Spring RTS Engine

The Idea is simple, the execution not. And here the Dev Eyes go up to see what else feature request got. And no, they stay here, right here with me. Oh, wait not many free devs at the moment. Well read on, though with no hands free..


Springs Cliffs are its only weakspot - because they cant draw what mother nature has, hard edges.. or to counter the reply. The engine certainly can draw those, but they dont are on par with the sweet rolling hills, the sand dunes and beaches.

Thus i propose and present. The Autocliff.
Step1:
To make everybody happy- make it fully optional. Some of the maps have nice mountains.. dont want to destroy that just for progress.
Now we still need to detect the steepest, unreachable regions with the nice stretchy textues.
Step2:
It then creates a poly stripe, and continues subdividing it until a userwanted level is reached.

Step 3. The Polygroups are either extruded inwards or outwards.(Mostly depending on the distance to the ground below).

Step4.
It then grabs into the colour of the map, and togther with the maps detail texture for said cliff.
Step5:
And if there is a single blade of grass on the map, default grasstexture on all triangles with a smaller slope then <<PlaceRandomMagicVarHere>>

normal maps?

are not the real thing when it comes to providing sharp edges? You yourself told me that polys are cheap and textures are expensive..

autocliffs require art assets, better to do it with 3d tiles like every other rts game.

The only issue is how to handle the tiles. We have no translucency with which to blend the tile edges. Features are prohibitively expensive as are units. So I thought well, can one write a custom shader to draw a 3d object with that? I don't have the GL knowledge. Zwzsg could probably shed some light on it. I have been itching to do a simple 8 tile set and seeing if someone could help with the gl portion of it. After that is worked out, I could model out several more tiles, then it would be easy to make an in game placer of them and have them raise and lower the terrain inside them so they are sheer cliffs etc. at that point in the planing phase pushing and impulse become issues.

I recall Kloot did something where he streched ssmf splats based on the normal of the surface, thus achieving cylindrical mapping. But the cost was an increased number of texture lookups.

I just went through the process by hand. Turned out pretty neat at the end.


In honor of all art i do and will do.. this is not complete - and can certainly not competete with something i would have done if i had free hand

Features are prohibitively expensive as are units

What in the features is the expensive part?

Presumably when handled by an automated utility, a single 'feature' could actually contain the entirety of the map's cliff geometry, also solving the "disappear on zoomout" issue.

Just to make things clear.. this in excess aint the ideal either.. noth everything in nature is sharp and edgy.

But to get stuff like this working:

it should be good enough..

Best part is it basically needs no need to change on the engineside- and if your mod has spider units (which would intersect with the cliff) you just turn this feature off..

and if your mod has spider units (which would intersect with the cliff) you just turn this feature off..

Apart from some suspension scripts on vehicles, and from that tripod aGorm made, i know of no unit made for Spring that has inverse kinematics. And units without IK are going to clip, no matter what you do.

The commanders walking knee-deep in soil in every mod that has them are a searing example of this.

Therefore, i postulate that minor clipping such as likely to be caused by spiders crawling on 3d walls is allowable.

Whoever is the art-guy at ueber - kudos to him for having style - and some superior skill at blending textures..

I tryied for 2 h to produce the same. I phailed miserably.
Sir if you read this, kudos to you, and i bow my unworthy head.

AO bake it with xnormal. then it will blend.
Also, massive edge highlighting needed.

Edit:
pure WM:


more 'pop':

Okay you convinced me Behe.. you and some cool tutor at the computer graphics course. Showed me in one minute how to do better with cliffs. Seems its not all in the texture.. I shall modell it in HighDef and then bake it down..

PS: Your cliffs look better in the editor. And they are the best looking cliffs of spring so far.

Its just a test.. nothing in here is final..

The second shot is also from the editor, I just tweaked some stuff. If you are interested, I will gladly share the world file.

I like your cliffs there, but they will be very hard to do right :)
Good blending on the bottom too.