Spring RTS Engine

Haven't had much time for spring in the last months , and now I noticed that fences (dragon teeth etc.) seem to be handled as units. I saw it in one of my maps with a KOTH script, where fences in the zone now counted as units and kept the counter running. This was different in the past.

Has BA changed sth. there? Or does someone happen to know if there was a change in the engine?

I do know that Bluestone changed this for some particular reason.... but I dont know what it was anymore...

Ah, OK, thanks! Shows that I really haven't been here for a while if it was still Bluestone who did it

Guess, I will have to update the koth scripts then...

They were changed to be units to remove an age old hack.

BA used to forcibly make all enemy features (including wrecks, walls, etc) visible to all through a gadget, with the nasty consequence that LuaUI wouldn't recieve any feature related callins for enemy wrecks, even though these wrecks were fully visible. Now (meaning, as of several month ago) its done cleanly with modrules, LuaUI FeatureXXX callins work, and in essence BAs walls were always stationary units, anyway. I'm sorry it broke your mutator - I didn't expect any fallout.

I'm not sure what you use walls for in KOTH, but if you want truly feature-like walls you could
(1) spawn walls as units associated to gaia
(2) use the same model (iirc you're using a mutator here) and add a featuredef for it, then call Spring.SetFeatureAlwaysVisible yourself

Thanks for the extensive info and tips!

The "problem" is not that the koth mutator uses fences/walls, but that the koth area counts as occupied as long as any unit of the currently occupying team is still in there.
Since it's comparably hard to remove fences/walls (except if you have a good control of the area and can suck them up with a builder), this potentially throws balance off, i.e. gives an advantage to the current occupier.

Luckily, the solution is not that complicated and just needs an additional if to ignore these unit types. In the back of my head, I anyway had for a while the idea, to look if I visually improve these maps a bit and re-release them.

To my mind considering DT as units makes a chance for a some kind of trickery. Enemy units attac them and do not take notice for more important/dangerous objects. With a large forces when you can not to aim each unit individually it have a matter.

You can check http://imolarpg.dyndns.org/trac/balates ... _walls.lua or just play, and realize that your point was taken care of.