Spring RTS Engine

Dear authors of the "TA Spring", I
want say something about your work:



1. So border of the map, ugly and not beauty.
Maybe can made, how this maded in game
"Dungeon Siege", or something similar to a fog ?

2. Strange and grieve, but unit scripts by "Original TA",
can make things, that "TA Spring" scripts - can not make.

Errrr....

the SY's dont MAKE the maps. They just made the graphic engians.

And you never mentioned "what is good".

1: It's something that has been bothering me as well, the way that these sharp edges appear make you feel less in a "world" and more in some sort of virtual test box.
I was thinking about extending the map renderer and mapconv so you can have some sort of low-res map extending beyond the borders. It would be low priority for the mapconv tile generator, have no pathfinding information, no metalmap, losmap, radarmap, centerheightmap... so increase in memory usage will be minimal.
If buggi reads this, maybe we can work on this together?

2: Yes and units in TASpring can do things impossible in OTA... there are always differences.

Oh, that's my map! :)

From now on I try to use a SkyBox with a bottom face having the same overall colour than the map border. It's not perfect but it makes the edge more discreet in top-down view. Also, a little trick that help, and that I'm using on my w.i.p. map, is to surround the map with a little moutain range along the border.

Point 2 needs some more clarification. What are those "things" possible in OTA and not in TA you are talking about? So far Spring opened far more possibilies than it closed. Need I go fetch the url to my walking and flying factories again?

Careful dinamik, don't want zwzsg to start getting medieval on you...

In the most recent version, 66b1, as far as I can see there is only one thing that's impossible in Spring yet possible in OTA - for a building to be effectively disguised as a feature. For instance, the pup-up dragons teeth in AA are useless now because once you see them, whether they fire at you or not, they are forever marked on the map. There needs to be a tag, ideally, like "notrace" or "nomemory"...

Aside from that, Spring does nothing but add features. (but lots of bugs still)

Well, I really don't like the ghosted buildings, as I think they take away from gameplay. But seeing as they are in, I really don't think you could have a "nomemory" tag, because it would just be too confusing and counter-intuitive.

What if we made mappers define a small tile to act as the map's "edge", and anything beyond the main maps edge is just rendered infinately in the small tile? If it becomes too unintuitive where you can and can't make units go we could always make some kind of lazer wall that radiates out of the edge of the map, ground/water surface. That can't be any less logical or workable then having the world simply dissapear compeatly at the edge of the map.

Caydr wrote:And you never mentioned "what is good"

VERY GOOD this - in the "TA Spring" is fully rotatable camera view !

zwzsg wrote: ...Point 2 needs some more clarification. What are those "things"
possible in OTA and not in TA you are talking about?...

For example is problems with VTOL.
So - "TA Spring" engine can not made:

You can do it in TAS with first person mode... Gunships won't, but normal aircraft will.

[edit] meaning it isn't a engine problem but a missing action AI...

I could have sworn I've seen planes roll in Spring.

same, and loop. :D

Zaphod wrote:1: It's something that has been bothering me as well, the way that these sharp edges appear make you feel less in a "world" and more in some sort of virtual test box.
I was thinking about extending the map renderer and mapconv so you can have some sort of low-res map extending beyond the borders. It would be low priority for the mapconv tile generator, have no pathfinding information, no metalmap, losmap, radarmap, centerheightmap... so increase in memory usage will be minimal.
If buggi reads this, maybe we can work on this together?

2: Yes and units in TASpring can do things impossible in OTA... there are always differences.

I think you're right - actually, the best approach would be to have a map "edge" as normal but have mappers define a square within the landscape that is the "playable map area" - everything beyond that is background. The map compiler can take that as a hint to reduce texture detail and suchlike in the external area. So a current map would be backwards compatible in that the playable map area is 100% of the map. It would also be fun to be able to add monstrously huge "features" for background outside of the map, as is often done in UT.

My only note is that a line should be (optionally) drawn on the ground to show this edge. It's all well and good that units can't go out there, but it would confuse a player to be wondering "why can't I order my units to point X?" Thus, it would behave just like the current game except that there's no visible sudden "edge" - and you'd see where misfired artillery came down.

I think the coolest thing that has ever happened to me in OTA was when a hawk felw in front of a BB and the BB fired at the same time and blew the hawk out of the sky. That was when i realised how totaly cool TA is! The firebats can hit the carriers, was my exact thought, as i had also found SC at that time.

The coolest thing that happened to me in TA: Spring was when the flares were added in and a hakw did a back flip, firing its flares and avoiding five missles fired by five missle towers. It was soooooooooo cool and now i wish i could recreate it and get a screeny.

Oh well....

Also planes can do barrel rools and flips in TA: Spring. And the 'bad' you pointed out wasent very bad, as sometimes in OTA a plane would do a barrle rool... right into an enemy flack.

If that pic is supposed to show a barrel roll, then it is supported in Spring. Nothing in Spring prevents you from randomly "turning base to z-axis ...".

Or maybe you are saying moverate1 and moverate2 are improperly supported which cause the regular way of calling barrel roll not to work? Then it's a very minor issue. I mean, it's fine to mention it so that it can be fixed, but you cannot really say Spring overall is bad just because it misses that. Meanwhile, just use another way than moverate to call for barrel roll. (There I could go on and provides script exemple, but I'm not sure it's worth wasting an hour on making one just for posting it here.)

zwzsg wrote:If that pic is supposed to show a barrel roll, then it is supported in Spring. Nothing in Spring prevents you from randomly "turning base to z-axis ...".

Or maybe you are saying moverate1 and moverate2 are improperly supported which cause the regular way of calling barrel roll not to work? Then it's a very minor issue. I mean, it's fine to mention it so that it can be fixed, but you cannot really say Spring overall is bad just because it misses that. Meanwhile, just use another way than moverate to call for barrel roll. (There I could go on and provides script exemple, but I'm not sure it's worth wasting an hour on making one just for posting it here.)

I tryed all, but in the TA Spring, VTOL can not make so !
Look zwzsg, please, please, please (please 3 times !)
if you can, make example, DO IT !!

I've seen fighters barrel roll. do this:

start a game with emptyai.dll as your opponent.

.cheat
.give 100 armhawk
then somewhere else
.give 150 corvamp

Now give the vamps to the enemy team and tell your hawsk to attack them. You'll see the kind of airborne acrobatics you want and much more.

the combat air test works well too

I just completly discarded the use of Moverate and instead scripted my very own speed-o-meter, and a resident stunt manager that randomly choose a stunt to perform between sleep of random² duration.

The difficult part was to force Spring to execute the script that I wrote, instead of trying to interpret the move now and hide/show in FirePrimary to its own odd fancy.

BTW, WD and FF porter, this unit sports a simple trick to force Spring to properly execute a FirePrimary which hide the wingtip missile then show it again.


Spring is Good
But Spring is different from TA.
Spring is harder to script.
Because Spring is not friendly with TA scripts
The Spring engine thinks it can improve TA scripts,
but the Spring engine is stupid
and the Spring engine breaks the script instead.




exemple ufo

What plane is that anyway?