Spring RTS Engine

I'm sorry but I suck...

I don't understand why no one has done the following...

What You Do:

(Notice that the 3D model goes underground but above the water, thereby cutting off the voidwater jaggies)


What You See:


No I'm really BAD at map making, and have yet to be able to make a decent 3D model of an asteroid... So I'm not going to be the one to do it... but someone has got to be able to do this type of thing... it would look so great...

very interesting idea

but if its water? ummm

why not drop the waterline off the map, and make the space between the rocks real jagged so that it can't be built on, or traveled on, etc....

but planes could "land" on it...

Hmm it would be great if it works.
And I don't see any reason why it shouldn't.

*walks away thinking*

Gnome did something very much like that for the Star Wars in Space mod, but he never released it because he got so frustrated with the collision detection on large units.

thats great and it should work if the features under the water line are visible but i think they are!
The point is the red line must have a very low slope. I think thats a great idea.

I was infact goona do somthing very much like this, but I was not gonna bring it up with my modeling friends (LathanStanley...hint hint) till I knew exactly what I wanted... The thing is you'd have to make alot of differnt asteroid botems for each asteroid, which may put some people Off.

Also, out of curisoity, for the FF mod, how big do you think an asteroid needs to be?

aGorm

LathanStanley wrote: why not drop the waterline off the map, and make the space between the rocks real jagged so that it can't be built on, or traveled on, etc....

What the heck are you talking about? have you ever even played FF? Could you explain?... you do realise that that would looke like a big ugly sheer cliff with a asteroid that you couldn't see the bottom of wrapped around it. meh...

Optimus Prime wrote:thats great and it should work if the features under the water line are visible but i think they are!
The point is the red line must have a very low slope. I think thats a great idea.

objects under the void water are visible... THAT'S THE WHOLE POINT!

Warlord Zsinj wrote:Gnome did something very much like that for the Star Wars in Space mod, but he never released it because he got so frustrated with the collision detection on large units.

See... Colition detection of large units doesn't matter because the actual model iseffectively underground... so the collision detection is with the "island" not the the asteroid.

This would be great. I think the biggest challenge would be getting the s3o to align perfectly with the heightmap/texturemap and creating an asteroid(bottom) thats low poly but still looks good. Hopefully someone is willing to put the time into making this work.

one question: Is it possible to put features under the ground? I thought features are over the ground so they would be on the top of the asteroid
I hope i m wrong :D

yes... it's entirely possible to put features underground

edit:

To Clairify: If you go into upsrping/3dobuilder and simply adjust the Y value to negative it shifts the object below the ground... this is how parts of the shipyards are underwater... typically doing something like this on land units it a wast of tris, but with voidwater you can effectively see "under" islands/platforms...

Cool! now Asteroids will actually look like asteroids and not...pankakes.

But will it work? Looks like. Will someone do it? Probebly. Will it be me? No, cuase like Sinbad i can't map for crap!

No, I understand that. I meant the collision detection of involved with having units the size of a small map (Star Destroyers, etc).

See this image:
http://gnomre.no-ip.com/swta/hoth.jpg

Note that the planet in the background (the small one, not the big one) is a model, not a skybox. The little dots infront of the planet are SWTA sized TIE fighters, to give you a sense of scale. (obviously the textures on the Star Destroyer are just place holders )

Here is a video to make it more clear:

http://wormhole.tauniverse.com/spring/hoth.avi

You can see some of the problems that arise with having an object that will move as you pan the camera with having a skybox with objects in it. You would need a very vague (ie: stars and nebulae, etc) skybox for it too work properly.

I thought the thing looked cool.

REALLY REALLY COOL!

EDIT: But it dose look a little too much like a snowball. It should be a little smoother and larger. But thats just me

grrr... I decided to have a go at making a map... and I've done it before at it worked... yesterday even... and then photoshop decided to stop letting me save bitmaps, so I had to get the gimp... and mapconv works right... in fact I get as far as "Creating Unit Textures" before the program dead crashes... I have 2 features with 512x512 uvmaps and I know that's not too much for the engine... grrr...** brain explodes **... I'll have to double check it but it pissed me off...

any guesses as to what would be crashing at that stage or how to read the logs that it may have made...

PS:(one of the features acctually worked fine yesterday on a 2x2 map, basically all I'm doing is adding a second feature and making a 4x4 map.. I think I may try my new object in the old map when I get home from work)

Basically I got a feature to line up with the height map... WOOT...
Try it out:
http://www.fileuniverse.com/?p=showitem&ID=2715

The Secret to getting it to line up?

when you are in spring playing with your map, you can mouse over the "corners" of your object and then write down the x/y co-ordinates... put them into a spreadsheet and divide them all by 8. then draw this shape on your heightmap... then you just need to adjust the models height in upspring to make sure it matches (ignore the textures... not my thing yet)

Cunning, but ugly, oh so ugly.

I know... I don't think it could get any worse... could it?

I want a bespin map.

Zoombie wrote:I thought the thing looked cool.

REALLY REALLY COOL!

EDIT: But it dose look a little too much like a snowball. It should be a little smoother and larger. But thats just me

'Twas just a quick test to see if this was possible, nothing more. Obviously a real in-game model and skin would be made a bit better

me thinks of starcrafts metal style maps (someones gonna kill me cause i said that)