New game idea, but is it possible ?

[sunspot]

Hey guys,

A few years back I had some spare time and created a custom game mode. Since then time ran out and I couldn't work further on it. However I had fun doing so, and luck seems to have it I have some free time again (less demanding job).

Now I like to create a new prove of concept and if it works hell why not flesh it out in a full game that is playable. It should be a website/spring rts hybrid kind of game and I'm not entirly sure that is possible. I would also settle for a java client/spring rts hybrid. This is what I was thinking about.

The game itself will have tactical battles where you have a set amount of units like warhammer tabletop that you bring to each battle. The goal is to capture checkpoints in three lanes (MOBA style) to open up an attack route to the enemy base and destroy it to win. Each unit has a timer value that when it gets destroyed you have to wait out the timer to spawn it again, so you'll never end up without units and keep having a chance to win the game.

Now on top of those tactical battles you need something to design the army you gonna bring to the battle. In that aspect I was thinking of building a website/java client lobby, where you spent credits to buy booster packs, that contain some units. Those units you can then organise in armies of a set size or point pool (each unit costing x points depending how powerfull it is). In a later step I might also like to make units moddable where you can attach mods to it ... BUT that seems a whole other can of worms together that I won't open yet. Furthermore will each tactical battle take place on a RISK style world map where you fight vs an other faction to gain control for bonusses (more credits after you win a match, more rare units in a booster, or something likewhise)

So thats the core of the game I like to make. With the tools at hand I will probably come against a few challenges.

- ChiliUI for creating the tactical battle HUD. I wrote a tutorial about using ChiliUI years ago, but I was no expert I had to learn everything on the fly and I'm still no master of it.

- After a match starts, I need a way to load a players army from the website database. I've read about lua sockets, so maybe a REST call to a http link over tcp to get the info as JSON data. This needs to be securely ofcourse so another player can't get it's hands on an army he doesn't have rights to

- Creating a java or website lobby might not be as easy as it sounds to get it connected to spring RTS

- Is it even possible to spawn units in Spring RTS , or does every unit needs to be build (there is a workaround for this ofcourse, make the base build them)

- Is it possible to script that you can only have x units of a certain type so you don't spawn more of a kind then you own in your army

well you see I have a lot of questions, before I even can consider starting on this project. Nothing is more frustrating then starting on something and mid way discover it isn't possible.

I would appreciate any feedback you can give on the questions i'm puzzled with.

sincerly

Sunspot

[FLOZi]

Welcome back Sunspot

I believe what you suggest is possible, certainly ZK goes some way towards many of your goals already.

I can answer these confidently:

Is it even possible to spawn units in Spring RTS , or does every unit needs to be build (there is a workaround for this ofcourse, make the base build them)

Yes, Spring.CreateUnit call in a gadget.

- Is it possible to script that you can only have x units of a certain type so you don't spawn more of a kind then you own in your army

Yes, there's a unitdef tag, unitRestricted (I imagine that only prevents building rather than spawning though) or you can code it yourself via a gadget and AllowCommand / AllowUnitCreation callins.

edit; Also regards a java website lobby, check out weblobby.

[Silentwings]

Having players modify the graphics of the units they use would be hard, but you could look at the game YAAG for a similar feature. Also I'm not sure if a game that's in progress would be able to communicate with a website, although a lobby that the game is launched from can (and this is done in currently popular games, see e.g. replays.springrts.com).

But after I skimmed through it, the rest of what you're trying to do seemed possible.

[sunspot]

Having players modify the graphics of the units they use would be hard, but you could look at the game YAAG for a similar feature. Also I'm not sure if a game that's in progress would be able to communicate with a website, although a lobby that the game is launched from can (and this is done in currently popular games, see e.g. replays.springrts.com).

But after I skimmed through it, the rest of what you're trying to do seemed possible.

Well I don't want it to change the looks tbh :) Just the stats , but I believe that to be equally as difficult, I'm not sure you can alter unit defs on the fly. Those files are baked into the unit if I recall correctly.

It would work something like, spawn a unit, look if it has mods attached, alter HP with 10% ... or something likewhise.

But this is just an afterthought to be real hounest, for the moment I like to just see if I can make something where people collect set units, and get them into a game

[FLOZi]

Certain attributes are mutable - HP is one of them. I made a 'buy a perk' system for Battletech which changes things like heat dissipation (stats based entirely within the game lua are easy to modify) , sensor ranges, ranges of e.g. missile type weapons and so on.

[sunspot]

Certain attributes are mutable - HP is one of them. I made a 'buy a perk' system for Battletech which changes things like heat dissipation (stats based entirely within the game lua are easy to modify) , sensor ranges, ranges of e.g. missile type weapons and so on.

hmmm interesting , That could make it possible after all. But like I said first prove of concept before I'm going full feature creep :).

I did find a nice json parser allready, for parsing json to lua arrays. That could prove usefull. I'm thinking when a game starts, make tcp call, fetch json string with army list, parse string and put army in a data structure to draw chili buttons with counters on screen to limit what people can build/spawn ... something like that :)

http://luaforge.net/projects/luajson/

btw Flozi do you have an up to date emptymod.sd7 that is compatible with the new spring ? Since some stuff has changed like the call to end a game being completly scripted now I would guess the old one won't work anymore ?

[Silentwings]

Well I don't want it to change the looks tbh :) Just the stats , but I believe that to be equally as difficult, I'm not sure you can alter unit defs on the fly. Those files are baked into the unit if I recall correctly.

