Spring RTS Engine

What was feature placer?
Feature placer was what it is described as, a way of placing features.

What was the concept/history?
Feature placer was just that, something to place features on maps. After I saw that walls were created and leave a *feature* I was like, hey i can use this. I spoke with Argh, he like the idea, asked, hey can I use it, "sure." I chose to go on a trip and he ran with the idea making world builder, an ambitious take on what I wanted to do. When I finally saw what argh did, creating a projecting which required people to use a library of his for all this crap other than features.. I was incensed. That wasn't what I wanted to see. So I asked Gnomre to help me by writing an example code that places/dumps features. After that Lurker helped me write some code that allowed me to place random things. Having code that placed a feature, dumped the def and left it for a mapper to include was ALL I WANTED.

of course this was back when mapping was much harder and the def file was a huge leap over our bitmap based placement that required a file with feature names in sequential order. That was feature placer, there was NEVER any intent on adding a dependency. My next step was to have it dump all models, textures, defs etc that FP needed into a folder for the mapper.

NOT USE A FING DEPENDENCY.

Why are there 2 versions then?
While I was gone on another trip someone wanted a copy of FP standalone. Forb extracted FP from EVO to make this happen. At the time he was unaware of the fact that I was SITTING on a stand alone version that I was letting arturri use and test. No one seemed to have any interest in the stand alone so I left the project in my spring dir.. there probably is a zip file around here.

Why did evo then have a version embedded in it?
Simply put, I wasn't done and still am not. The version he had in there was there so he could have game specific files in his configs.

GAME SPECIFIC? WTF?
Because some games have corpses specific to their projects and a lot of mappers were including BA corpses on thier maps. IN OTA you had to have the object packs to use special objects. I NEVER WANTED A SPRINGFEATURES ARCHIVE. I instead wanted the mappers to inclue the feature defs for the features already in their map. AFTER THAT each map could have an alternate version of that def with features belonging to that game within there.

So an example would be: Desert valley has all of it's features in it, but if you played it in gundam, suddenly zeon bases showed up, neutral radar jammers were placed in areas etc. So project/game specific configs allowed for this.

Why you mad tho?
Because i had much larger plans when I came back. I was NOT contacted nor was any attemp to contact me made, otherwise I would have told forb I am working on a standalone, here try this. Either way, at the release of the standalone, I made myself very clear that I was NOT supporting it as it was dated code and I was honestly, and still am, pissed about it.

YOU SHOULD HAVE SAID SOMETHING!
I don't like to announce shit until it is done, feature placer was NOT ready for release I was maintaining it as a tool while I was learning how to gui etc. I did a lot of work, things like creating lua defs for all the features adding categories and scale was the next step but I WANTED TO HAVE A LIFE and had a chance, a once in a lifetime chance to go to antartica instead of hang around here in a community that largely forgets me.

What now?
Pretty much the entire situation is a festering wound between forb and I. We are still good buddies but the very existence of spring features and the fact that there is a version of FP that I constantly read about having issues is a frequent annoyance. I had been working on fixing and actually doing new and exciting things with jitter, spread and rand rotate. However, the constant frustration that is the current situation makes me throw my hands in the air, say screw it, and go do something else. I might move some of my code over to scened or whatever as the community largely has NO understand of what FP was supposed to be and the entire springfeatures debauckle has the community demanding people just stop using it. So whatever, I have sunk so many hours of my life into this thing and I because I don't feel you dinguses need to hear about every rewrite and are incapable of reading revision logs, I don't think I know what I want to do. It is a fun tool, I think it could be a lot of fun. Whatever, feel free to declare a living project deprecated, I appreciate that you guys just decide for me my project needs to die. Don't bother checking in or or asking me... THANKS GUYS, eat a bag of penis.

forgive my intrusion on your personal pain here for a moment.

what licence did you release your code under?
if no licence then a cease and desist for respective parties should have been respected.
if an open licence then perhaps you misunderstood how that works.

either way, good luck in letting go and moving forward to some productive path.

personal rant should remain personal

I was going to whine sooner or later about maps with TA corpses in them.

On my game I replaced most of the OTA textures, but kept the names, and deleted quite a few.

Later...I found that not only TA wrecks were found on some maps, but also that they showed with partially wrong textures!

maps should be self-contained. No dependency shit. That's asking for trouble.

It is PD but I would have preferred some kind of contact or just checking in with me about it. I did pop on for a bit. You gotta realize before all of that I had shut down GRTS about a year that time and was working to get a new project setup(my current thread in art and modeling).

at this point there is not an issue of what is legal or a C&D, it was more to the point of people just not contacting me or assuming things. I don't mean to beat on forb, I am just saying what exactly was planned and going on. The reason he had FP in evo was so he could do evo specific configs and put evo specific items in the maps like I was doing for GRTS. The feature placer in evo was just an early version and since GRTS was shut down FP was in flux as I was working on my new RTSCore project which was fixing and expanding FP at the time.

