kill the enemy. Dropships will be the only player-controllable structure a player has; it will have defensive armaments and act as an entire base rolled up into one giant sphere. There will also be NPC-style structures on maps in "Territory Control" mode that will do various things such as be able to repair your units, unlock new units you otherwise wouldn't have access to, etc.
3 - As Flozi said there will be two primary modes of earning income; through damaging and/or killing enemy units (instant reward), or capturing and holding strategic locations (continuously streaming income). At the moment this is a modoption.
4 - There will be NO INFANTRY. This is a game about big robots shooting other big robots; a game in which every unit is a Krogoth. However I may, may, may decide to look at Clan Elemental as a sort of gimmick specialized unit. I envision them being like a little group of fleas bouncing around on their jetpacks shooting their little lasers and SRM-2s and generally being an annoyance to big Mechs. But nothing like "standard infantry". Our standard infantry are Battlemechs.
5 - There will be no Mech Lab or customization of loadouts. My approach is that there are more than enough Mechs of every caliber, size and conceivable armament that we can choose an individual type for every foreseeable in-game role so there's no need to have 6 different Mad Cats with different weapons. However I am not stringently sticking to canon weapons loadouts or stats, some units may have more or less weapons or different weapons than they "ought to according to CBT rules" to fit with gameplay balancing.
6 - Clans will obviously be a fuckton better than greasy subhuman freeborn scum. Currently there are two sides: Clan and Inner Sphere. Eventually if this project takes off I will morph those into Clan Wolf and Federated Suns, respectively, and do the major factions (DC, Lyrans, Free Worlds; Clan Jade Falcon, Clan Smoke Jaguar, Clan Hell's Horses etc) with various nuances and unit choices particular to that faction (as well as different textures). That's a long way off though.
7 - There will be "component damage" for arms, legs, torso etc that will have a variety of effects (leg damage will slow, torso/arm damage will destroy weapons in those locations). You will not be able to directly target these components however so their damage will be randomized more or less however some weapons (such as LBX) will have native and artificial bonus damage to some parts more than others.
8 - We will have jump jets because they are cool. They'll let your Mech jump up onto (or off of) cliffs or over hills or to make a quick getaway.
9 - There will be no melee bullshit because giant 50 foot tall robots swinging giant 20 foot tall axes is fucking stupid I'm sorry.
10 - We will have a rudimentary system for Active and Passive Radar and a reconditioning of the Radar System. Primarily, you will be able to turn Radar to Active or Passive modes. In Active mode radar works just like radar does. In Passive mode you will not detect enemy units outside of your LOS but you will become stealth and undetectable by the enemy unless in their LOS. We will also have Active Probe systems that will allow for both enhanced sensor range and detecting passive units.
11 - I already have a list of a bunch of different Mechs and other units that are planned for inclusion. Currently we have about 25 units (of which 11 are Mechs) more-or-less working in-game with their proper armaments and stats.

If you want to know more ask.

SpikedHelmet wrote: 7 - There will be "component damage" for arms, legs, torso etc that will have a variety of effects (leg damage will slow, torso/arm damage will destroy weapons in those locations). You will not be able to directly target these components however so their damage will be randomized more or less however some weapons (such as LBX) will have native and artificial bonus damage to some parts more than others.


If you want to know more ask.

Oh, that i shall. How do you want to archieve this? Unitvariations, quickly morphing when a part is overdamaged? You ve got to deactivate weapons for that, also got to have diffrent animations (weightshift)

By the time i hit this posts submit, the modells i guess will be done already, and as awesome as wolf-in-exils ones. No doubt about that. But the damage modell... i dont know how that shall work out. NEEDS MORE DESU- AHEM DETAIL!!! DETAIL DETAIL!

ammunition? are you doing the s44 way or? zwzsg made a true ammunition reloader gadget that i use in contact, you might want to play with that.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lDL9iZop5LY

spiked helmet presents... the crescents hawks revenges' revenge!

so is this RTS (build a base, etc) or RTT (given a loadout of units)

PicassoCT wrote:

SpikedHelmet wrote: 7 - There will be "component damage" for arms, legs, torso etc that will have a variety of effects (leg damage will slow, torso/arm damage will destroy weapons in those locations). You will not be able to directly target these components however so their damage will be randomized more or less however some weapons (such as LBX) will have native and artificial bonus damage to some parts more than others.


If you want to know more ask.

Oh, that i shall. How do you want to archieve this? Unitvariations, quickly morphing when a part is overdamaged? You ve got to deactivate weapons for that, also got to have diffrent animations (weightshift)

By the time i hit this posts submit, the modells i guess will be done already, and as awesome as wolf-in-exils ones. No doubt about that. But the damage modell... i dont know how that shall work out. NEEDS MORE DESU- AHEM DETAIL!!! DETAIL DETAIL!

I'm not completely sure of the details but we'll be using some sort of hit detection magic via "hitbox units" attached to parts of the model that will detect and manage damage to that individual part. It will most likely be simplified into Torso (which will actually be the primary part and not a hit detection thingamabob), Right Arm, Left Arm, and Legs. At something like 50% of damage to a component, weapons housed in that component will start to randomly die and Legs will cause the Mech to slow down considerably. When the Torso is destroyed naturally the Mech dies. When an arm is destroyed all weapons in that arm are destroyed. When the legs die the Mech will either fall over (and die) or become immobilized. I'm leaning towards immobilized because if the Mech just dies when the legs die then its really no different than being part of the Torso.

As for models I've already got my hands on a lot of assets from past Battletech attempts. i'm more worried about when it comes time to texture everything...

Why give resources for damage dealt? When winner of a battle not only gets to keep more of their stuff alive and have more units now, they also get economical upper hand from it...

Of course it's dependant on how those resources compare to the constant incomes too, but still it seems like a bad idea to make battles into pure damage dealing contests (even more than in your average rts) instead of giving them more interesting strategic goals.

I'm not completely sure of the details but we'll be using some sort of hit detection magic via "hitbox units" attached to parts of the model

or not.

Johannes wrote:Why give resources for damage dealt? When winner of a battle not only gets to keep more of their stuff alive and have more units now, they also get economical upper hand from it...

Of course it's dependant on how those resources compare to the constant incomes too, but still it seems like a bad idea to make battles into pure damage dealing contests (even more than in your average rts) instead of giving them more interesting strategic goals.

Just one available game mode.

d-gun wrote:so is this RTS (build a base, etc) or RTT (given a loadout of units)

RTT. There is no economy management; as I said, in normal game mode, everybody gets a Dropship, that's it. Everything is built or requested out of there. It's all about fighting.

you need variable speeds so light mechs can flank heavier mechs easier. such as low, medium, and high speeds.

for the looming texturing work, i'd suggest start off with a simple camo and slight details (basically a rough draft) since that would allow for the game to be developed faster (don't want to lose to much momentum) and you can always come back and redo textures to nitpicky details later.

FLOZi wrote:

Johannes wrote:Why give resources for damage dealt? When winner of a battle not only gets to keep more of their stuff alive and have more units now, they also get economical upper hand from it...

Of course it's dependant on how those resources compare to the constant incomes too, but still it seems like a bad idea to make battles into pure damage dealing contests (even more than in your average rts) instead of giving them more interesting strategic goals.

Just one available game mode.

Yeah but that doesn't answer "why" does it :D