It varies from stat to stat - and there are hacks you can do from (synced) gadgets that control what happens on e.g. UnitDamaged events and so on. You can't alter unitdefs on the fly but you can sometimes override their effects. It would eat up some cpu and you'd need to be reasonably competent with lua to do it.

something where people collect set units, and get them into a game

That's definately possible.

[PicassoCT]

Youre the man to do it- welcome back. Remember those 2 weeks. Wish all guys would approach theire stuff like this. :D

PS: Silentwings - he is reasonable competent !

[sunspot]

Youre the man to do it- welcome back. Remember those 2 weeks. Wish all guys would approach theire stuff like this. :D

PS: Silentwings - he is reasonable competent !

yeah resonable ... , now if spring would run groovy instead of lua ... I would be moderatly competent :D.

I'm pleasantly suprised that there is still work being done on ChiliUI I just downloaded the new master from git hub and the last commit was 7 days ago.

Just have some trouble finding a new emptymod with up to date files so I can start from a blank slate again.

BTW Silentwings

http://www.gravegast.be/~sunspot/temp/

here you can find my old work ... I never completed it cause at the time I started a new job and just didn't have the time anymore. I was working a lot at home as well and you loose a bit of that coding drive and rather play games then program them

[Silentwings]

Oh, nice stuff, in those days I only played :)

I don't know where to find a blank mod file, but if nobody has one then imo there should be one and I'd be happy to help make one.

[sunspot]

Oh, nice stuff, in those days I only played :)

I don't know where to find a blank mod file, but if nobody has one then imo there should be one and I'd be happy to help make one.

No worries just tried Flozzi's latest one and it still seems to work it loads a map at least so I'm happy for now. Next up is for me to get my chili powers working again and get a basic framework UI going.

Well after my pasta dinner :p devs need to eat appearently

[FLOZi]

Still keep meaning to make a new one.

[Licho]

Perhaps get zero-k lobby and take a look at ZK:Dota - it has commanders that select upgrades as they level up ?

[zwzsg]

You can't change unit stats on the fly ingame (except a few specific ones), but you can change unit stats during the loading stage. For exemple in Kernel Panic I have something that let people change any unit and weapon stats from a modoption in the lobby.

[sunspot]

You can't change unit stats on the fly ingame (except a few specific ones), but you can change unit stats during the loading stage. For exemple in Kernel Panic I have something that let people change any unit and weapon stats from a modoption in the lobby.

That could be quite handy as well. I'll keep this in mind, for the moment I'm just trying to get chili back to work. I downloaded the new master and place it in the LuaUi/widgets folder like I used to , but now my game won't show up anymore , so stuff has changed since then and I'll have to figure everything out all over again

[FLOZi]

Current 'bleeding edge' Chili will only work correctly on Spring 95

[sunspot]

Current 'bleeding edge' Chili will only work correctly on Spring 95

Well I got it working again in a sence that the game starts, chili won't show up yet. But it seems back in the day I used a shortcut and used camain.lua and cawidgets.lua from another mod to get chili working. Which isn't reflected in my wiki tutorial !!!!

So right now I'm figuring out what main.lua and widgets.lua actually serves for and learning how to bootstrap a vanilla chiliUI without any overhead of code from another project. Once I got that running , I'm updating my wiki tutorial with the new knowledge and rerunning the tutorials to see if they are still valid. Nothing more frustrating for people then broken tutorials and I don't want to be an author of one of those !

[FLOZi]

Did you remember lockluaui.txt? I always forget it

[sunspot]

Did you remember lockluaui.txt? I always forget it

nope I've put it in the gamedata folder. I just managed to load the gui_chiliguidemo.lua so yay we are a step further. What I did was copy the vanilla Spring lua files (main.lua, widgets.lua) , from the game LuaAI folder to the mod LuaAI folder. I also copied luaui.lua, from the game to my mod root dir. I first compared the camain.lua with the main.lua file just to be sure wth they where doing different. Except some code where they force someting out of a zip file there doesn't seem to be major changes. Guess only the author can tell what he was doing since he didn't wrote any documentation, and this is one of the cases that the code ISN'T the documenation :)

Basicly now I have the chili demo widget running BUT I still have the stock gui as well ... now to get rid of that one :)

edit: Good thing someone wrote a tutorial for doing that ... hey wait ... I wrote that one ... DOH !

[jK]

Current 'bleeding edge' Chili will only work correctly on Spring 95

Well I got it working again in a sence that the game starts, chili won't show up yet. But it seems back in the day I used a shortcut and used camain.lua and cawidgets.lua from another mod to get chili working. Which isn't reflected in my wiki tutorial !!!!

So right now I'm figuring out what main.lua and widgets.lua actually serves for and learning how to bootstrap a vanilla chiliUI without any overhead of code from another project. Once I got that running , I'm updating my wiki tutorial with the new knowledge and rerunning the tutorials to see if they are still valid. Nothing more frustrating for people then broken tutorials and I don't want to be an author of one of those !

95.0 will contain a new handler.lua (atm just used for LuaIntro), best is to use lockluaui.txt and force using it.
With that new handler.lua ZK's modifications are deprecated and merged back into the engine + more. So no need anymore for custom handlers, instead modifications can be moved to an Utilities/* folder and so copying files between games becomes much easier.