Spring RTS Engine

Android_X has gotten to V0.3 yet no threads have been made, and only 2 posts according to search have ever mentioned this program, which I'm sure many many people would find useful, below taken from readme.txt:



Spring Single Player v0.3 for TA:SPRING 12th January 2006

SpringSP is freeware.

Installation:
Just put SpringSP.exe in the same folder as Spring.exe(where you installed TA:Spring) and that's it.


Hi all,

SpringSP is a program that sets up a skirmish against AI players while offline.

SpringSP was made in VB6 and needs the standard VB6 runtime files(msvbvm60.dll) to work.
msvbvm60.dll can be dowloaded from http://www.dll-files.com/dllindex/dll-f ... l?msvbvm60
after downloading it put it in the \windows\system32 folder.

Do not email the good people at TA:Spring with bugs reports about SpringSP because they didn't make it.

Most maps work but spring.exe sometimes says "cannot find mapname.smd", this is not a problem with TA:Spring but with SpringSP, please do not email me about this unless you know how to fix this. Any other bug reports or comments are welcome.

Have fun,

Android_X

Download V0.41 Here
Download 0.41 Source

PS: Although it says it doesnt support other races save arm and core, I figured that if you delete the names and type your own one in, say Taros or, Xect then it'll work just as well.

it looks quite better now
i gotta get it to see whats improved in code, as before it didnt launch in any map.

Sorry Chocapic but the 'mapname.smd not found' problem still exists. However I now know what causes this problem but am unable to fix it at this time.

The problem occors when the mapname of the sd7 file is different to the mapname inside the sd7 file. For example say I have a map called MetalHeck. The sd7 file in the maps folder is called 'Metalheck.sd7' but inside this file the .smd .smt and .smf files have the name 'MetalHeck'.

The problem is the lowwer case 'h' in the sd7 file. To fix the problem you need to name the sd7 file according to the mapname used inside the file so 'Metalheck.sd7' would become 'MetalHeck.sd7'. The map should now work with SpringSP.

You may ask why I can't fix this if I already know the problem. The answer is I don't know how to read inside archived files useing vb6(or any other programing lang), so until i can do that i can't add unit restrictions or fix this problem or automatically get the side names for different mods.

Any comments about SpringSP are welcome.

Android_X

Do you get the same bot errors with this program as you do with hosting a bot game in TASclient?

Yes you will still get the same AI errors as in TASclient.

well i got a weird bug, using it to spawn 2 ais with "random" on 2 valeys v1.
they just spawned at the same place and the game crashed after the boom with a spring crash (dunno if the map spawns are messed or not)
other than that it has a very pleasable GUI now

It's great!
Looks good, and makes a singleplayer game so much easyer to manage.
I didn't encounter any bugs (exept AI ones). Only player one game though.

So good work and keep it up ^.^

Very ... nice ..

I've got to DL it to check it out ...

I think I have a solution to the map names bug. Have SpringSP use the commandline 7-zip utility to read the contents of the sd7 files. You'd have to include this with it, but still.

yes its what spring.exe does i think

Thanks for the ideas but using the 7-zip commandline could be a bit messy and I have may have found another way...

I have looked through some of the TASclient code and I am trying to use the same dll it uses but I have to figure out how it all works. The good news is that once I can get that working I should be able to:

fix the map name bug,
and add unit restrictions,
detect the different mod sides automatically eg ARM/CORE/TLL,
and mabe preview the map minimap and look at map info like map size, wind strength, mex radius and gravity

Thanks for your help!

it'll be the offline lobby! lol ..

Wouldn't it make a little more sense to just have the lobby function offline? I mean, some of the things in the lobby are a tad messy, but it does the job. I like the OTA look though, very cool!

yeah!i wish the lobby looked like that!

I hope that theme isn't copyright!

Why oh Why duplicate the work?

The tasclient needs only 2 lines of code* to make it work offline, and is vastly more powerful in its settings.

*: one to allow opening a game without server connection, one to allow starting a game without server connection if only local and ai players are present

The tasclient needs only 2 lines of code* to make it work offline, and is vastly more powerful in its settings.

*: one to allow opening a game without server connection, one to allow starting a game without server connection if only local and ai players are present

I had the idea this was the case before I started springSP but because of my very poor c++ skills I would be unable to add the code to tasclient. Being able to use tasclient offline would be very cool and as the official spring client, nessasary IMO.

I made SpringSP mainly to practice my programming skills and only shared it because I thought someone else might find it useful.

You won't need any C++ skills to alter SpringClient, becouse it's written in Delphi.
Ans Delphi has many things in commen with Visual Basic.
(actually it workes 90% the same, expect that the text you code isn't Basic but Pascall, what is fits in the SSDN (Same Shit, Diffrent Name) thing)

I'm using Delphi becouse I used to do everything is VB and wanted more power. (hint, hint)

The multiplayer lobby is divided into 2 sections. The Delphi part, which is the client itself, and the Java part which is the server which controls game creation and stuff.

For the lobby to work singleplayer, all that Java that controls games creation would need to be re-writen (to Delphi or something else) or that Java code would have to go with the Lobby, adding the need for users to have a Java Runtime installed.

Betalord has already aknowledged this and is aware of the requests. It's in that Mantis thing.
Personaly, i think it should just be shipped with the Java code since most users (both Windows and others) have Java runtimes installed or easily available (unlike the .NET runtime which proved somewhat hard to install).

For 0.4 could you do two thigns?

First off, make the program remember the settings from last time/last battle played, and make ti save to script.txt rather than springSPscript.txt so i can parse ti with NTAI rathre than beign confused as to wetehr sprign has script.txt or springSPscript.txt as an arguement.

Secondly, the backgrounds of some fo the list boxes in Spring SP namely players and maps, are usign default, and I cant read the yellow text on them under the theem I have running on XP.