Spring RTS Engine

What should I make next?

* Another Remake?
* Original Map?
* Video Tutorials?
* Continue the Reference Documentation?
* Research and Development?

enetheru wrote:What should I make next?

A sandwich.

gajop wrote:

enetheru wrote:What should I make next?

A sandwich.

what do you want on it?

enetheru wrote: what do you want on it?

Whatever you have as long as its a modular sandwich.

R&D

My advice: Don't ask. Trust you own judgement on this. No-one probably knows you like you do.

I think that could even be true for a big part if you were thinking about getting more involved with an existing specific project (i.e. a game). Sometimes you know better what you have-to/can offer a project than (the people in) the project.

I must admit though, I have most fun when I try to find a niche, try to be a pioneer, try do do something someone else hasn't done before, in a certain way or within a certain domain. (Being a pioneer is probably an illusion most of the time but that didn't stop it to motivate me at times )

Combining "R&D" and what Firestorm just said:
--- see how fast you can remake an arbitrary map using your current "tileset".

FireStorm_ wrote:I must admit though, I have most fun when I try to find a niche, try to be a pioneer, try do do something someone else hasn't done before, in a certain way or within a certain domain. (Being a pioneer is probably an illusion most of the time but that didn't stop it to motivate me at times )

then my personality compliments yours. I take proof of concepts and break them down to digestible info. New stuff isn't my strong point. I was thinking bridges or feature cliffs as an r&d effort.

Anarxhnid wrote:see how fast you can remake an arbitrary map using your current "tileset".

i like this idea. It took me ages to make charlie because of the learning curve.

Really I'm just looking for what will have community support so i can benefit from mutual motivation. Perhaps even collaboration.

Well, if you want a request :p I don't have one personally but...

How about a seven islands remake? It's probably way to easy for you but everyone so often people ask for one and currently we don't have a functional version of it!

Perhaps even collaboration.

If you find the idea of 3d-model metalspots allowable, i could make some if map concept affords. Aside from that, some smaller new map would be interesting, too.

Silentwings wrote:How about a seven islands remake? It's probably way to easy for you but everyone so often people ask for one and currently we don't have a functional version of it!

thats a pretty uninspiring map, it could really use some feature cliffs to make it prettier. hmm.. R&D feature cliffs seems like a likely target.

I would have to start developing "tilesets" so that feature cliffs make sense as they would need to integrate seamlessly into the surrounding terrain.

I wonder how shading would look, the differences between features and terrain, LOD, view distance etc. experimentation would be needed.

I've made a cliff tileset in the past its much easier in 3D than isometric.

Anarchid wrote:

Perhaps even collaboration.

If you find the idea of 3d-model metalspots allowable, i could make some if map concept affords. Aside from that, some smaller new map would be interesting, too.

What benefits does a 3d metal spot provide?

I would imagine it would be as a feature, non blocking that sits in the ground... perhaps replacing the terrain..?? what do you have in mind?

what do you have in mind?

Pretty much being able to put up some potentially interesting low-amplitude geometry instead of just texture.

I've done some dabs at this:

But not (yet) anything really integrated with map (and its texture).

Feature cliffs sound much more beneficial but also hard to implement. There's at least one precedent of those working, however, see this.

Of course, black mescaline was all manual i think. Being able to do it automated from sculpt, based on incline values, or in any other non-manual way... pipe dream world :)

FFA , small game, 1vs1 maps are more in demand with the Zero-K community

Do whatever you want to though. Perhaps remake a few old maps for practice, final product is quicker to achieve and you have a base to work off of

OK, so I've figured out what I want to do. thanks for the input.

I'm going to try to do a remake using my existing assets and see how long that takes me.

After that I'm going to make feature cliffs as a tileset that can be added to maps. sort of like the way starcraft has cliffs. or red alert etc.

placing them will be manual, so its not going to be really user friendly to begin with. an auto placer would be awesome.. but outside the scope of a beginning project.(and I cant code that well, although its entirely doable)

I'll start with my existing cliffs, scale them up to be useful and see how that works.

Then i'll think about making more tilesets.

Hm well there was a (?)~300kb challenge some time back(although I guess it is over by now). If you are into that sort of thing, you could try doing a tileset-based map using lua that is really small..