Spring RTS Engine

partial fix for war at sea at:
http://www.fileuniverse.com/?p=showitem&ID=1650
very early stages yet
some way of fixing the textures up needs to be found. Any way of getting springs texture limits increased so these ships can look as good as they could be? -I've only been working on the french ones and they still aren't the best but they give a good idea of what could be.

The shots at FU looks quite impressive, look at those water reflections.

the moddels seem quite detailed compared to old ta.

A question, exactly how you "update" the old mod file ?

moved all contents to the mod file, i guess replacing some prior content but spring crashes then.

I am running the original waratsea spring port by having extracted all the waratsea sd7 files into a fresh install of 0.65b1. The fix contains all the stuff I had to do to get it working. It replaces the game content file which now adds some build trees for the french and german airships. It also renames the 'ddweaps' forlder to 'weapons' and puts some of the textures from unittextures/tatex/textures up a level into unittextures/tatex, (where they should be) I'm pretty sure that this is all it took to get this up and running. As I said earlier, this is still a pretty patchy implementation. If somebody can improve from this that would be awesome. Definitely have to address the 2048x2048 limit for textures though.

There is a tradeoff of amount of textures vs max units that can run easily but then in War at sea there are generally fewer units in battles except that they are much more powerful and have way more weapons. enjoy!

Did you utilize more than 3 weapons per unit?
I cant anything that would be more suitable to show of the new improved weapons than a battleship...

mecha wrote:partial fix for war at sea at:
http://www.fileuniverse.com/?p=showitem&ID=1650
very early stages yet
some way of fixing the textures up needs to be found. Any way of getting springs texture limits increased so these ships can look as good as they could be? -I've only been working on the french ones and they still aren't the best but they give a good idea of what could be.

I'll see what I can do about the texture map I managed to cram a lot of textures into Spring for some other mods :)

Definitely a good idea. I don't know if anyone else has it working in spring but there is around 10 rotating guns on each of the battleships. (yeah the same as in TA i know ) to do it I think the existing weapons would have to be toned down so that more could be implemented seperately ie one weapon script for each turret rather than one for 4.

I have no clue about tying different weapons to different turrets though since everything I've done here so far has been text editor based.

Kuroneko wrote:

mecha wrote:partial fix for war at sea at:
http://www.fileuniverse.com/?p=showitem&ID=1650
very early stages yet
some way of fixing the textures up needs to be found. Any way of getting springs texture limits increased so these ships can look as good as they could be? -I've only been working on the french ones and they still aren't the best but they give a good idea of what could be.

I'll see what I can do about the texture map I managed to cram a lot of textures into Spring for some other mods :)

But still i hate this 2048^2 texture limitation. How can one be so blind as to build a new engine with such a weakness.

I understand that state changes eat performance, and that the the depricated "one texture per face" thing would kill the framerate.
But why not just, in case of overflow for one texture, try fitting it into two or three? even if those would leave lots of textures duplicated for performance reasons, this would still be better than a showstoppen "doesnt work" message.

I wouldn't worry about it. They've said on IRC that new model format each unit can have its own UV map, ranging anywhere from 128x128 to 1024x1024. I'd much rather have that than worrying about messing with the current crappy system

But WHEN?

Thats your only hope, seeing as the SJ's made this for older card texture space limits of 2048x2048. Newer Nivdia cards can support up to 8035x8035 texture space.

Well just have to wait for the new model format, and UV mapping.

TA 3D wrote:Thats your only hope, seeing as the SJ's made this for older card texture space limits of 2048x2048. Newer Nivdia cards can support up to 8035x8035 texture space.

Crazy, they wanted to make a game with a broad compatibility range.

TA 3D wrote:Thats your only hope, seeing as the SJ's made this for older card texture space limits of 2048x2048. Newer Nivdia cards can support up to 8035x8035 texture space.

Well just have to wait for the new model format, and UV mapping.

You are drasticly misinformed as to the reality of and signifigance of that figure. Doom3 and HL2 both used some texture maps larger then that and radeon cards still outpreformed Nvidia cards in visual quality. Dispite the fact that the new Geforce cards have better preformance ratings then the current top of the line ATI cards, ATI's mid range cards still give you way more bang for your buck then the geforce equivalents. If radeon cards couldn't handle texture planes larger then 2048x2048 no one with a radeon card would be able to render the TAS world maps, as most of them are texture files in excess of 10000x10000 pixles.

I'm sure they have a special algorithm for maps which doesn't load it all at once into memory...

And I, for one, won't be touching ATI for at least two generations, if not more. They've had plenty of time to get their asses in gear, and yet their drivers still completely blow ass. And that's just on windows... on linux, forget it.

Gnome wrote:I'm sure they have a special algorithm for maps which doesn't load it all at once into memory...

And I, for one, won't be touching ATI for at least two generations, if not more. They've had plenty of time to get their asses in gear, and yet their drivers still completely blow ass. And that's just on windows... on linux, forget it.

I far prefer ATI's drivers to Nvidia's... They seem to run more stable and the features they include acctually work, not like Nvidias monitor hardware accelleration features, which I'm pretty sure is just a option box not acctually coded to attach to any function.

textures done... Thanks kuroneko! -I had to cut them down pretty mercilessly, as you can see, but now I can go back and let some of the full size, really obvious textures through

SwiftSpear wrote:

TA 3D wrote:Thats your only hope, seeing as the SJ's made this for older card texture space limits of 2048x2048. Newer Nivdia cards can support up to 8035x8035 texture space.

Well just have to wait for the new model format, and UV mapping.

You are drasticly misinformed as to the reality of and signifigance of that figure. Doom3 and HL2 both used some texture maps larger then that and radeon cards still outpreformed Nvidia cards in visual quality. Dispite the fact that the new Geforce cards have better preformance ratings then the current top of the line ATI cards, ATI's mid range cards still give you way more bang for your buck then the geforce equivalents. If radeon cards couldn't handle texture planes larger then 2048x2048 no one with a radeon card would be able to render the TAS world maps, as most of them are texture files in excess of 10000x10000 pixles.

Sorry, neither hl2 NOR doom3 used any texture map bigger then 2048x2048.
In fact IIRC correctly, the largest single texture in doom3 was <1024x1024.

but reading your last two sentences... URG. do you have a clue?
Its not like meshes have to use a singly polygon... did you ever think that maybe one can just use 4x4 1024^2 tiles.
Do you have a clue WHY games look better on one architecture than another? like pixelshader precission, AAF algorithms with different angle dependency and mipmap range, for example?
_Please_ dont sprout nonsense here. Youre tone gives the impression that you know what you are talking about, and we dont want noobs to believe in bullshit, right?

Also, did you ever even LOOK at the terrain in spring and notice that the texture map is at a MUCH lower resolution than you think (which is masked by detail texturing)?

Yes who would have thought that the wooden decks on these battleships are just a single line of pixels replicated many times to cover a surface... he he

Holy moly, somebody actually managed to cram all of those textures in Spring!
I have a semi-working version of it sitting on my hd, but it crashes every 5 minutes.

Michilus_nimbus wrote:Holy moly, somebody actually managed to cram all of those textures in Spring!
I have a semi-working version of it sitting on my hd, but it crashes every 5 minutes.

It's not hard to fit the textures into Spring, it's just annoying :)

OMG tell me about it, I sat there for an hour and a half hacking these textures up... what a mission. I'll post the the texture pack on the weekend if anyone is keen?