Spring RTS Engine

I was playing OTA (As in OTA OTA, not Spring:OTA) And i suddenly noticed a lot of things that didn't notice until i played Spring, which is great but still incomplete, and i was just wonder (out of idle curiosity) on how hard it would be to add these in:

Screen shakes (A little for small explosions, a huge amount for huge explosions and such, and a little check box in the options to turn it off, if you so wish)

A little kill counter (i always loved those :) )

And last but not least, Dynamic Music (This one sounds like the hardest to program, but what do i know?)

Now i think theses would do more to make Spring feel completer then a new GUI...

but thats also just me.

if memory serves me direct x has a dynamic music set of functions, you could supply parameters like speed and theme and it would fill it in..... but this was not a cunning plan that could not fail... because spring doesn't use direct x right? or does it

Basically every one of your ideas are on the Monthly Topic Rotation. But they are still good points. Screenshakes would be great, and not to hard to implement.
Psuedo Code:
Kill count shouldnt be hard, and I think it might be coming in the new GUI. If it isnt, im sure someone will implement it fairly soon after the GUI's release.

Dynamic music would be great, but first we need some music. We could nick the cavedog stuff, but thats illiegal. We could make out own, but who would do that? We could just suply an ingame mp3 player that read music from folders, but who is going to make it? Dev's have much more pressing things i think.

screen shakes would be awesome, but it would be most sensible if it were determined from Damage, AoE, Impulse Factor, and Distance to Camera. At minimum, Impulse Factor and distance to camera should be used, it is logically imperative that it be determined from at least those two variables.

Id write and record some killer riffs for you on my guitar...
Apart from the fact that...

1) I can barely play the guitar

and...

2) ... its err... broken

dammit

lol BigSteve that's helpful.

Also OTA has ochestral music!

OCHESTRAL!!!

setting a custom playlist or just having the option to place music in a directory as...

battle.. idle construction..
or even...

1,2,3,4,5 for randomizing.

we do not need full on compositions.

gheeber wrote:if memory serves me direct x has a dynamic music set of functions, you could supply parameters like speed and theme and it would fill it in..... but this was not a cunning plan that could not fail... because spring doesn't use direct x right? or does it

Correct me if i am wrong but arn't the guys moving to more open things away from direct x?

i miss the big white flash on the ground when something explodes

Screenshakes are very bad, because it was extremely irritating in old TA to misclick because a screenshake made the world move below your cursor, or to be plain unable to play and be forced to wait for a lull when the earth shake too much. Screenshakes may be fun a couple minute when playing the first missions, but already when you reach the Tremblor missions in CC campaign they are nothing but an annoyance. There's a reason why everybody who played TA online has +noshake in its tademo F11 macro, you know.

And yeah, Dynamic Music and Screenshakes have been discussed in Spring forum long long ago. And many times, especially Dynamic Music.

I believe screenshakes would mean a simple movement of the camera along the x axis that would be very easy to implement. I think that a slider to cotnrol the magnitude of the shakes is needed however, a small enough shake wotn give the error zwzsg describes as much as ti did in OTA while still giving an effect.

Shaking could also be made to drop off and be a localised thginf ro all btu the biggest explosions, and shaking magnitude can be ignroed in situations where you wouldnt be able to see what you're clicking through explosion smoke anyways but reduced when you moved away.

That and them not lasting as long as they did in OTA, only long enough to be noticed, and no longer.

Whatsmore they should be heavily influenced by mod settings, so that say seismic mines can be made and it used mroe as a tactical weapon, such as the nanite superweapon of ST Armada that made the GUI float around, only localized.

NOiZE wrote:i miss the big white flash on the ground when something explodes

I prefer without it. It was so annoying...

The big white flash was simply part of the explosion animation. I liked it too, but if we want to change anything at all explosion-wise, we'll need Spring to support custom-defined explosions. The explosions used now are all hardwired into Spring, if I am not mistaken.

FizWizz wrote:The big white flash was simply part of the explosion animation. I liked it too, but if we want to change anything at all explosion-wise, we'll need Spring to support custom-defined explosions. The explosions used now are all hardwired into Spring, if I am not mistaken.

No it wasn't. It was an engine thing. All weapons, even those without explosion gafs, had them. It was based on AOE.

I liked screen shakes

Gnome wrote:

FizWizz wrote:The big white flash was simply part of the explosion animation. I liked it too, but if we want to change anything at all explosion-wise, we'll need Spring to support custom-defined explosions. The explosions used now are all hardwired into Spring, if I am not mistaken.

No it wasn't. It was an engine thing. All weapons, even those without explosion gafs, had them. It was based on AOE.

oh, I stand corrected...
...explosion effect modding would still be good though

y'all missing out on the best feature of spring..it was the kill count... i only ever played OTA-OTA with a friend.... never even started the single player....
but still the KILL COUNT. was amasing.... it also made for like lil competitions like who can get the highest kill count.

amazing games. =]. whats the difference between dynamic sound and say winamp and spring running together... obviously it would both be only 1 program running as oposed to 2... but does that offer any advantages besides reducing lag?

if the oTA music lists were remixed into knew songs.. then it wouldnt be too bad.. it could be so cool. it could be like the map... download everyones remix's and argue over a song list in the lobby....
=D

We don't need remixes; multiple people have come here asking what type of music they should make for the game, but since there is no integrated system for music, there's no point in their making any.

I would prefere a "done damage" count :). because killing a krog is much harder than killing a mex or a peewee

Another thing i would like to see in spring would be "changig sound volume" independant from the pc sound. Atm it so, that when i m speaking over headset with my friends and i dont hear them cause of the volume of spring, i cant change the sound of the game cause than i change the sound of the headset too - that sucks. And pressing f6 isnt the best solution for me.