Spring RTS Engine

Could Spring have a entirely 2D client- just with UnitIcons- basically the Minimap running ontop of headless?

Run a normal instance, hide all other gui, and resize the minimap to cover the whole screen? The RedUI minimap widget used to have a bug where it did this...

What's it for?

It's for running Spring without a 3d GPU, obviously.

This might be rather interesting, not even only for spectating, if someone would go this far.
We already have the minimap, tough its probably a hastle moving that one into software renderer, but in theory shouldnt be too difficult either.

Also just hypothetical, any thoughts on how one might couple this with vnc, so 2d output could be piped over network?

And a small question, why is there a seperate headless executable? Why not a dynamic loading executable?

would be cool to see this coupled with webgl for a demo viewer.

like a ta demo viewer- but for spring..

The idea was to keep it playable even on low tec.

I see that NOTA Lobby have someone - NOTA TV using SVG animation for show point moving on minimap as replay.

playerO1 wrote:I see that NOTA Lobby have someone - NOTA TV using SVG animation for show point moving on minimap as replay.

Yes, NOTA Lobby has dot-wars. But you can not play a spring-rts game, with only dotwars representation. Always got to have 3d view.

This was a request for headless spring with only minimap and gui.

Problem is- this is late-game architecture changing - so wont work.

My understanding is that on low tech, the primary bottleneck will be the CPU. If you're aiming at getting to OTA type specs, then you're going to have to go a lot further than making everything 2D, OTA used a lot of rendering hacks and tricks to get some basic things working that we take for granted

Right now the best you can do is lower the unit count to ~500 and turn down all the graphics