Just like anarchid deciding to moth ball FP in another thread because of forb's branch.. not his FUCKING decision and he could have just asked me.

NO ONE OF YOU are MY BOSS, and the entitled attitude about my time an energy has me pretty furious right now. Not many people are making maps anymore, including myself. So it isn't like forb's version of FP is a bad thing beyond the fact that he didn't realize that the one on EVO was specifically there for him to do features SPECIFIC to evo, same as the GRTS one. I had the standalone for all other things. I am going to download the early version I posted for arturri, I wonder if it even still works.

I mean really, between the fact that people largely seem to just ignore the fact that I exist or ONLY CARE ABOUT MY PROJECTS WHEN THEY WANT ME TO DROP EVERYTHING AN SERVE THEM.

I am not sure, these are the "facts" as they were, I am not even sure what version people talk about with respect to FP. When I put out a new release IF I deem it even worth me sinking more time into it, I am going to rename the fucking thing so I can tell what tool people are crying about. I might not even bother, you guys can use SCENED and Anarchid decided to declare FP dead on his own.

I christ on a crutch, I only go married last weekend, in another state, it isn't like I have not been busy enough. Or the fact that I am working RIGHT NOW on something or that I have a thread where people can POKE and go is it dead about any one thing I am involved with..

Personal shit is one thing Raaar, shit with the project and the fact that people just make assumptions is another matter. Dependencies are something I loathe. Games can have dependencies but maps should not. I tried to be optimistic about it but I don't agree with the approach and that isn't what feature placer was meant to be.

I think you're overestimating the issues with FP. Personally I think it's fine and having FP's feature load as part of the "default map blueprint" is really good for now regardless if you use FP, Scened or something else to place features.

About dependencies, I think it's perfectly fine for maps to have both explicit (e.g. Spring Features) and implicit dependencies (e.g. Gravitas). Spring maps are really "feature poor" if you think about it. There are very few urban maps, and it's rare to find nature-based ones that look astonishing thanks to the features used (only beherith's dynamic trees comes to mind). In part this is due to a lot of maps using just the default engine feature sets, and also due to map makers avoid large amounts of custom feature types because of the the map resource limits.

Anyway, it's up to you how you want to manage user resources I think!

I was trying to say that I agree with you that maps shouldn't have dependencies. I wasn't blaming you or anything.

The thing that irritates me is, you got all upset because I made it standalone so that others could use it. A bunch of people asked for this btw and you made it clear that you were working on the next iteration (which never materialized) that was rewritten and significantly more advanced. Obviously, FP would be supplanted by your next iteration, but you got upset that it existed outside of evo, which makes about as much sense as a screen door on a battleship, and stopped working on it altogether.


Bonus back tot he future reference.


Sidenote: Funkencool added some chili stuff to make it easier to select features from the build menu, but that's window dressing. The code of FP hasn't been touched... EVER, except by you.

I'm getting tired of you acting like I committed some sort of mutiny by making it more accessible to others to use. That was the whole point in the first place (people widely using it).


---
I didn't read your posts, btw, not out of anger, but out of time. I will read them when I get a moment to spare. Sorry for that.

Ok, read them quickly...

Dude, you act like any of the code changed... None of the code changed! Not one freaking line! I didn't make a frigging fork, I just abstracted it so others could use it (and frankly, abstracted is a hell of a lot more convenient for me).

You want to make features get dumped into the map. That is silly to duplicate models and textures. That's just plain not thinking for the future. Spring features can evolve and since it's on rapid any version of it is fair game and not hard to get for clients. SF makes it extremely easy to change feature properties because you can include the changed defs in your map which then override both your game and sf!

Off of that shit...
Congrats on getting hitched! You and Krystal were made for each other in all the right ways and I'm happy as hell for you Remind me to ask you what took you so long

Original Contritbuter is the one getting all the (f/b)lame! And we have two contradicting philosophys in the ring- in the left corner with his eyes on the ground at hand- is smoth, and in the right, with the eyes on the horizon in tomorrowland - forboding.
Both have reasons, both have time, lets fight it out - in blood and slime!

3..

2...

1...

FIGHT!

+1 for making things self-contained, at least maps. Otherwise is just asking for trouble, I have personal experience from bundling some units in anteer strait map, they behave differently depending on what game you use for playing it. And then the map breaks because of new spring version. It is really just asking for trouble. A map should be a map, a piece of core prime earth.

Of course enetheru is also right but there is also a value in amicable resolution of discrepancies.

I think you're overestimating the issues with FP. Personally I think it's fine and having FP's feature load as part of the "default map blueprint" is really good for now regardless if you use FP, Scened or something else to place features.

The feature set loader is, indeed, good. A small piece of code that does a single thing, but does it well. Oppa unix style.

We've had this discussion enough times - and afaics this thread is a reasonable summary of all sides (or pm me, if you think otherwise). I suggest we call it a day & move on, just link back to this thread if the information is needed in future.

Locked.