Spring RTS Engine

I don't think this is in the Monthly Topic Rotation yet... but it should be.

Essentially what I want is every single feature from every other RTS... but let's make a list of what specifics I'm thinking of.

Upgrades:
- Click a Button and Change A Unit into another Unit
- Click a Button and Change all units of one type into units of another type
- Build a building and have a new button show up on a type of unit
- Research an upgrade and change the stats of another unit
- Build aditions onto buildings and units

Harvesting:
- Mobile Harvesters
- Ability to build harvest points (farms etc.)
- ability to pick up and move objects
- standard "pick it up, carry it home" behaviour

Spells:
- Buttons for special attacks other then D-gun
- "Mana" to be spent on multiple special abilities
- Visual display of reloading in menu (for any weapons with reload times)

Gaia:
- Roving monsters, animals to harvest

Non-Nano:
- Buildings that folow a "contruction script" instead of a build and fill like now
- Buildings that build themselves onece set
- Buildings that don't decay when left alone
- Construction animations that don't have nanospray

Unit Limits:
- Set unit limits for specific units
- scaled limits, different units use different quota
- ability to change soft unit limit with in game upgrades up to a maximum unit cap

... I bet you can think of more...

I don't want to sound like I want everything all at once... and in fact, a lot of what I'm looking for would work with a lua based GUI, like has been suggested... I just wanted to open discussion up (been playing Age of Mythology recently, and a bit of WarCraftII... both of which are excellent games... that could be so much better if they were comunity run...

Pritty much everything is already suggested (most of them multiple times and some of it is MTR).

I would be great to have this stuff implanted, so Spring could handle other types of mods then TA based.
But then again, there are more important things to attant to first.

Spells:
- Buttons for special attacks other then D-gun
- "Mana" to be spent on multiple special abilities
- Visual display of reloading in menu (for any weapons with reload times)

F1-9 keys for shortcuts? Maybe a button that causes a window to pop up listing all the spells (for the new GUI, obviously)

I also think that unit/script-specific toggles need to be on that list too. The SYs keep adding more toggles like the "Land At" and the wierd immelman/flyover toggle. At some point the toggles may need to be unit-specific.

As for "spells" - I've always thought those would go well in the build list. At the very least we need nanolathe units that are harvest-only so we could make a C&C-style mod, which would probably be the simplest conversion. Sure, the harvester wouldn't come home, but at least it would be harvest-based metal gameplay.

Ah, but harvesting would require regrowing features! *runs*

harvesting could be done by some kind of mobile metal extractor though

Guessmyname wrote:Ah, but harvesting would require regrowing features! *runs*

Not necessarily. While C&C had regrowing features, Dune didn't, and neither did the Blizzard family. BattleZone '98 had a nice approach where actually the starting metal on the map was very low, so the "harvesting" phase of the game ended quickly as the scrap was depleted. At that point, the game was about combat and harvesting the wreckages of your enemies (or your own lost troops).

Guessmyname wrote:Ah, but harvesting would require regrowing features! *runs*

Scriptable features, and areas of effect. Those would be useful.

Deathblane wrote:

Guessmyname wrote:Ah, but harvesting would require regrowing features! *runs*

Scriptable features, and areas of effect. Those would be useful.

Well, if you had the "gaia" faction, you could just have an unattackable invincible factory cranking out "sheep" - that is, gaia units that exist to reclaim.

Pxtl wrote:

Deathblane wrote:

Guessmyname wrote:Ah, but harvesting would require regrowing features! *runs*

Scriptable features, and areas of effect. Those would be useful.

Well, if you had the "gaia" faction, you could just have an unattackable invincible factory cranking out "sheep" - that is, gaia units that exist to reclaim.

You could have "Gauntlet" Like generators too... I remember a mod/map for WC3 that did this... basically houses that would spit out monsters if you were in range of them... so you would destroy the house to make the monsters stop coming... not really sure why you would want them... but it would be a nice feature to have available.

for building, how about the ability to pull a starcraft and use mutations or different ways to make units other than the normal nanogun like having the ability to make builders build by becoming a part of the building, so like a building could take a certain number of builders to finish. and this could be achieved easily, just have it build alot in a millisecond then kill it off.

/me points to development forum....

Mod makers cannot change this issue.

On the topic of regrowing features.. I'm pretty sure the TA features had some funny tags relating to that kind of thing, although I am unsure whether or not it actually worked. Trees were supposed to spawn foilage around them, or maybe even reproduce. Something along those lines would be cool, just specify three lines in a feature file - spawn speed, spawn radius, spawn feature. It could make for some crazy ideas. Like for example lava flows - since features should only appear where there are no features, such thing could slowly spread from a certain point on the map, slowly taking away the space on the map, unless someone comes with a big horde of builders and reclamates the lava to oblivion. That would need to be streamlined though... it could be crazily resource-hugging after while.

Sean Mirrsen wrote:On the topic of regrowing features.. I'm pretty sure the TA features had some funny tags relating to that kind of thing, although I am unsure whether or not it actually worked. Trees were supposed to spawn foilage around them, or maybe even reproduce. Something along those lines would be cool, just specify three lines in a feature file - spawn speed, spawn radius, spawn feature. It could make for some crazy ideas. Like for example lava flows - since features should only appear where there are no features, such thing could slowly spread from a certain point on the map, slowly taking away the space on the map, unless someone comes with a big horde of builders and reclamates the lava to oblivion. That would need to be streamlined though... it could be crazily resource-hugging after while.

That'd be brilliant if it was ever done.

A= Should be in developers suggestions, B= Yea, me and Chris had an idea about upgrades for units, example would be

Peewee

Peewee Mk II

Peewee MK III

Peewee X

yea, we even had a bunch of units thought out, we searched forums and all, but we found we couldn't implement this, so we abandoned it.
Hehe, I hope we can get stuff like all this done, that would greatly deepen the Strategy needed to win

Lava/trees and all would be interesting, I would make a volcano map, hehe

Too many things we could do if any of this was implemented, oh well, most likely won't be