Spring RTS Engine

Is it possible to have a fixed camera position (no zooming in and out) similar to OTA?

Afaik yes, you could intercept the commands the user gives and re-interpret them as you see fit i.e. discard all cam scroll in/out commands and block changing of cam mode. I think it won't be pretty though.

Why do you want to do this? 3d is cool!

Iam a fan of oldschool rts and i dislike the zoom and icon wars similar to Supcom. I prefer the old OTA way. But if its not possible no problem.

You could unbind page up/down and buy a cheap mouse without a scroll wheel Then it would seem like it it really was old times...

rofl. no thx. I guess i have to play the old TA on gameranger again. Thx for the reply.

You can do it I have in the past

Is it easy to modify?

It is. But I have it as part of a gadget

If you don't like zoom, why don't you just.. not use it? You can also change the distance at which units turn into radar blips, set it so high that it's unreachable

AF wrote:If you don't like zoom, why don't you just.. not use it? You can also change the distance at which units turn into radar blips, set it so high that it's unreachable

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He wants to prevent OTHERS from using it.

He hasn't said that, he's simply stated he dislikes strategic zoom and icon wars.

When he says that in this subforum I think he means that he wants to block it for everyone.

It sounds like this could be done pretty easily. Lua has full control over the camera as far as I know and if there are problems it sounds reasonable that they would be fixed in the engine. But as a basic implementation you could unbind the controls with a gadget and force the camera back to the correct height if they try to circumvent it.

AF wrote:If you don't like zoom, why don't you just.. not use it? You can also change the distance at which units turn into radar blips, set it so high that it's unreachable

He's doing it for his own game, which is it's own project, and is intended to be played top down and at a set zoom level.

If you have trouble understanding this relatively simple concept, you might consider looking at SC and SC2. Two of the most played RTS games on the planet. Both have fixed cameras.

I have had a gadget for this for like 5 years now. Can we stop the arguing.

so post it then?

/edit
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thanks to editors of http://springrts.com/wiki/Lua_camState :)
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says date = "Mar 2011, 2011", due to copypaste fail, was made now

I thought I had the svn around here somewhere?

ODD

I don't think he wanted the code just to know if it could be done, that is why I didn't post the svn.

I'll put some links to my svn in my wiki profile.
*done* now I don't want to hear about how you lot cannot remember my svn.

knorke wrote:so post it then?

/edit
see attachment
thanks to editors of http://springrts.com/wiki/Lua_camState :)
/edit2
says date = "Mar 2011, 2011", due to copypaste fail, was made now

+1 for making it a widget.

luckywaldo7 wrote:

knorke wrote:so post it then?

/edit
see attachment
thanks to editors of http://springrts.com/wiki/Lua_camState :)
/edit2
says date = "Mar 2011, 2011", due to copypaste fail, was made now

+1 for making it a widget.

-1 if you are going to have it as part of the game, there could be an unfair advantage/gamebreaking/visual breaking etc of unlocking the camera. that is why I have the camera stuff as a gadget.

try the halloween thing, you will find it is a bit more than just the cam lock to the gadget.

'Part of the game' makes sense if there is something like shields being rendered in 2D, where zooming will mutilate the shield bitmap when it gets scaled on your screen. For anything normal/'vanilla' in spring with no crazy customizations, there shouldn't be any problem.

So of course the original starcraft was all 2D bitmaps, and zooming would have made no sense. For SC2 however, there is really no good reason it should not have better camera zoom.

at a higher zoom the amount rendered on screen is increased, this can mean that many people will not be able to handle rendering such a big battle going on. Thus people with better computers have a clear advantage.

Playing a game at a specified zoom level may be because of the decision to keep the art within a certain detail level and when you zoom out it becomes difficult to make out key shapes and elements of the art.

You can argue that it is bad design but to date, the only game that did zoom out well was ruse. Even then that was closer to a true strategy game than the hybrid that we have used since dune. I am not going to get into any sort of lengthy game development discussion but I FEEL if the game dev wants to lock your zoom level he should be able to. It is his design he has thought about it more than you have I am sure.