Spring RTS Engine

So flozi and I decided it'd be cool to record our progress in slowly developing Mechcommander Legacy (previously Battletech Legacy) via a series of 'devblog' style videos showcasing various features and code implementation, since just typing out some long-winded posts is kinda boring both for us and anyone who decides to read it (not many!)

Hopefully people find it entertaining at least.

#1: Heat System and Jump jets

We're always looking for some extra help, LuaUI wizards, texture artists and voice actors especially. If you're interested in helping out, stop by our subforums here and say hi.

ehhh really cool and good idea, thanks!

i was barely able to hear the voice, even though i had everything on maximum volume, and it sometimes changed average volume during the video. otherwise.. very well, all of it!

nice video, sound is shitty, sometimes mic volume is ok, other times its shit and nothing can be understood even with volume on max. run a quick master on the recording and compress the shit out of the speech.

Cool stuff!

Yeah - looks promising. Will weapons be customizable? - I loved that part most in the those Mech games...

Actually surprised to hear about shitty volume. I mean, Flozi mentioned it, but to me it sounds absolutely fine. Well, I know at some parts the audio changes volume from clip to clip, but at no point (on my computer) are any parts hard to hear.

Maybe I have some wierd normalization sound settings on somehow.

Guess I'll have to redo the audio. But thankfully the next video should be perfectly fine, since I didn't do the audio.

It was fine spiked. People are spoiled by youtuber channels who re-re-redo their audio until it sounds clean and even on their 200 $ mics.

It's not the quality of the sound that's the problem, it's the volume.
Otherwise good video.

azaremoth wrote:Yeah - looks promising. Will weapons be customizable? - I loved that part most in the those Mech games...

Customisation is through purchasing of different variants of mechs, thoug you will be able to toggle individual weapons on and off to micromanage heat.

FLOZi wrote:

azaremoth wrote:Yeah - looks promising. Will weapons be customizable? - I loved that part most in the those Mech games...

Customisation is through purchasing of different variants of mechs, thoug you will be able to toggle individual weapons on and off to micromanage heat.

I was wondering Flozi, unit scripts are not dumb fbi text files anymore, wouldn't it be possible to pass in a list of weaponid's in a unit lua script file to alter the weapons on a unit ?

Or do unit scripts get read in and cached on starting the engine ? It would then technically be possible to change weapons behviour on the fly (probably not the gfx though)

Just brainstorming here with not to much inside knowledge on the engine btw ... just using common sence ...

sunspot wrote:

FLOZi wrote:

azaremoth wrote:Yeah - looks promising. Will weapons be customizable? - I loved that part most in the those Mech games...

Customisation is through purchasing of different variants of mechs, thoug you will be able to toggle individual weapons on and off to micromanage heat.

I was wondering Flozi, unit scripts are not dumb fbi text files anymore, wouldn't it be possible to pass in a list of weaponid's in a unit lua script file to alter the weapons on a unit ?

Or do unit scripts get read in and cached on starting the engine ? It would then technically be possible to change weapons behviour on the fly (probably not the gfx though)

Just brainstorming here with not to much inside knowledge on the engine btw ... just using common sence ...

Currently it isn't possible to change a units weapons on the fly in the true sense.

There are ways of doing it (give them all the possible weapons and selectively disable the ones this 'variant' doesn't have, or use lua projectile spawning to recode the whole weapons system) but

1. I don't really feel like doing it
2. I don't really feel those solutions are robust enough yet
3. I managed to convince Spiked it was not feasible, don't let him know otherwise
4. I think for fluff & balance reasons he'd prefer certain 'fits' to be available rather than full customisation, I might be wrong.

FLOZi wrote: 1. I don't really feel like doing it
2. I don't really feel those solutions are robust enough yet
3. I managed to convince Spiked it was not feasible, don't let him know otherwise
4. I think for fluff & balance reasons he'd prefer certain 'fits' to be available rather than full customisation, I might be wrong.

I can understand your reasonings :) To bad it isn't' easy to achieve though. I would think that when I spawn a unit I pass on a list of stuff and it would overwrite the stuff of the "blueprint" (unitdef) oh well maybe in a future spring release :)

Yeah I was a little off on my technical details (edited). Some parts of weapon handling are unit attributes and others unitdef, so it may be plausible in the future to do actual swapping but nothing in the pipeline that I know of.

sunspot wrote: I would think that when I spawn a unit I pass on a list of stuff and it would overwrite the stuff of the "blueprint" (unitdef)

When it is only about spawning units of the same type with different weapons, you could just have different variants of the same unitdef.
Like mech_laser, mech_rocket,mech_gun and so on.
With .fbi unitdefs that would be cumbersome since for each variant you have to copypaste everything into a new file and it quickly becomes confusing.
With .lua unitdefs it is easier because you can script loops to create the variants or have inheritance:
http://springrts.com/phpbb/viewtopic.php?f=14&t=28123

knorke wrote:

sunspot wrote: I would think that when I spawn a unit I pass on a list of stuff and it would overwrite the stuff of the "blueprint" (unitdef)

When it is only about spawning units of the same type with different weapons, you could just have different variants of the same unitdef.
Like mech_laser, mech_rocket,mech_gun and so on.
With .fbi unitdefs that would be cumbersome since for each variant you have to copypaste everything into a new file and it quickly becomes confusing.
With .lua unitdefs it is easier because you can script loops to create the variants or have inheritance:
http://springrts.com/phpbb/viewtopic.php?f=14&t=28123

Nice this proves the engine has a lot of flexibility. I don't understand why it isn't more popular for amateur game design affiniates. With a bit of study everone could make a game. Well the code anyhow, making 3D models, texturing them and animating them is still HELL at least to me . I sure hope you can get thru that hell with Mechcommander legacy Flozi

I let Spiked deal with that particular hell, my modelling days are far behind me

Except that last model I finally finished off more or less for s44, but yuri had to actually complete it


And yeah, I'll probably do something like my weapondef inheritance for the variants, though atm they are just copy-pasted.

Pretty nice guys. I appreciate your hard work after so many failed attempts at a Battle tech game on this engine. It almost makes me want to mod for spring again... Almost.

#2 - Radar & Detection

Godamn sexy voice actor on this one.

now, compare your volume level with this random video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I6GKsXV1tBE

my speakers were so loud I JUMPED IN MY CHAIR!

Yeah it's still too quiet, it is at least consistent throughout this one though.