Spring RTS Engine

Lately I've read several posts by people requesting an easier way to upgrade from Mex to Moho. Anyway, a while ago I sent this PM to Caydr, but we decided not to post another request. Seeing as a few other people have mentioned this, I thought i'd post it and see what you guys think;

What I was thinking was when you double right click on a mex, if you have a con unit selected which can build a moho mine it would reclaim the mex and build the better one. That saves a lot of micro time. Same with moho geothermal powerplants. It doesn't make much sense with adv solar collectors or moho metal makers, of course, but it makes a lot of sense with those two buildings.

Now, of course if you do think this is a good idea, we have to get a developer to implement it, which is a problem because they are so busy already, but another problem would be how the mod actually indicates that one unit is an 'upgrade' of another.

I reckon the mod should be able to specify a keyword. If that keyword is in the unit description, then the characters immediately preceding it would refer to the upgraded unit.

Say the keyword was "Advanced ". That means that when you double left click on a "Metal Extractor" it searches all the buildmenu's of the units you have selected and looks for the description "Advanced Metal Extractor."

how about allowing orders to place buildings at the same spot as an existing building. When this is done, the existing building is automatically reclaimed before building the new building, same as happens with stuff like trees at moment.

Possibly get the cursor to flash or something to help prevent accidently reclaiming buildings when you thought you were going to build next to it, and not on top of it.

I am all for some type of one easy step upgrade to moho mine solution. To me its up to the devs to decide what priority they would place on it.

I want double right click because then you don't have to find it in the menu.

Not smart and not a good solution.

For one, there's plenty of mods whose "advanced" Metal extractors and geothermal powerplants have multiple versions; AA for example has no less than three advanced geothermal structures and two different advanced metal extractors per side.

Second, this ties in a great deal in the overall argument concerning micromanagement and how much work the computer should do for you. Admiteddly, this was a headache in TA, but in Spring, its far less of a problem because when you move a building over a current building, it turns yellow and not red, so its very simple to set a con unit to first reclaim a mex and then build the desired moho mine over it in one go.

I think this is one instance where the player shold actually be arsed to simply reclaim-build on his metal spots.

Dragon45 wrote: Second, this ties in a great deal in the overall argument concerning micromanagement and how much work the computer should do for you. Admiteddly, this was a headache in TA, but in Spring, its far less of a problem because when you move a building over a current building, it turns yellow and not red, so its very simple to set a con unit to first reclaim a mex and then build the desired moho mine over it in one go.

No it doesn't! It turns red, and you can't assign the order till it's been reclaimed!

Doomweaver wrote:

Dragon45 wrote: Second, this ties in a great deal in the overall argument concerning micromanagement and how much work the computer should do for you. Admiteddly, this was a headache in TA, but in Spring, its far less of a problem because when you move a building over a current building, it turns yellow and not red, so its very simple to set a con unit to first reclaim a mex and then build the desired moho mine over it in one go.

No it doesn't! It turns red, and you can't assign the order till it's been reclaimed!

Tested and verified. You only get a yellow auto reclaim order for reclaimable features.

So it should be made possible then.
Self-D your mex to replace it is a waste. (and in some mods it takes 5 sec time). Make the reclaim and place procedure automaticly. Wasn't this suggested a year ago?

Implement it and test it till its bug free and then send a patch to Zaphod and im sure he will look a lot more favourable on it.

That is probably a work around hard to make.
It would probably be easier to make it so that regular metal extractor were made reclaimable. (not every building as it could make you do mistakes)

This is GroupAI territory and falls directly udner the arguement of what is too much automation.

Modmakers could solve this anyways by letting mexes build smaller units as "upgrades", that then sit ontop of them working in the same way nanotowers work.

It is group AI territory. The argument is that it should be built in XTA AI territory.

There is no XTA AI territory, unless you use the non-groupAI method I suggested above. Otherwise what you'd be talking about is sub-AI territory which affects all mods not just XTA.

And I doubt that it would be prudent to modify the spring engine to contain code that only executed specifically for XTA.

Well okay, you've won me over. The double right click idea wasn't my brightest... I hope we get the auto-reclaim thing though, whereby building a moho mex over a mex automatically orders the mex to be reclaimed.

Oh, and by the way, HAPPY_NEW_YEAR!

Edit: But it clearly doesn't fall into the groupAI arguement. I mean, if it's implementation is a groupAI, how does that change the fact that you are issuing every order? I mean, it's not like you will do it any different to the AI, but you'll be slower and all.

Well to me, its a mixed bag. It would be nice to auto reclaim if u want to place it there...

However, what if you are so busy and in a rush and you accidentally que something like a fusion over your adv. lab or something w/o paying too much attention as you are getting attacked or attacking or spotting or whatever.

It can go either way. Personally, I vote no. Doesn't take long to self D the mex (instant in most cases, cept for FF) and just place a moho. Annoying yes, but it works and its fast.

Play on map with large extraction radius. Build the moho mine next to the basic mine!

jellyman wrote:how about allowing orders to place buildings at the same spot as an existing building. When this is done, the existing building is automatically reclaimed before building the new building, same as happens with stuff like trees at moment.

Please no, I would hate losing my fusion because I misclicked when placing a dragon teeth next to it, or similar. Don't auto reclaim my own building!

Zwzsg wrote:Play on map with large extraction radius. Build the moho mine next to the basic mine!:lol:

yup, it works too, and reclaiming the basic mine afterwards doesn't boost the moho mine's extraction beyond their combined extraction. If your basic happens to be an exploiter, then that's just a no-brainer.

Guys, obviously not just any building will be reclaimed. It would be the equivalent building. And you can't just say, well it's okay on some maps, because I many (most, actually) of the good maps have mex radius almost exactly equal to the size of the patches. Plus, it's a waste of space to have a mex setting there, when that space could be used for more useful things. (Like a free metal generator)

The question I suppose really is how will it be determined if a unit can be built over another?

It could be simple and uncustomizeable, like Geothermal plants can be built on top of other Geothermal plants, units that mine metal can be built on top of other units that mine metal. But I don't think this is a very good solution - you might by mistake replace a moho mine with a mex!

Somehow the modmaker needs to be able to define which units are replaced by what. Maybe it could be as simple as that, actually.
In one of the mod's data files you could have something like;
(Note this is a not a unit tag)

Moho Mine is built over{
Mex
}

Super Adv. Geothermal is built over{
Geothermal
Advanced Geothermal
}

and this information is passed onto the gui and not really handled much by spring. So I guess that makes it a request for the new GUI (it feels like we have been talking about that bloody platform independent GUI forever!) more than one for the spring engine.

it'd be FAR simpler for the mod maker to allow the unit to 'upgrade' itself i think. nice idea just difficult to implement, i quite like the idea of making mexes and geos reclaimable, i mean if u try to stick a DT nearby and get it wrong it'd take a lone con ages to reclaim a geo neway so im sure u would notice and stop.

how about holding alt while placing a moho onto a mex will automatic reclaim it, otherwise it won't

There's only 1 or two units that acctually need to be built on top of another unit with any reasonable regularity. It's probably best to just do a simple tag addition in this case, since the functionality would be really nice to have now and for all mods, and complicated workarounds under the maby in development new scripting language won't nessicarly make the functionality easily available to all mods that might want to use it.