Spring RTS Engine

I have a new idea for a map feature.

At this moment i'm making a map with lots of Lava,
Of course this is water because it have to cause a lot of damage to the units.

The only possible smoke producing feature is a geovent,
but they only give smoke on land and in water in case the land is lowered by a nuke. ':?'

It would be nice to make it possible to have geovents producing smoke in the lava.

The suggestion: a underwater smoke producing feature :)

I like that idea... or course, I also want underwater geovents that we can use the Restore function to draw out and use.

For what it's worth +1

I like that idea... or course, I also want underwater geovents that we can use the Restore function to draw out and use.

if it starts underwater then restoring it will do nothing unless you damage the underwater terrain in which case it will restore it to its exact point. so thats impossible!

yeah indeed TB.. +1/2

don't make it one big smoking shit, so there's only grey smoke and no lava @ all.

thinking about lava..

like i think water could be, lava might also be dynamic. Just make a lava-generator, that 'erupts' lava from somewhere, and then let it flow its own way out into the map :D. I did one 3dsmax tut about the animation of a lava stream (very hard, but very beautiful).. so maybe make something like it in-game.. (simpler ofcourse, but i now know the idea)

Also for water, this could be used to make waterfalls, dams, basins, floods :D

Sorry just brainstormin' here..

It could be like the frosty fog effect in Age of Mythology... especially around the fountain thing...

I wouldn't like this - as nice as smoking lava would look, it would be visually confusing for the player. To my eyes, smoke=geovent. Just like you don't make a map with "fake" metal patches.

A smoke particle fountain feature would be nice, but it should look nothing like a geovent. Smoke should be different colour, height, particles, etc.

Geovent smoke can be made to look different.

When you say "restore", you actually mean "deform";


You ask for terrain modifying unit; this is technically MTR

Cheesecan wrote:Geovent smoke can be made to look different.

Technically geovent smoke should be steam (steam is what powers geothermal plants), and therefore very white. Smoke from a volcanic eruption is ash suspended in volcanic gas, and therefore dark gray and opaque. As far as I can tell from cursory research, lava itself does not emit visible smoke.

The appropriate effect would probably be a hot-air refraction effect--that "shimmering" effect we often see over a road on a hot day. Due to the way the temperature gradient is layered, this is more visible the more horizontal your view is, making it very similar to the current water reflection effect. However, this would be quite hard to program in comparison and seems like an unrealistic goal.

So this idea is kind of silly since you shouldn't have smoke plumes emerging from lava flows. However, having arbitrary smoke plumes as a map feature is still a good idea--for instance, if the map includes the volcano itself.

Why not add shimmering too, I've seen the effect in a couple of shooters to date so it must be feasible.

Cheesecan wrote:Why not add shimmering too, I've seen the effect in a couple of shooters to date so it must be feasible.

http://www.ati.com/developer/demos/r9800.html

Demo of it made back when DX9 was new.

Cheesecan wrote:Why not add shimmering too, I've seen the effect in a couple of shooters to date so it must be feasible.

Sure, it's possible, but something like that is bound to be low-priority. Also, while the effect itself may be relatively easy to add, it might be a lot harder to properly restrict it to regions near lava flows. I'm not a graphics programmer so I really don't know how hard that would be, but it certainly seems like it could be an issue. Plus then you have to work it into the map format and redo the maps.

Arco wrote:

Cheesecan wrote:Why not add shimmering too, I've seen the effect in a couple of shooters to date so it must be feasible.

Sure, it's possible, but something like that is bound to be low-priority. Also, while the effect itself may be relatively easy to add, it might be a lot harder to properly restrict it to regions near lava flows. I'm not a graphics programmer so I really don't know how hard that would be, but it certainly seems like it could be an issue. Plus then you have to work it into the map format and redo the maps.

Ever made a map? Adding a new feature does NOT require all other maps to be remade suddenly.

Cheesecan wrote:Ever made a map? Adding a new feature does NOT require all other maps to be remade suddenly.

I didn't mean all the maps. I meant if you wanted the effect to be present in your lava map, you'd have to go back and edit the map to add this new thing. There's no way the engine can autodetect where something is supposed to be lava and add everything itself.

Well, that isnt _really_ a problem..

Arco wrote:

Cheesecan wrote:Ever made a map? Adding a new feature does NOT require all other maps to be remade suddenly.

I didn't mean all the maps. I meant if you wanted the effect to be present in your lava map, you'd have to go back and edit the map to add this new thing. There's no way the engine can autodetect where something is supposed to be lava and add everything itself.

It isn't supposed to. There basicly aren't any decent lava maps right now because we don't support good looking lava as a water replacement and features are currently static making smokejets and what not impossible. Basic partical effects handled as features would be an awesome addition for mappers that wouldn't mean anything to new maps, features are individually defined by map peramiters.